Safe Enough by Lee Child

Published by Mysterious Press on September 3, 2024

Safe Enough is a collection of Lee Child’s short fiction, excluding Reacher stories. In a forward, Child admits that he is a novelist who hasn’t mastered the art of writing a short story. I would agree that he often swings and misses, but enough stories in this collection count as base hits that Child has a decent batting average.

Many of the stories collected in Safe Enough set up a mildly interesting scenario before Child tries to deliver an O. Henry ending. The assassin in “The .50 Solution” is hired to kill a racehorse but makes a predictable departure from the plan. The journalist who narrates “Public Transportation” talks to a cop about a murder case that was closed for the sake of convenience, not because the crime was solved correctly. The true killer’s identity is predictable.

In other stories, Lee makes the formula work. “Ten Keys,” about a man who stole money and product from a drug distribution organization, telegraphs part of the surprise in its ending but manages a final unexpected twist. “Me & Mr. Rafferty” is narrated by a killer who leaves clues for Mr. Rafferty to find. The ending is genuinely surprising.

“My First Drug Trial” benefits from an ending that surprised me, but I’m ranking it as one of my favorites because of a weed smoker’s internal monologue as he talks himself into getting high before court.

A snobby FBI agent tells a Metropolitan Police inspector to read a Sherlock Holmes story as the source of clues to a murder. The murder turns out to be a misdirection. The element of surprise makes “The Bone-Headed League” a fun story.

I enjoyed a few others, as well:

For an assassin, “The Greatest Trick of All” is getting paid by a husband to kill his wife and getting paid by the wife to kill her husband — a trick that has disastrous consequences when it doesn’t work as intended. “Pierre, Lucien & Me” is an interesting take on an art forgery story that begins immediately after Renoir’s death.

One of my favorites, “Normal in Every Way,” is about an autistic file clerk in San Francisco in the 1950s who solves crimes by reading files and seeing connections that others miss. In “New Blank Document,” a reporter tells the story of a Black jazz musician who stayed in France after World War II, a place that allowed him to escape the racist place where his brother was murdered.

“The Snake Eater by the Numbers” is narrated by a rookie London cop who is tutored by a corrupt cop in the importance of clearance rates. When the corrupt cop fits up a mentally unwell Londoner who believes himself to be an American Marine, the rookie learns the meaning of street justice.

“Safe Enough” is written in a more literary style than is common for Child. The story of a disintegrating marriage, after the wife apparently killed her last husband, has some insightful thoughts about marriage but ends predictably.

“Addicted to Sweetness” benefits from interesting dialog about punishment inflicted in the West Indies upon people who stole sugar from their employers. The dialog enhances this story about the leader of a criminal organization who learns the downside of imposing tough punishments.

And I was unimpressed by several:

“The Bodyguard” is interesting only because the bodyguard fails at his job. “Section 7(A) Operational” begins with an intriguing story of an operative assembling a team for a dangerous covert operation. The story’s ending renders the setup pointless.

Another five or six stories don’t merit comment. Since I enjoyed more than half, I regard the good stories as outweighing their forgettable companions, but it’s a close balance.

RECOMMENDED

No Plan B by Lee Child and Andrew Child

Published by Delacorte Press on October 25, 2022

How do you know a Reacher novel was written by the son rather than the father? The sentence “That was for sure” appears multiple times when Andrew Child writes the novel. I doubt that’s a sentence his father would ever use. And while Andrew tries to emulate his father’s style — sentence fragments, lots of “Maybe this. Maybe that.” — Lee Child builds a natural rhythm into the prose that his son fails to capture.

No Plan B gives the reader a main plot and two subplots. The main plot involves a private prison in Mississippi and a ship that mysteriously lurks just out outside US territorial waters. The prison is about to release an innocent inmate with great fanfare as proof of its respect for justice and civil rights. The corporate executives who run the prison are worried that Reacher will disturb the ceremony after they learn that Reacher witnessed a murder in Colorado. Before the murderers made their escape, Reacher glimpsed the contents of an envelope that relate to the mysterious crimes for which the prison is a front.

Reacher decides he will travel to Mississippi to right whatever murder-related wrongs he can uncover. A woman who was close to the vicim of a second, seemingly related murder decides to drive Reacher to Mississippi. Watchful prison employees are staged along likely travel routes in anticipation of Reacher’s arrival, but the reader knows that Reacher will defeat them all, usually with a single punch.

The first subplot involves a kid whose evil foster parents neglect him. He runs away. Naturally, his destination is the prison. Naturally, he will encounter Reacher as he travels, but only after proving that he’s a plucky kid who can survive the theft of his backpack and money. No novel featuring a kid at a bus terminal would be complete without an attempt to kidnap the kid and sell him into slavery. Trite much?

The second subplot features a guy named Emerson who is seeking revenge for his son’s death. The death connects to the prison, although Emerson isn’t aware of that connection until he burns a couple of people alive while searching for someone to hold responsible for his son’s fate. The subplot feels like filler, added only to satisfy the need for a second subplot and gratuitous gore. The reader is evidently not meant to feel sympathy for Emerson because his methods are too extreme. Reacher comes close to crossing the extremist line, although he can usually claim he’s acting in self-defense when he maims or kills the bad guys. Well, except for the bad guy he kills for no good reason near the end of the novel. This is shortly before he tells another character, “I’m not going to kill anyone in cold blood.” Yeah, not unless he’s in a killing mood, anyway.

The message of certain tough guy novels is that size and strength are more important than moral courage. Reacher novels have always flirted with that message, but Andrew brings it to the forefront.

The mysterious criminal scheme operated from the prison is common in thrillers but almost never occurs in the real world. It’s a fallback for writers who can’t devise an original crime. The notion that a major corporation would operate the scheme undetected, even in the cesspool of corruption that is Mississippi, is just too nonsensical to work as a credible thriller plot.

Reacher needs to break into and out of a prison as the story winds down. His ability to do so is implausible, but such is the nature of the modern thriller. Implausibility is one thing; the complete absence of credibility is another. There is nothing credible about Reacher’s consistent ability to knock out his opponents with a single blow, sometimes with a mere twitch of his body. Yet it is the ridiculous criminal scheme operated in the prison that cheats thriller fans out of the opportunity to suspend disbelief. A close second on the credibility scale is the corporation’s fear of Reacher who, as far as its executives know, is a drifter with no reason in the world to look for trouble in Mississippi.

Fans of tough guy fiction who value toughness more than strong plotting might enjoy No Plan B. Fans of Lee Child might be frustrated that books “co-written” with Andrew Child come across as factory fiction. The book has good pace and a fair amount of action, but little else of merit.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Better Off Dead by Lee Child and Andrew Chlid

Published by Delacorte Press on October 26, 2021

Despite their formulaic nature in recent years, I’m generally a fan of Reacher novels, in part because the formula is a good one, in part because of Lee Child’s spare writing style. The formula is to have Reacher walking down a road, stumble into a dangerous situation, make a reluctant decision to help the endangered, and fight his way through adversity as he subdues dangerous thugs and saves the day. Better Off Dead follows the formula but it lacks the tension and the style that keeps me coming back to Reacher.

In a slight departure from the formula, the story begins with Reacher lying dead on a morgue table. Readers know that Reacher is indestructible of necessity; killing him would end Lee Child’s income stream.

A few quick flashback chapters get back to the formula. As Reacher walks down a road, he spots a woman in a crashed car. She pulls a gun on him when he tries to help. Satisfied that Reacher isn’t one of the bad guys for whom she set a trap, the woman (Michaela, a/k/a Mickey) resets the trap and acquits herself handily, despite having a prosthetic foot. Reacher gets her to explain her problem, which involves the capture and possible murder of her twin brother, then reluctantly agrees to help her go after the bad guys. Part of helping her includes the opening scene in the morgue.

Dendoncker is the first of two bad guys. He seems to be manufacturing bombs. Maybe they are smoke bombs. Maybe they will release a poisonous gas. Michael was either willingly or unwillingly helping Dendoncker make the devices. I didn’t care much about Michael's fate because Mickey is such a one-dimensional character that her woes about her brother left me unmoved.

The second bad guy is named Khalil, although he exists more as a name than as a character. Whether he is working with Dendoncker or working at cross-purposes is a question that isn’t set up sufficiently to whet the reader’s interest in the answer. The eventual explanation of their relationship is strained and uninteresting.

The plot goes off the rails in the second half when Dendoncker decides to enlist Reacher in his evil scheme. The smart move, easily accomplished, would be to kill Reacher, but that would end Lee Child's income stream, so the villain can't behave intelligently. It’s not like Dendoncker has a shortage of lackeys to do his bidding. Instead, he has Reacher deliver one of his devices while holding Mickey hostage. The outcome is easy to predict.

The nature and purpose of Dendoncker’s device wasn’t made clear until after I stopped caring. Unfortunately, its purpose is the only clever and unexpected part of the story. The rest of the novel consists of Reacher hitting people. That’s fine, it’s what Reacher does, but the fight scenes in Better Off Dead lack pizzazz. At least Reacher didn’t hit someone in the throat (the current go-to move in tough guy thrillers), although he thought about it.

Lee Child is known for a crisp writing style that emphasizes short, punchy sentences. His style makes for easy and rapid reading, which probably contributes to his popularity. At the same time, he balances fragmented sentences with longer, more elegantly constructed passages. He creates a rhythm. This novel emphasizes the punch and minimizes the rhythm. I don’t know if that’s because Lee had less input into the writing style than his brother Andrew, but the style differs from other Reacher novels. I’m not used to seeing pointless sentences like “That was for sure” and “That was for damn sure” in a Reacher novel. The writing style feels like an attempt to copy Lee Child rather than authentic Lee Child. Enough Lee Child bleeds through the narrative to make the novel worth acquiring for Reacher completists, but readers looking for Lee Child at his best might to give this one a pass.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Blue Moon by Lee Child

Published by Random House/Delacorte Press on October 29, 2019

Readers who crave gratuitous violence can count on Reacher novels to satisfy their addiction. Readers who enjoy a good thriller and don’t mind gratuitous violence can count on Reacher novels to push the right buttons. Lee Child’s punchy sentences and short chapters assure that the novel will move quickly, and he usually comes up with a plot that isn’t stale. Readers who want to root for decent characters will always find someone to like, while readers who appreciate the complexity of human nature will admire the darkness with which otherwise likeable characters are infused. Reacher novels are serious but characters occasionally say something amusing to relieve tension. There’s a little something for everyone in a Reacher novel.

Blue Moon follows that formula. The plot carries the ever-wandering Reacher into a small city that is divided down the middle. Both sides are controlled by criminal organizations. Albanians are in charge of crime on the east side while Ukrainians provide the crime on the west side. The operate protection rackets, loan sharking, prostitution, and other enterprises that, in the good old days, were Mafia-run businesses.

A kindly old gent named Aaron Shevick has borrowed from a loan shark to pay for an expensive treatment that might save his daughter’s life. He is on his way to repay the loan when a mugger interrupts him. Reacher knew this would happen we he saw the envelope full of cash in Shevick’s pocket, so he follows Shevick and thwarts the crime. Then he acts as a bodyguard and even stands in for the old guy to make the payment, something that is made possible because the regular Albanian hood has been replaced by a Ukrainian hood who doesn’t know Shevick. That happened because of a power grab that turns into a comedy of errors as each side misunderstands the forces driving their conflict. A confusion of identities follows, as both the Ukrainian and Albanian organizations operate under the mistaken belief that Reacher is Shevick. The Ukrainians even come to believe that Reacher is a representative of organized crime in Russia who has been sent to take over the entire city on behalf of Russian interests.

All of that, of course, is just an excuse for Reacher to bust heads and to shoot people for a worthy cause. In this case, the cause is to protect the Shevick family, although he also hopes he can help by locating Maxim Trulenko, who embezzled funds his company should have used to pay health insurance premiums for his employees, including Shevick. This leads to an interesting and possibly accurate discussion of how administrators of a government fund that is supposed to address problems like this one are motivated to save money by waiting for patients to die so they don’t need to pay their healthcare expenses.

That, however, is the only serious point in a novel that is dominated by Reacher proving again that he is the toughest guy on the planet. I lost track of the body count as Reacher gunned down every Ukranian and Albanian criminal in the city. This is tolerable because, unlike most tough guy protagonists in thriller world, Reacher isn’t obnoxious about his toughness. It’s just who he is. Being tough is something he does. No big deal. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the action, despite its implausibility. Also implausible is Reacher’s ability to guess at the existence and location of a secret guarded passage into an otherwise impregnable building, but hey, it’s Reacher. Of course he can do implausible things.

Between the action scenes, Reacher engages in his usual musings. Other characters join him in speculating about what might happen next and how to plan for it. All of that held my interest, as Child always does. Only at the very end does the story’s implausibility become hard to swallow. Still, happy endings are nearly always implausible. Readers want them anyway.

Reacher’s good-and-evil perspective appeals to readers who believe that answers to moral questions are never ambiguous, but to his credit, Child doesn’t pander to mean-spirited readers who view the world as a simplistic conflict of us against them. Central characters are primarily decent or villainous, but Child shades them with a touch of gray. Most of Reacher’s killings in Blue Moon are acts of self-defense, although some are outright murders of unarmed bad guys, at least one of whom committed no obvious crime that warranted the death penalty. If that sort of thing troubles you, there is hope for humanity. If it troubles you even to imagine such things, Blue Moon isn’t the book for you. Child doesn’t glorify the killings, so I can accept them for the sake of the story, even if I would want to see Reacher behind bars in the real world. Fortunately, the real world is pretty far removed from a Reacher novel, which makes it easier to recommend Blue Moon as one of Child’s typically well-executed tough guy fantasies.

RECOMMENDED

Past Tense by Lee Child

Published by Delacorte Press on November 5, 2018

The fact that a new Reacher novel is published the day before an election is no excuse to stay home on Election Day. Get out and vote, then spend the rest of the day reading.

How often do thriller writers have fresh ideas? Not often enough. To his credit, Lee Child managed to invent something new in Past Tense. The main plot isn’t entirely original in concept, but the execution is unique. By the time the concept is revealed, the reader is hooked.

A relatively young man and woman from Canada are driving their Civic through New Hampshire when the car begins to overheat. They can’t abandon the car because they are carrying a heavy suitcase, the contents of which are a mystery. They’re on one of those tree-lined roads for which New Hampshire is famous, far from civilization, when they see a sign for a motel. Their car limps down a side road, where one of the motel owners fiddles with the car, then sets them up in room 10.

The next morning, the car won’t start at all. It will be another day before a mechanic can arrive. By that time, the couple have their doubts about the legitimacy of the motel and its owner. Their doubts are validated when they find themselves locked in room 10, their every word and action recorded on hidden microphones and cameras, as carefully selected guests begin to arrive in anticipation of . . . well, they know what will happen to the couple, but the reader doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Reacher is hitchhiking when he finds himself near the small New Hampshire town where his father was born. He decides to take a look. Being Reacher, it takes only a day before he has been in two fights and made two deadly enemies, one with ties to serious criminals in Boston. The town’s chief of police would like Reacher to leave before thugs descend on the town, spewing collateral damage in all directions. Reacher would like to oblige, but his investigation has triggered evidence that his father’s history is not what he expected it to be. Curiosity overcomes safety, so Reacher stays near the town, which is near the mysterious motel.

The motel storyline builds tension at a deliberate pace. Child weaves Reacher’s scenes into the story to add interludes of action, because Reacher is never in a scene for long before a jaw gets broken. Thus action and suspense are blended with skill so that neither the suspense nor the action become dull. The mystery surrounding Reacher’s father gives the story another dimension.

Reacher is one of the best thriller protagonists, not because he has the extraordinary fighting abilities that are standard issue for thriller heroes, but because he combines those abilities with close observation and deduction. He’s the Sherlock Holmes of thriller protagonists. If Sherlock had beaten villains to a pulp, he would have been the first Reacher. He also makes clever conversation without trying to be clever. It’s hard not to like Reacher.

But I liked Past Tense not just because Reacher is Reacher, but because Child allowed other characters to have their moments of glory. This isn’t a story of Reacher saving helpless victims, although he certainly plays that role. The victims, however, are resourceful and far form helpless. Child makes it possible for the reader to cheer for multiple characters, even for a few who are living normal, sedate, small town lives, simply because they are good, helpful people who aren’t filled with hate or anger. He even tosses in an understated love story to make readers feel good about the world, in between all the scenes of people getting maimed and killed. In the end, it’s all very satisfying, and one of Lee Child’s best Reacher novels.

RECOMMENDED