I've seen neither, but in terms of books, both are really interesting

Lee Child and Tom Clancy both write for the mass audience with no literary pretension. I've read most of what both of them have written.

Lee Child's hero is deeply into blues music and his novels are a bit like a blues song. There's a structure everyone knows: if I play the first half of an 8- or 12-bar blues on the piano or the guitar, almost everyone who hears it can predict what the second half is going to be, more or less to the note, even if they have no musical training at all and only a passing interest in the blues and it's the same with the books. We know just how they're going to play out and the twist is usually well telegraphed rather than merely foreshadowed. Within a good blues song there's no particular musical pyrotechnics; the skill is taking that well-known structure and moulding it to a particular story you want to tell....you can see where I'm going. Child's genius lies in his pacing and his characterisation and just-enough variation between different books - sometimes Reacher gets the girl, sometimes not; sometimes he's in the first person and sometimes in the third; sometimes Reacher is almost monosyllabic and sometimes quite verbose. Reading a few of his books back to back is like listening to a few tracks by any blues legend you can name back to back - different and yet recognisably the same. Reacher's character flaws define him as starkly as his strengths.

Tom Clancy started out brilliantly. Hunt for Red October, Sum Of All Fears and so on - properly structured relatively complex geopolitical thrillers written well, and some of the good guys are bad people and vice versa. But sadly as he get older his skills declined. Jack Ryan became a Mary Sue; the Good Guys always had good character traits; morality was black, or it was white; and so on. His last few are almost unreadable honestly - and yet did almost as well as his early novels which were so much stronger.

I'm curious to watch Reacher and if I can find the time I probably will; but I worry that the Jack Ryan thing will be more like late Clancy than early Clancy.

Posted By: Old Man, Feb 18, 22:31:27