Lee Child’s new book has tales with a twist

Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. “Fabergé eggs they ain’t,” he says, in the introduction to Safe Enough and Other Stories, but they are real gems nonetheless. With no global readership to worry about and no commercial interests involved, Child was free to have fun.

And fun he has with the short story form, shooting from the hip — “no need,” as he says, “to save anything for Chapter 17’.” The trademark economy of style is faultless, each cop, hitman, fixer or judge fully fleshed out in just a few words; the scaffolding for each narrative constructed with the absolute minimum of material. Jack Reacher does not feature, but here in tale after tale is a world which Reacher fans will recognize instantly. Except that most of the time the “I” — and the majority are written in the first person — is not Jack but his natural enemy.

This is a great summer read. There is always a twist and always a different one.  Sometimes the bad get their comeuppance, sometimes they don’t, though the good are rarely rewarded or even recognized. The protagonist is never what he — they are all men — appears to be at the outset.

Perhaps most playful is a story called “Section 7(a) (Operational).” Slipped in among the tales of villains, cheats, assassins and potheads, this appears at first to fit the mould. A mastermind assembles his crew of specialists for an operation in Iran that will take about six months. They spend an evening in the boss’s elegant flat, sitting on his carefully described designer chairs and discuss the job. Which is curiously vague. The boss notes what the team members say, how they are dressed, how they interact with each other and how they behave towards him.

Given that there are nineteen other stories in this collection, perhaps it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that what becomes apparent is that this is one in which Child himself is the protagonist, the author mustering his cast, working on the language and formulating the narrative line for his next novel. It’s a nice conceit and beautifully worked: “An operation that lasted six months, overseas in hostile territory, was certain to produce casualties. I knew that, and they knew that. Some of them wouldn’t be coming home. But none of them flinched.”

There are potentially twenty full-length novels here, or forty hours of screenplays, but you’ll romp through them in a happy afternoon.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.