I was sad to learn recently that Harold Pinter and I will never be best mates, and not just because he is dead. Nor because he was a Nobel Prize-winning literary genius, while my writing career peaked in the late 2000s, when I was knocking out three Wii shovelware reviews a day.
According to Pinter’s wife, Antonia Fraser, “Harold did not understand the mentality of one who is keenly awaiting the next Lee Child.” Thus, alas, Harold Pinter would not understand me, because I love that shit.
For those who don’t know, Lee Child is the author of a hugely successful series of thrillers. They all star Jack Reacher, a burly ex-military policeman who spends his time drifting around America. He tries to mind his own business but endlessly wanders into trouble. There is always a mystery to solve and a wrong to be righted, and this is always achieved with excessive amounts of violence. Imagine Murder, She Wrote except Angela Lansbury has a buzz cut and giant pecs, and instead of writing jolly novels about murder, she uses her typewriter to stove people’s heads in.
There have been two movies, both starring Tom Cruise as Reacher – a casting that enraged fans from the moment it was announced. The main complaint was that Cruise bears little physical resemblance to the Reacher of the books, who is 6″5 and 18 stone. In terms of staying true to the source material, they’d have been better off casting Adrian Chiles.
But it’s not all Tom Cruise’s fault the films are so bad. They were never going to be great, because Jack Reacher was never going to make a great movie character. And that’s because he’s a video game character.
For evidence of this, just read some of the books. (As they’re all basically the same it doesn’t matter which, or in what order, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you view the classic Murder She Wrote episode “Hooray for Homicide” before “Murder to a Jazz Beat”, or “Corned Beef and Carnage” after “No Laughing Murder.”)