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A review by mwx1010
No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories by Lee Child
4.0
The film critic Mark Kermode describes a certain type of filmmaking as “Tab A into Slot B” - functional, technically competent yet somehow unexciting. Over the past few Jack Reacher novels Lee Child has been drifting slowly into this type of writing. There’s clearly a formula that works and he churns out a book a year like clockwork. Whilst I enjoy them whilst I’m reading them (and they are one of my guilty pleasure reads), I find them almost instantly forgettable once I put them down.
No Middle Name is something a little different. A collection of short stories featuring Reacher, it has - like many collections - a mixture of the good and bad. I realised however - once I’d gotten over the shock of reading about a character who I knew so well in a shorter form - that I was actually enjoying this anthology more than any of the recent Reacher novels. It’s interesting to see what Child does with ideas which clearly do not have enough to them to sustain an extended narrative, and the good stories are very, very good. Not an introduction to the character and - let’s be serious - if you’ve made it this far (Goodreads lists this as book 21.5 in the series) you’re in for the long haul and will likely read this anyway, but this was more rewarding than I expected.
No Middle Name is something a little different. A collection of short stories featuring Reacher, it has - like many collections - a mixture of the good and bad. I realised however - once I’d gotten over the shock of reading about a character who I knew so well in a shorter form - that I was actually enjoying this anthology more than any of the recent Reacher novels. It’s interesting to see what Child does with ideas which clearly do not have enough to them to sustain an extended narrative, and the good stories are very, very good. Not an introduction to the character and - let’s be serious - if you’ve made it this far (Goodreads lists this as book 21.5 in the series) you’re in for the long haul and will likely read this anyway, but this was more rewarding than I expected.