The contrarian

Thanks mainly to Raymond Chandler’s highly praised parsing of Southern California, most of today’s crime writers are on the same page as Realtors regarding the importance of location, location, location. Not so Lee Child, who offers a contrarian approach in “One Shot,” featuring the resourceful ex-military cop Jack Reacher. The action, and there’s plenty of it, takes place in a nameless, more or less generic city in the more or less generic state of Indiana.

The lack of local specifics is too pervasive to be anything but purposeful, presumably because Child, who takes his yarn from zero to super speed on Page 1, wants nothing to distract us from its dramatic twists and turns. Which begin as soon as Reacher puts in an appearance. Employing the same terse, objective narrative he’s used in the series’ eight previous novels, the author homes in on a sniper as he carefully prepares for and carries out the assassinations of an almost random quintet of nine-to-fivers leaving their offices.

A surfeit of clues easily leads the canny chief of the city’s Serious Crime Squad (an amusingly vanilla name) to a retired U.S. Army marksman named James Barr, who, instead of confessing, asks a lawyer to “Get Jack Reacher.” Surprise -- when our hero arrives, it’s not to save Barr but, for a shocking reason best left for the reader to discover, to make sure he’s convicted.

Child has as much use for subplots as he does for local color. Reacher comes to town to make sure justice is served; the other characters are there to help or to harm him. The closest we get to a subtext involves the ambitious district attorney, Alex Rodin, and his daughter, Helen, a bright but struggling lawyer who agrees to defend Barr against Daddy’s wishes. Their spiky relationship is not explored to any degree. Of more consequence is the possibility that Dad may be the villain.

No matter. Reacher’s shoulders are broad enough to support the series. His heroic origins can be traced to the peripatetic knights of King Arthur’s Court up through such self-appointed arbiters of justice as “Bulldog” Drummond, the Saint and James Bond and his brothers in spydom. There’s also more than a shade of the great Sherlock in the way he reads people and situations. These literary legacies owe much to Child’s own origins. Although currently New York City-based, Reacher’s creator was born in England and spent most of his life there. Still, with rare exceptions (Reacher says a night is as dark “as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat”), the character is convincingly all-American, as hard-boiled as Mike Hammer or Sam Spade.

Reacher’s main distinction from fictional heroes on either side of the Atlantic is his fierce pursuit of anonymity. Since 1997’s “Killing Floor,” Reacher has remained a transient, pursuing temporary jobs, staying in hotels and traveling light. When asked why he lives this way, he replies: “The less I relax, the luckier I get.” OK. So, Child feels lengthy explanations can be as distracting as settings and character development. It’s his game, and he plays it well enough.

“One Shot” may not be the new “Maltese Falcon,” but if you’re looking for compelling, furiously paced escapist fiction that doesn’t stint on deduction, you should definitely follow murder suspect James Barr’s example and “Get Jack Reacher.” *