I have to say that this book makes me wonder about the state of the publishing industry. It’s not that the book is bad; Lee Child has a nice writing style and a good sense of pacing, and the novel kept me turning the pages quickly enough. My complaint is about the number of factual errors in the damn thing.
Let’s take a look.
On page 240 of the paperback version, Child writes, “Her jacket made it plain that she was going to make master sergeant and then first sergeant like night follows day.” But master sergeant and first sergeant are the same pay-grade. You don’t make one and then the next, when you hit E-8 you choose which career track you want to pursue and then you get to be EITHER a master or first sergeant.
Admittedly, this is not a major plot point, and not a big deal. Reacher is supposedly up on all sorts of military trivia (he uses Military Police radio codes – which he can apparently recall en toto – throughout the book), so a mistake like this stands out, but okay. Let’s look at something more substantial.
Starting on page 83 and continuing for several pages, Child attributes the following (among other things) to “steroid abuse”: 1) a high-pitched voice on an adult male, 2) being “muscle-bound” (a lack of flexibility stemming from “too much muscle”, for those of you who aren’t old enough to remember this old canard), 3) having one’s head “rewired”, and 4) creating “dumb” (i.e., non-functional) muscle that “tires you out just carrying it around”.
Now, the public has been being “educated” (read: brainwashed) about the evils of steroids by the media for several years, so I can see how a person might think that they were bad. But this is just ridiculous. It sounds like Child had sand kicked in his face somewhere along the way and decided to get his revenge in print. All of the above are silly (Steroids make you crazy? I guess Child graduated from the Michelle Rodriguez school of pharmacology.), but the first one is just classic. Since the steroid abuse presumably started after the character in question hit puberty, there is no way that it would have affected his voice. Female bodybuilders who use steroids can and often do develop deeper voices than they have naturally, but no one gets a higher voice. It’s physically impossible. Even eunuchs who were castrated after puberty retained their masculine voices. Child probably was thinking about the opera castrati, who were snipped before they hit puberty to retain their angelically high voices – but that’s a completely different situation.
Sigh. Onward. Reacher, who supposedly is half-French and supposed to know the language, says that “sabot” means “boot”, and that the word “sabotage” comes from French people kicking machines to make them break down. Well, no. Actually, a “sabot” is a kind of wooden clog, and the word sabotage comes from French people taking their heavy wooden footwear off and tossing it into machines to make them break down. Internally. Even if this weren’t the case, who the hell thinks that kicking an industrial-revolution era machine (we’re talking real steel here, folks, not an aluminum can) with a regular boot is going to do anything to it? I ask you.
And then there is the whole Russian roulette bit. This IS a major plot point, as it allows Reacher to persuade a bad guy to accept him into the fold. Reacher uses a precision-made gun and plays the game five or six times in a row, spinning the cylinder and snapping off shots to his head. Of course he survives. Later, he tells someone that the odds weren’t really the usual one-in-six, as the gun in question is so finely machined that the odds of the lone bullet ending up in the ten-o’clock position are “more like six hundred or six thousand to one”. The idea here is that in such a precision piece the weight of the bullet would pull it down toward the bottom once the cylinder stopped spinning.
Only thing is, every time I’ve ever seen anyone play Russian roulette (okay, okay, in the movies), they snap the cylinder into the gun before it stops spinning. Think about it. It’s the whole point. Who the hell would let the cylinder stop spinning – when you could see where the bullet is – and THEN put it to his head? It would take a complete idiot to see that the bullet had ended up in the ten o’clock position and THEN snap it in and pull the trigger on himself. At that point it’s not Russian roulette, it’s just suicide.
And no one on the editorial staff caught any of this. Wow.
There are more flubs I could point out, but I don’t want to be writing this all night. At the end of the day, Persuader is a decent book, one with an excellent plot and good characters, grievously wounded by the sort of factual errors listed above. I can’t count the number of times I’d be reading along, getting into it, when something like the above would take me completely out of the narrative. I really wonder if anyone at Dell bothered to check anything that was written (well, the spelling was right), or if Child bothered to do any research. God knows it’s easy enough to look up a French word nowadays.
Jack Reacher is sometimes compared to Travis McGee, but John D. MacDonald never seemed to get his facts wrong like this. In the final analysis, I found myself unpersuaded.
