“All in all, this is a
very entertaining anthology, and well worth every penny you might spend on it.
Rather drop hints to family members and friends and hopefully it might end up
in your Christmas stocking.” Review by Barry Meehan
Author Lee Child is a prolific writer, the creator of one of the true heroes of modern-day literature, Jack Reacher.
It has been estimated that a Jack Reacher novel is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds of every day, which is quite some feat, even for Jack Reacher!
His books (now
co-authored with his brother Andrew), consistently reach the coveted number one
spot on various best seller lists worldwide, with a reported sales total of
over one hundred million copies.
So, having read many Jack Reacher novels, I volunteered to be the reader when Safe Enough was offered up to artSMart for review by Penguin Random House. Expecting the giant figure of Reacher to come bursting out of the first chapter, I was quite surprised to find that the book was in fact a collection of twenty short stories, all of them previously published between 2006 and 2020 in various crime anthologies and magazines.
So what does Lee Child himself think of his writing talent as far as short stories are concerned, as opposed to his full-length novels? This is a quote from his foreword:
“I tried anything I wanted. And I was happy with them. Although I never really learned to write them. Not well. Faberge eggs they ain’t. There’s a mysterious short-story thing the great writers do. I never figured it out. Mine are very, very, very short novels. But none the worse for it. They have beginnings and middles and ends. Something surprising happens. Or is revealed.
In spite of his self-criticism above, Lee Child does a damn
fine job with his short stories. There is no common theme running through them,
no common characters; each has its own theme and “hook”. Obviously with 20
stories, some might grab you more than others, but I assure you they are all
worth the read. My favourite, if anyone is interested, was Dying for a Cigarette, about a movie scriptwriter’s battle with
production executives who want to turn his story upside down in terms of
characters, period etc. There are many more characters to get involved with,
though. Just to mention a few – a drug-dealing assassin, a rookie cop who is
assigned to his department’s filing room, a more than methodical bodyguard who
has to quit his job when his target gets the better of him, a hitman who only
kills bad guys – and the list goes on.
All in all, this is a very entertaining anthology, and well worth every penny you might spend on it. Rather drop hints to family members and friends and hopefully it might end up in your Christmas stocking.
Do yourself a favour when reading it, though. Don’t binge read all 20 stories in one day, or even over a weekend. Go through the stories one at a time, with a decent break to digest each one before moving on to the next. You’ll get much more out of it that way! – Barry Meehan
Safe Enough by Lee Child is published by Penguin Random House UK: ISBN 978-0-8575-0680-1
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