History Literature / JackReacher

* FriendToAllChildren: Reacher is noticeably more tactful and soft-spoken when dealing with kids than he usually is with adults.

* GoodIsNotNice: Reacher is often portrayed like this.

* MustHaveCaffeine: Reacher's love of coffee has been described as "making heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline"

* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Leon Garber, Jack Reacher's commanding officer.

** In ''Make Me'', Reacher takes a blow to the side of the head, and ends up with a cerebral contusion. He tries to just 'walk it off' and power through, but after repeatedly losing his balance, forgetting people's names, and zoning out during important conversations, the GirlOfTheWeek forces him to go to the emergency room. He is still resistant to treatment, and ends up suffering bad headaches that affect his vision and marksmanship during the final fight. Two of the people he met during the story insist on not letting him go solo, and are ultimately vital due to his handicap.

* WithGreatPowerComesGreatResponsibility: This is the main motive behind Reacher's actions as his mother raised him to believe that his size and capabilities brought with it a responsibility to do good where he could.

* HeroicBuild: Reacher never exercises or practices good diet and yet he's perfectly toned and extremely strong. He lampshades it in ''Never Go Back'' and blames it on good genetics. (It's possible that his preferred meal patterns (high-calorie GreasySpoon food, as and when called for) and all the exercise he gets walking around (his second-most common mode of transport behind long-distance coaches and hitch-hiking) cancel each other out.)

** Paul Hubble, an important yet conflicted member of the conspiracy behind the events of ''Killing Floor'', goes missing partway through the story. Reacher figures out he had been laying low, moving between hotels around the Atlanta metro area, and based on Hubble having told him that Music/TheBeatles were his favorite band, correctly deduces that Paul was using the band members' surnames (except McCartney's, obviously) on a rotating basis each time he checked in.

* DrinkOrder: Black coffee for Reacher, always. Sometimes if he's enjoying himself in a bar rather than needing to get information, he'll have a beer.

* TheAllegedCar: Casey Nice's whip in Personal is an old, heavily-used Ford pick-up that was previously a farm vehicle, which she bought from an airman at Fort Pope for twenty dollars.

* ButForMeItWasTuesday: Reacher has never thought much of John Kott, the rogue sniper he arrested in his Army days. Kott, however, takes his arrest as a personal insult and looks to get even with Reacher as soon as he's finished his prison time. [[spoiler:(Reacher eventually figures out Kott's obsession was stoked by the {{Chessmaster}} O'Day, who had Kott make an assassination attempt on a national leader prior to an important conference, so O'Day could lead a joint capture operation, bank some political influence, and raising his profile]]).

** In ''The Sentinel'' the Russian operatives produced disinformation leading investigators to conclude they were racists making a rally.

* CunningLinguist: Due to his mother being from France, Reacher is fluent in French. He also has very good conversational skills in Spanish.

** In ''Presuader'', after killing [[spoiler: Paulie]], Reacher has a DEA agent man a makeshift machine gun turret while he and the two other DEA agents find out where [[spoiler: the guns and a missing agent who the BigBad intends to sell as a sex slave are]]. Unfortunately, when they get back, [[spoiler: the agent has been killed and the bad guys are having their meeting as planned]]. Reacher finds out the gun he set up (a [[{{BFG}} Soviet NSV]] belonging to the late [[BigGuy roided-up]], henchman Paulie) hadn't being used for years, as it had been peacefully swinging on a chain to serve as a giant "don't mess with me" sign. Not being used for decades [[spoiler: caused it to jam after one shot and lead to the agent getting taken out]].

** OTOH, Reacher regularly uses the names of Yankees second basemen as aliases - this keeps away people who've only heard of him in passing, yet enables people he ''wants'' to stay in touch with like his friends in the military can find him relatively easily.

* TrademarkFavoriteFood: Reaches ''loves'' breakfast food and black coffee.

--> '''Chang''': This is for Keever.\\

** Reacher's father, Stan, is a [[SemperFi captain in Marine infantry.]] Reacher himself suggests that his father was even more stone-cold than he is.
** Before he died, Reacher's brother, Joe, is a Treasury agent who single-handedly prevented foreigners from smuggling counterfeits into the U.S.
** The most surprising of all, however, is Reacher's mother. At 13, she was an active member of the French Resistance, escorting fallen pilots to safety by pretending they were relatives. When a schoolmate threatened to expose her, she garroted him to death.

* Reacher is ''also'' an unapologetic murderer ([[AssholeVictim of bad guys]]) with no compunctions about using violence, but there are some opponents he'll hold back against, and he won't kill someone he's never met just because he's asked to. In one case, he actually stops a fight and backs off [[ItMakesSenseInContext to allow an opponent to escape a burning car]], because said opponent is just a 20-something kid hired as dumb muscle and doesn't deserve to die.

** Some of the cases he looks into directly involve things from his military days that leads to Reacher doing everything to kill the bad guy. ''Killing Floor'' has the death of his brother, the deaths of the former members of his squad in ''Bad Luck and Trouble'', and sighting the bad guy he thought dead in ''Persauder'', and he was on his way to kill the fall guy in ''One Shot'' when he ran into the conspiracy set up by the Russian.

* ChronicHeroSyndrome: Reacher is quite simply unable to ever not help someone in need or take down someone abusing their power, regardless of what he has to do to make it happen.

** Reacher buries his mother in ''The Enemy.'' Later, in ''Personal'', he visits the grave.

*** Also in ''Worth Dying For'': Reacher takes a room in the Marriott in the town nearby while he investigates what happened to Dorothy's daughter 25 years ago. Meanwhile, the Italian, Iranian, & Iraqi mobsters from Vegas, who are there to put pressure on the Duncans (who in turn have blamed their supply-chain issues on Reacher), have also gotten rooms in the Marriott. Reacher concludes his research & aims to return to Dorothy to tell her his findings. He happens to encounter one of the Iranians in the carpark, kills him in self-defense and stuffs him in the trunk of the car he was driving (which he borrowed from Eleanor and belongs to Seth), then takes the Iranians' car. When the remaining Iranian decides to rally the other mobsters to go and pressure the Duncans again, he is forced to steal another car from the hotel carpark because of the fact his partner appears to have absconded with theirs, and Seth's car that Reacher left behind is the best choice (he obviously can't boost the other mobsters' rental cars, and none of the other vehicles there are appropriate). Later, while the Iranian is watching the Duncans' compound, he inadvertently opens the trunk while trying to turn on the seat-warmer, and when he gets out and goes to close the lid, he finds his deceased partner. He then finds the documentation proving the car belongs to Seth, and comes to the conclusion that Reacher doesn't exist; the Duncans made him up to cover their own power play for supply-chain dominance (which admittedly, the Italians and Iraqis were also doing).

* EveryoneHasStandards: Reacher is an unapologetic red-blooded seducer, but he ''will not'' sleep with a married woman.[[note]]Technically he does once, but the woman's husband is a vegetable, and so is essentially dead[[/note]] Also, while he routinely kills bad guys in cold blood, he will not murder a guy he's never seen himself.
** Reacher has done and seen a lot of things, but in ''Worth Dying For'', seeing [[spoiler:the barn where the corpses of little girls have been dumped for years after being raped and murdered by the villains]] is too much for him. He grimly says that he's going to regret going in there for the rest of his life.

* RealMenTakeItBlack: Reacher's preferred drink of choice is black coffee.

** He's also ''fantastic'' at doing math in his head, has excellent time and direction senses, and knows a great deal of random useful facts even though he doesn't do much reading onscreen.

* PlatonicLifePartners: Reacher and Neagley. They've been friends and colleagues for decades, but have never been romantically involved. Given that Neagley HatesBeingTouched to a nearly lethal extent, this is understandable.

** Just because you know how knock out somebody, does not mean that [[AccidentalMurder they'll always get knocked out]]. In "Die Trying", Leon Garber tries to knock out a member of the militia who kidnapped an FBI agent with a rock, only to end up braining the guy and severing his spinal cord. Then, in the book ''Running Blind'', Reacher, who had earliar boasted that he knows how to not kill somebody unless he wants too, accidently murders [[spoiler: the BigBad, by punching her so hard in the head, that he breaks her neck]].

* BattleInTheRain: The confrontation on the mesa in ''Echo Burning''.

* BeenThereShapedHistory: A very minor example, but ''Die Trying'' reveals that Reacher was singlehandedly responsible for [[spoiler:the adoption of the Beretta 92 by the United States military instead of the Glock during the mid-1980s handgun trials, based upon an article he wrote while recovering from injuries.]]

** Most importantly, Plato's a complete sociopath who doesn't care about anyone on Earth besides himself, while Reacher regularly gets involved in plots because he hates bullies, [[spoiler:and nearly kills himself because he failed to protect two people he barely knew.]]

* EveryoneHasStandards: Reacher is an unapologetic red-blooded seducer, but he ''will not'' sleep with a married woman[[note]]Technically he does once, but the woman's husband is a vegetable, and so is essentially dead[[/note]]. Also, while he routinely kills bad guys in cold blood, he ''will not'' murder a guy he's never seen himself.

** An improvised actual MuzzleFlashlight (taping a flashlight to the barrel of a gun) was used in "No Going Back". The DumbJocks who created it soon discover its drawback: They had attached it to the gun in such a way that the head of the flashlight was in front of the muzzle and, as such, the flashlight was blown to pieces with the first shot fired. Reacher privately lampshades the tactical idiocy of this idea once he uses the trope in its traditional sense to aim himself at the guards.

* TookALevelInJerkass: In ''The Hard Way'' Gregory is a criminal, but a nominal ally of Reacher's for most of the novel before Reacher realizing that TheReveal hardens him due to a sense of betrayal.

* WifeBasherBasher: Reacher, sometimes to the point where it can kick off the plot of a novel, liken ''Worth Dying For''. One of his suspects in ''The Enemy'', an Eastern Bloc defector, is reluctant to reveal his alibi at first. It turns out to have spent three hours working over a wife-beater. Reacher approves.

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* ''No Middle Name''[[note]]Includes two novellas (''Too Much Time'' and ''High Heat'') and ten short stories ("Deep Down", "Everyone Talks", "Guy Walks into a Bar", "James Penney's New Identity" (1999 version), "Maybe They Have a Tradition", "No Room at the Motel", "Not a Drill", "Second Son", "Small Wars", "The Picture of the Lonely Diner", and the first chapter of ''The Midnight Line'')[[/note]]

* ExtremityExtremist: Reacher doesn't like kicks, and frequently thinks little of those who try to kick him. Given that he's an extremely large human being with military grade combat skills, he really doesn't need to kick people.

** ''Worth Dying For'': [[spoiler:Averted: Eleanor Duncan calls the police with evidence of all the crimes going on, but because she admits that her husband constantly beats her, they think she's just making things up to get back at him. Thing is, she actually did get at least one cop's attention, and so when Reacher catches a lift, he ends up getting dropped off in exactly the right place for him to start setting things to rights.]]

** In ''The Visitor'' (''Running Blind'' in the US), Reacher subdues a thug with three separate blows to the head. This trope is immediately lampshaded. Three blows to the head is enough to take someone out of a fight. It's also a pretty bad concussion. Later in the same novel, [[spoiler:the Big Bad]] is outright killed by a punch to the head (that breaks their neck).

* CouldHaveAvoidedAllThisPlot: ''Without Fail'' revolves around a plot to assassinate the Vice President-elect. Reacher is absolutely livid when he correctly guesses that the VP-elect had received a threatening message before the events of the book and knew who sent it, but never mentioned it to anyone, because by this point the plot has already resulted in several deaths and maimings. The VP-elect rebuts that he had no idea that it was important, and Reacher should really be blaming the Secret Service's policy of never telling anyone who's been threatened about the threat, because if the agents had just told him, he would have told them everything.