Lee Child had written a dozen novels about Jack Reacher—the clever, jacked-up former Army cop who now drifts around the country carrying only a toothbrush and an ATM card looking for justice to fight for—by the time I read my first. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I guess I was going through a long nonfiction phase, but really, I think I just considered myself above airport bestsellers and was thus too busy reading things like Robert Caro’s million-page Lyndon Johnson biographies so I could brag about it insufferably. (“Oh my god , you haven’t read them?”)

Then my boss at the time, David Granger, a former editor in chief of Esquire, mentioned that he loved the Reacher books. This not only surprised me, it shocked me. Granger was one of the smartest men I’d ever met, and discernin

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