I have enjoyed all the Reacher books, they are good pot boilers. Last month I was talking with my brother about Reacher. His opinion is that Reacher is a serial killer.
That got me thinking. Vigilante? Yes, for sure. Serial killer, my heart says no, my brain says yes.
Any thoughts on this?
New Labor
Serial killers don’t kill people who need killin’. Or in self defense.
He’s Conan the Barbarian in jeans and army surplus.
He’s probably somewhere close to being sociopathic, but he’s not a serial killer. His goal/motivation isn’t murder, it’s justice. His methods are simply amoral.
That’s true of most serial killers. They’re often horribly deluded about what “justice” entails, but that’s what they think they’re doing.
Is it really?
I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer seemed pretty clear that he was lobotomizing, raping, and eating young men for his own satisfaction, not out of any sense of “justice”. But maybe he was an outlier? How much do we actually know about the motivations of such people?
Well, a lot of them seem to target prostitutes, and in at least some cases, they’ve said that it’s some sort of punishment for them (the prostitutes) being immoral. As Jack is reputed to have said, “I am very down on whores, and I shan’t stop ripping them”. But I don’t think anyone would label him as a “vigilante”.
I thought that was the whole schtick behind Dexter?
Jack Reacher said that?
Dexter was a serial killer with those kinds of serial killer urges. As a young man, he would kill animals. His cop dad was successful in channeling those urges into something that resembled justice, by making sure he killed people who “needed killin’”. But, without that, he just would have been a regular serial killer.
If Jack Reacher ran out of people who needed killin’, he would stop killing. That’s why he’s different from a serial killer.
He’s certainly a killer, serially.
You could have fun bit of fanfic based on an ‘unreliable narrator’ Reacher who invents all of these scenarios simply to justify all of his killing sprees.
Serial killers target prostitutes because they are marginalized people who are vulnerable to predation by the nature of their trade and are generally not reported as missing promptly if at all. There is extensive research on the psychology and behavior of serial killers that demonstrates a wide range of motivations but the most common is a sense of sexual gratification, control over others, or thrill-seeking, often as a result of abuse and neglect as a child. There is a subset of serial killers who claim that their primary motivation is for some kind of punishment or removal of morally indigent people from society (particularly found in serial killers with strong religious beliefs) but with the possible exception of killers with some diagnosed form of psychosis such a motivation is questionable.
Despite what you see in movies and television, most serial killers do not make elaborate plans, or are expert in creating false clues to mislead investigators, play ‘cat & mouse games’ with law enforcement, or promote their crimes for attention. A rare exception to this was Dennis Rader (the “Bind, Torture, Kill” serial murderer) who would stalk his victims, murder them after fairly extensive torture rituals, and then taunt police with letters (which was his downfall) but he also admitted that doing so was inspired by media presentations of other serial killers. It should go without saying that serial killers in popular entertainment such as Hannibal Lector or Dexter, while perhaps based in some part on case studies of actual killers, do not represent real world sociopathic serial murderers any more than ‘Maverick’ and ‘Iceman’ are accurate portrayals of Navy aviators.
As for Jack Reacher, I’ve only read a couple of the novels and watched the first series of the Amazon Prime show but he is clearly a character inspired by wish fulfillment whose abilities and physique are near-superhero qualities. He seems to fall into situations where killing is morally and ethically (if not legally) justified and while he doesn’t take pains to avoid killing ‘bad’ people he doesn’t make up excuses for why someone ‘needed killin’’ just to satisfy a passion for murder. So, insofar as it is really possible to create a psychological profile of and assign motivations to such an exaggerated, unrealistic fictional character, I don’t think Jack Reacher really qualifies as a serial killer.
Jessica Fletcher, on the other hand…
Stranger
Jack Reacher probably doesn’t fit most people’s definition of serial killer, but I could argue that he is a serial maimer.
Or Travis McGee without the boat?
Travis McGee is still a modern man - Conan (as per Howard’s original stories) and Reacher are something more ancient and pure. They’re primal beings, unburdened by the complexities of civilization. If they see evil, they fight it; if they see enemies, they kill them, and then wander off to find some new adventure.
Yeah, I think this is it. Reacher is much closer to pulp and comics than to detective or suspense thrillers.
Yep, I concur.
There’s also a practical difficulty.
Lots of people who need killin’ are adept at avoiding being killed. They’re generally badasses themselves, or can afford to employ badasses as private security. Or control governments and have lots of taxpayer-provided security .
Reacher succeeds because he has massively thick plot armor. You or I or even real life Chuck Norris at a younger age would struggle then fail without that plot armor.
If one did really enjoy killing for it’s own sake, and one wanted to a do-gooding vigilante, it’d still be hard to make much of a career of that IRL.
And a weird type of Serendipity where he commonly runs into weird issues requiring violence.
I think that if one hung out in the right, which is to say wrong, circles one could find those situations pretty readily. Maybe not every thirty minutes, but on most overnights.
Challenging the local bully works well; you just need to find out where he hangs out to drink and get stupid. And in the right / wrong social circles the answer to that is pretty much “every shitty bar in the bad part of town.”
Having known a few serial killers, I tend to disagree. In my experience, the most common factor is a lack of empathy. Serial killers don’t see other people as real. So they feel it doesn’t matter if they kill people.