Jack Reacher is a serial killer?
Isn’t that true of a lot of heroes? What is Reacher’s body count? I bet he can’t come close to Lucas McCain’s.
Reacher is barely into his third season. McCain had five.
Which is often the bar where the best live Blues music is playing; as it’s well established Reacher likes the Blues almost as much as he likes black coffee.
This is far more plausible than the stories as written.
Travis felt bad about killing people or being instrumental in their deaths, which he didn’t cause that often. Reacher’s conscience wasn’t troubled by breaking bad guys’s necks, but he didn’t travel the land looking for opportunities to kill, hence not a serial killer.
Drank a ton of coffee, hardly ever needed to take a piss. The most unreal aspect of Reacher novels.
I’ve read over 30 Reacher novels (and they were all excellent.)
Reacher is NOT a serial killer.
He had a fine Army career (and caught an Army sniper who was a serial killer.)
Then he was ‘down-sized’ out of the Army and decided to become a hobo (not a vagrant or a tramp!)
He travels around hitch-hiking and staying off the radar.
Trouble finds him … and he deals with it. 
Reacher is frequently given the opportunity to walk away. And decides to walk right into trouble.
Sometimes it’s because he’s looking for trouble (won’t turn around), originally because his brother was killed (that was before he had killed lots of people, one after another).
(BTW, the army snipper he let go, while still under orders, was a mass killer (3), not a serial killer.)
Like any executioner who has executed a lot of people, by this stage he’s crazy as fuck. Either he was crazy to start with, and became an executioner for that reason, or the killing has made him crazy. Either way, he’s walking across the US, leaving a trail of death behind him.
I like the earlier stories better, before he was a crazy killer. It’s just exhaustion: the author has done some prequal stuff which is ok, so he’s still got it in him.
I can;t remember where I read it.
“Lucas McCain killed more men than cholera.”
There was a bit in a couple of the later novels and short stories telling how Reacher was tracked by the Army already as a preschooler as someone who will reflexively run towards any perceived threat without thinking too much about it. Also, during his tenure as an MP he was regularly tapped to do off-the-books assassinations.
Jack Reacher is hobo Doc Savage.
If I recall correctly, Doc Savage never killed anyone. His trick was he knew a surgical process which would turn any criminal into a law-abiding citizen. Granted, cutting up people’s brains without their consent in order to change their personalities hasn’t aged well. But this was back in a time when people thought lobotomies were a miracle cure.
No, Jack the Ripper.
There are different classes of multiple murderers. Serial killers differ from hit men, spree killers and rage killers in some very specific ways. Their first kill gave them something akin to sexual release, and every subsequent kill is an attempt to re-live that satisfying event. Robert Ressler, the author of Whoever Fights Monsters and one of the subjects/characters or Mindhunter, chose the term specifically for its connection to movie serials from the 1930s and 40s. The first cliffhanger is a doozy, and they have to try and top it with every subsequent adventure.
Anyway, Jack Reacher appears to have a different motive and may fit better into some different existing category.
Here is the 1930s definition I once read.
A hobo travels to find work; a tramp travels and works only when necessary; a bum doesn’t work.
I bet McCain killed more in his first 2 seasons than Reacher did.
ETA: according to Google, McCain killed 24 men in season two versus Reacher’s 20.
My point stands.
Not by any real definition of Serial killer, which includes Murder, not justifiable homicide.
If you’re reading the books, Reacher went way past “justifiable homicide” years ago. Perverting the course of justice, vigilante, whatever: the guy is a repeat killer by choice.
He needed killin’ != justifiable homicide.
As tempting as that idea sometimes is, the outcome IRL would substantially always be worse than current reality.
I think there is much less difference between McGee and Reacher. While the violence is not as graphic in the McGee series, ol’ Trav kills a lot of people, all in the na,e of righting wrongs. And Reacher is just fine in the modern world, in some ways more so than McGee. By that I mean Reacher is in some ways a good corporate man, at home and at peace, as it were, with the bureaucracy of the army; he understands the necessity, or at least the evolution, of it, and understands such a structure does some things better. Somewhere Reacher says,roughly, he didn’t leave the army, the army left him. Travis could never handle or believe in such corporate structure. Where they differ is for all his rejection of the corporate world, Travis is able to have high end consumer goods, from his great music system to his expensive liquor. He is a discerning consumer who despises mass consumption and mass culture, but he is a big time consumer. Reacher understands that he cannot have it both ways: he can have freedom or relative wealth, but not both. He goes for freedom.
The two represent the changing nature of the middle class in their respective eras. The fantasy life represented by Travis is no longer believable at a fundamental level, and so his modern counterpart, Reacher, lives a very different life.
Of course the fantasy of their violence is another matter altogether.