FICTION
Battle Mountain
C.J. Box
Bloomsbury, $32.99
If you have a Lee Child section in your alphabetically arranged bookshelves, it’s time to create space ahead of it for the novels written by C.J. Box.
Child, who was born James Dover Grant, has confessed that he adopted his pen name so that his work would appear about eye level in bookshop displays. Box has been Box all his life, so there has never been any need for such strategising – and he’s always going to come before Child in bookshops.
While Child is best known for his 30 Jack Reacher novels, so far, Box’s reputation primarily rests on his 25 featuring Joe Pickett. At least in Australia, he’s not as well known as his fellow writer, although Child describes him as “one of today’s solid gold, A-list, must-read writers”. He’s also written numerous other novels, including six in the Cody Hoyt-Cassie Dewell series, which was adapted by David E. Kelley for the now-cancelled Big Sky series (all three seasons are available on Disney+). The two seasons of the equally lacklustre Joe Pickett can be found on Paramount+. Neither does justice to its literary source.
Like Child’s, Box’s books belong to the realm known as pulp fiction – a putdown label for some, a drawcard for others. Their style is straightforward – the prose is no-nonsense; the characters skilfully depicted; the locations evocatively drawn – and they keep you hooked. They rip right along. He’s the kind of writer who gives pulp a good name.
But while the two prolific authors tell stories about classic American adventurers trying to bring order to mostly out-of-the-way places in a generally troubled nation, their protagonists are very different kinds of men, although they both like doing their own thing in their own way.
While Reacher, formerly a military policeman, travels the road defiantly alone, like an old-time cowboy (he don’t need nobody, ma’am!), Joe is a Wyoming game warden who delights in being by himself in a vast mountainous wilderness. Like Reacher, he don’t go lookin’ for trouble. Still, somehow it always finds him. These are crime novels, after all.
Author – and Wyoming ranch owner – C.J. Box
But while you can’t imagine Reacher going far beyond the occasional clinch on the final page, Joe is a family man. Torn between the romance of the wild and his devotion to his wife and three daughters, he deals with the everyman stresses of being a husband and father. He worries about paying the bills, about keeping his job, about how best to manoeuvre his way past self-righteous, incompetent or plainly corrupt bureaucrats, law-enforcement officials and politicians, and how to deal with an ornery, disapproving mother-in-law.