Safe Enough by Lee Child

Published by Mysterious Press on September 3, 2024

Safe Enough is a collection of Lee Child’s short fiction, excluding Reacher stories. In a forward, Child admits that he is a novelist who hasn’t mastered the art of writing a short story. I would agree that he often swings and misses, but enough stories in this collection count as base hits that Child has a decent batting average.

Many of the stories collected in Safe Enough set up a mildly interesting scenario before Child tries to deliver an O. Henry ending. The assassin in “The .50 Solution” is hired to kill a racehorse but makes a predictable departure from the plan. The journalist who narrates “Public Transportation” talks to a cop about a murder case that was closed for the sake of convenience, not because the crime was solved correctly. The true killer’s identity is predictable.

In other stories, Lee makes the formula work. “Ten Keys,” about a man who stole money and product from a drug distribution organization, telegraphs part of the surprise in its ending but manages a final unexpected twist. “Me & Mr. Rafferty” is narrated by a killer who leaves clues for Mr. Rafferty to find. The ending is genuinely surprising.

“My First Drug Trial” benefits from an ending that surprised me, but I’m ranking it as one of my favorites because of a weed smoker’s internal monologue as he talks himself into getting high before court.

A snobby FBI agent tells a Metropolitan Police inspector to read a Sherlock Holmes story as the source of clues to a murder. The murder turns out to be a misdirection. The element of surprise makes “The Bone-Headed League” a fun story.

I enjoyed a few others, as well:

For an assassin, “The Greatest Trick of All” is getting paid by a husband to kill his wife and getting paid by the wife to kill her husband — a trick that has disastrous consequences when it doesn’t work as intended. “Pierre, Lucien & Me” is an interesting take on an art forgery story that begins immediately after Renoir’s death.

One of my favorites, “Normal in Every Way,” is about an autistic file clerk in San Francisco in the 1950s who solves crimes by reading files and seeing connections that others miss. In “New Blank Document,” a reporter tells the story of a Black jazz musician who stayed in France after World War II, a place that allowed him to escape the racist place where his brother was murdered.

“The Snake Eater by the Numbers” is narrated by a rookie London cop who is tutored by a corrupt cop in the importance of clearance rates. When the corrupt cop fits up a mentally unwell Londoner who believes himself to be an American Marine, the rookie learns the meaning of street justice.

“Safe Enough” is written in a more literary style than is common for Child. The story of a disintegrating marriage, after the wife apparently killed her last husband, has some insightful thoughts about marriage but ends predictably.

“Addicted to Sweetness” benefits from interesting dialog about punishment inflicted in the West Indies upon people who stole sugar from their employers. The dialog enhances this story about the leader of a criminal organization who learns the downside of imposing tough punishments.

And I was unimpressed by several:

“The Bodyguard” is interesting only because the bodyguard fails at his job. “Section 7(A) Operational” begins with an intriguing story of an operative assembling a team for a dangerous covert operation. The story’s ending renders the setup pointless.

Another five or six stories don’t merit comment. Since I enjoyed more than half, I regard the good stories as outweighing their forgettable companions, but it’s a close balance.

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