While Reacher might look and hit like a classic American bruiser, Jack Reacher’s DNA is a little more British than fans may realize. In a new interview with Men’s Journal, author Lee Child—the English creator of the bestselling Jack Reacher novels—revealed that his famously brawny hero is heavily inspired not by James Bond, but by legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. What an elementary choice.

“It was a very conscious homage on my part,” Child said. “In Killing Floor [the first book], I did an explicitly Sherlock Holmes thing where Reacher says to Finley the cop, ‘I see that you're divorced and you gave up smoking in April.’ That was Reacher deducing like Holmes.”

That moment, much like Holmes' famous deductions about pocket lint and walking stick scuffs, helped define Reacher not just as a wrecking ball of justice, but as a meticulous thinker who notices everything. Across three seasons of the Prime Video series,...