Egg lit, also known as romance fiction, churns out bodice-rippers by the million, elevating its best-selling authors to a pantheon of palatial homes and soft-focus, over-styled promotional photographs.

While men, as is well-known, are not the readers that women are, they will respond enthusiastically to the printed word if the ink is mixed with a sufficiently high level of testosterone. Hormonally saturated sperm lit (think Tom Clancy) does the trick. High-pec fiction features protagonists of awesome physical development who are profoundly rational and cool even in the most planet-threatening situations. While they may have the emotional maturity of a three-year-old and are fixated on the functional intricacies of high-level death toys, they are not averse to the occasional brief hay-romp, but then it’s always back to the patriotic and bloody business at hand.

In both egg lit and sperm lit, we’re of course dealing with that hoary tradition of publishing: formula fiction, also known as genre fiction. It’s been around a long time. In a sense many of the Great Dead Writers were writing to formula. They just did it very, very well.

Now, with the mass market, formula has generated many specialized genre fiction sub-genres: romance, thriller, suspense, mystery, gay, black, Hispanic, Asian-American.

What the formula means for the reader is: no surprises. You buy a romance novel and you know you’re going to get a clever but put-upon heroine whose virtue, if a bit smudged, will win the day— and the good guy— in the end. When we still had a Cold War, you bought a Tom Clancy and you knew the good-guy patriots (who, needless to say, were Americans) would counter and defeat every vicious, underhanded move made by the Commies.

All very satisfying, consoling, and with about as much enduring value as last night’s dim sum take-out.

But. The occasional author can take the formula and run with it, creating an ambiguous, challenging world where the line between hero and villain, good and evil, is at times as difficult to define clearly as it sometimes is in life. Graham Greene did books like this, which he called "entertainments," to distinguish them, I suppose, from his non-entertaining "serious" novels. (Only after his death did it become clear that the entertainments were a lot better than the non-entertainments.)

And some formula writers do the formula so well, with plot, place, and characters polished to a fare-the-well, that the books survive and find new audiences across generations. Think Agatha Christie. Or Dick Francis. Or, for that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle.

What all this comes down to is: talent tells.

Creaky plot or not, good writing will out. (Think Shakespeare.)

Formula or not, genre or not, the really well-told tale always, always wins.

Part 2. In which, in an act of near-indecent exposure, the critic bares all.

Lee Child, an American transplant from the UK, has done four books:

    Die Trying,
    Killing Floor,
    Tripwire,
    Running Blind.

They’re being marketed as suspense fiction, or thrillers. And they are certainly sperm lit through and through. And I am here writing this today because I am absolutely smitten by them.

Child's prose is spare, utterly straightforward, and always to the point, the point being: advance the action. (Now and then, he'll loosen the reins for a moment and let fly with an insight. At one point an exasperated character describes the horrors of the just-ended era thus: "...the night and fog swirling through a ghastly century"; I haven't come across a better three-word characterization of 1900-1999 than "a ghastly century".)

There is nothing here of the forced, fearful, strutting "manliness" of priapic Hemingway/Mailer figures which came to occupy so many 20th century writers. The characters are stark but, somehow, believable and sympathetic (some of these guys, you suspect, are already carrying arround a Viagra prescription in their wallet, though they may not yet have had it filled). The good guys are imperfect but you know they’re trying as hard as they can. The bad guys are imperfect and you know they’re also trying as hard as they can.

Realistic? As 20th century lit-crit people grew so fond of saying: yes, and no.

"Realism" is not an issue here, because Lee Child is one of those writers who is so good with word-magic that he immerses you very rapidly in his world and somehow convinces you, as long as you’re reading, that that world is whole and valid and important. The story's the thing.

Willing suspension of disbelief? You betcha, and praise the Lord.

Though a Brit, Child has mastered American patois (one assumes not without a little help from his editors). Only very rarely does an occasional Britishism slip through (usually in the form of a "wrong" preposition—such as "round" instead of "around").

If he’s taken lessons from reading anyone, it’s surely from Dick Francis.

On page one of each of the books, we get a troubled but worthy protagonist who quickly discovers that something is terribly wrong in the old chaotic world. Events conspire to put the protagonist in a position where it’s up to him to set things right. For Dick Francis’s heroes, stability and support always came ultimately from the class of privilege and money—but the characters and stories were usually so compelling that you could forgive him this simplistic Tory strain. Child’s good people find strength and help in the ordered and ordering system of the military. But as with Dick Francis, you easily forgive him this boy-scout world view because the story carries you along so effortlessly.

Great writing? No, no. We’re talking about entertainment of high quality, entertainment which does not insult your intelligence (compare Hollywood) and whose creator worries about accurate plotting. Yes, occasionally the plot creaks. Something just a little too improbable happens, but the momentum of the roller coaster easily carries you past it.

As Francis did at the beginning of his long career, Lee Child is staying with the same central character, a nomadic loner called Jack Reacher, a former MP (that's "military policeman," not "member of parliament") who left the army when the downsizing started after the end of the Cold War. An army brat for whom the military had been his entire life, Reacher now wanders the country, unable to understand how anyone could be satisfied owning a house, how anyone could stay in one place for long. Foot-loose, but hardly fancy-free, Reacher knows not all is well with him, and certainly not with the world. He, like Francis’s heroes, bumps up against nice people with big, often violent problems; and he just can’t ignore them and go on his nomadic way.

A cardboard figure? Again: yes and no. Yes, because after four books you begin to know what kinds of problems Reacher will bump into, and how he will react. But no, because the problems, no matter how baffling, continue to be utterly believable and engrossing.