The Jack Reacher And Will Trent Team-Up That Fans Might Have Missed

Before he was the star of a hit streaming series, Jack Reacher was trekking his way around the United States in Lee Child's novels. The British author created his hero as a lone-wolf former military policeman with a penchant for a nomadic, minimalist lifestyle. While the character is known for being a loner, across what is now 29 Jack Reacher books, Child's hero has met and teamed up with all manner of cohort, acquaintance, and ally.

That's the same for the streaming series, too, with "Reacher" season 3 — based on the best Jack Reacher novel — following the titular ex-Army officer as he teams up with DEA agent Susan Duffy (the best thing to happen to "Reacher" in some time) to take down a dodgy rug import business. Previously, the show has seen Reacher join forces with a local police department, and we've seen plenty of his friend Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), who was a member of Reacher's 110th Special Investigations unit in the Army and is frequently called upon to help her former boss out of the many binds in which he finds himself.

What we might not see in "Reacher," however, is the protagonist teaming up with characters from outside Child's original Jack Reacher universe. The prolific author, who serves as executive producer on the series, didn't stop at 29 books, writing a series of short stories and a book breaking down Reacher's rules and personal ethos. But he also branched out into other universes entirely, teaming up with other authors to bring Jack Reacher into the world of similarly popular modern literary heroes. At one point, this involved co-writing a short story with Karin Slaughter, author of the Will Trent novels.

While Lee Child was busy creating a series of novels about an itinerant American action hero while writing in his native UK, American crime writer Karin Slaughter was crafting a series of books about Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Will Trent and his partner Faith Mitchell. Though the Will Trent novels aren't quite as numerous as the Jack Reacher books (there are currently 15 Trent outings), they are very popular in their own right and similar to Child's series in that they focus on a singular hero capable of feats that other agents simply can't match. In that sense, it was only a matter of time before Reacher and Trent met in some capacity, and in 2019, that very meeting occurred.

"Cleaning the Gold" is a short story/novella from Child and Slaughter that features both Jack Reacher and Will Trent. The story sees the latter go undercover at Fort Knox as part of his investigation into a 22-year-old murder. When he embarks on his mission, he has a single suspect: Jack Reacher. As it happens, Reacher is also at Fort Knox as part of his own mission to topple an illicit group operating within the American military — something with which the former military policeman is very familiar. Of course, it's not long before the duo form an alliance to tackle an even bigger task after discovering a conspiracy that neither could have foreseen.

Most reviews of "Cleaning the Gold" are fairly positive, so it seems this was a well-received team-up, even if it won't be remembered as either Reacher nor Trent's finest outing. The best Jack Reacher novels are beloved by fans, and his Trent team-up was always unlikely to usurp any of the most celebrated novels in the series. Still, it is interesting to see how far the Reacher universe spreads.

The Jack Reacher-verse is even more sprawling than even some fans might realize. For example, "Cleaning the Gold" wasn't the first time Lee Child's hero had ventured outside his own literary universe. Jack Reacher once crossed into the world of "Bones," in a 2017 short story that similarly paired Child with a female writer, this one being Kathy Reichs.

Reichs is a forensic anthropologist whose own novels featured the character of Temperance Brennan. Brennan is an anthropologist based on Reichs who was used as the basis of Emily Deschanel's Temperance "Bones" Brennan in the Fox procedural "Bones." The short story "Faking a Murderer" appeared in the anthology "MatchUp," and saw Reacher teaming up with Brennan after she's falsely accused of a murder. Again, it wasn't the most celebrated Jack Reacher adventure, but it was a neat little addition to both characters' lore.

The same goes for Reacher's team-up with Will Trent. Both characters have since been given their own series, with "Will Trent" now in its third season on ABC, and "Reacher" similarly in its third season on Prime Video. At this point, there's absolutely no indication or need for either of the two to crossover on-screen, but it's interesting to think about potential future crossovers — especially in Reacher's case. The character is such an archetypal American hero that fans will surely be eager to see how he measures up to other beloved action heroes. We'll almost certainly never see a Reacher/James Bond crossover, or a Reacher versus John Wick movie, but the concept of taking Alan Ritchson's hero and crossing him over into another universe is a tantalizing prospect.