When my publisher approached me to write Jack Bauer novels during 24’s first, Emmy-award winning season, it became my job to find a way into the heart of this fictional character. Over the years, pundits Left and Right have seen Jack as part of a larger political agenda. But as a writer, I couldn’t approach Jack that way — not if I wanted to bring him to life on the printed page.

So who is Jack Bauer? Among the ticking bombs and ticking clocks, what makes him tick?

On the surface, the man is easy enough to define. As deputy director of a fictional CIA Counter Terrorist Unit, he shares the thriller stage with a cyber-smart, heavily armed crew. The heart of Jack Bauer, however, isn’t found in a digital clock, computer virus, or high-caliber weapon.

But for me, defining Jack as a character begins with understanding his place in a fictional pantheon, a tradition of rogue heroes that reaches all the way back to the genesis of story itself. While it might be a stretch to toss Gilgamesh into the mix, Jack does share many attributes with characters such as the wily Odysseus and the “outlaw” Robin Hood: men who triumph using their wits as often as their weapons. Violence may surround such men, but intelligence and the ability to strategize is what allows them to prevail far more than their ability to draw back a bow — or, in Jack’s case, draw a gun.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ADVERTISEMENT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jack’s more modern counterparts can be found in pop-culture icons like James Bond and Dirty Harry; comic heroes like Wolverine, Batman, and The Punisher; even Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian.

Like these rogue heroes, Jack possesses an internal beacon that indicates what’s just — a moral compass unaffected by the code of law, the rules of institutions, or the mores of society at large. Jack takes decisive action when he needs to. He cuts through the Gordian knots of social and institutional malaise, bureaucratic betrayals, and covert corruption. Jack will always strive to do the right thing, often without regard to his own best interest; and as was the case with the rogue heroes who came before him, not all of Jack’s actions will appear heroic.

Jack inhabits a fictional world, of course. Decoding and defining this “universe” became my job as well.

To capture the popular imagination effectively, all rogue heroes must exist in a world that to some degree mirrors contemporary reality. Take Conan the Barbarian: Writer Robert E. Howard created Conan in the early 1930s as a hero who battles his way through a long-lost (completely fictional) Hyborian Age. But these stories were more than disconnected fantasies. Howard himself admitted that Conan was a reflection of the gunfighters, outlaws, and con men he’d rubbed shoulders with in the rural, boom-and-bust Texas town where he grew up.

During his lifetime, Conan’s adventures were readily digested as popular pulp fiction, a kind of American fantastic noir that echoed the attitudes and themes of other Depression-era authors including Raymond Chandler.

Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe may not appear to have a single thing in common with Howard’s Conan, but at their cores the two are alike. Both soberly acknowledge the existence of darkness and corruption in their worlds, then use their internal codes to resist giving in to it and their wits to triumph over it.

While keeping those antecedents in mind for the core of Jack Bauer, I couldn’t help considering 24 as a sort of post-9/11 incarnation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Back in the mid-Sixties, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement seemed like a pretty cool place to work. Everyone was so dedicated and functional. Its boss, Alexander Waverly, was a jovial father figure, an employer you could count on when the chips were down. Even better, U.N.C.L.E. headquarters was staffed by a bevy of lovely young women. Best of all, you knew the enemy and it was THRUSH, not the guy or gal in the next cubicle.

But the world’s changed plenty since Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin hit the airwaves in the Swinging Sixties. The idealism that took America to the moon and promised Baby Boomers flying cars by the time they had driver’s licenses has been eroded by Vietnam, Watergate, and all the gates that followed, not to mention those airliners crashing into both Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a bucolic field in Pennsylvania. For generations that never experienced the hardships of the Depression or the heartbreaks of a world war, life suddenly became brutal.