Jack Carr draws in unlikely readers with his personal details from battle and Amazon turns his work into a TV show

‘I’m bringing the feeling and emotions of somebody who fought,’ says author Jack Carr of his writing. PHOTO: SIMON & SCHUSTER

By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg

Some writers sell fantasy, romance or mystery. Former Navy SEAL Jack Carr trades in his precise knowledge of guns and battlefield tactics. 

In Carr’s latest novel, “Only the Dead,” battle-scarred James Reece opens a family trunk full of deadly weaponry.

He “reached inside and removed the 9mm Smith & Wesson M39 from the chest. Better known in the SEAL Teams as the Mk 22 ‘Hush Puppy,’ it had earned a legendary reputation in the jungles of Vietnam for silently eliminating sentries and guard dogs.” Soon, Reece is grabbing a box of “9mm Super Vel subsonic ammunition.”

That ultrarealistic detail is Carr’s signature. It’s part of the formula propelling him to success in a competitive genre, military and political thrillers, where few newcomers break out. Drawing on his experience, Carr spins tales about a SEAL who begins on a mission to avenge the deaths of his family and winds up unraveling terrorist plots and global conspiracies. 

Combined, his six books have sold about 3.3 million copies in all formats, according to publisher Simon & Schuster, with “Only the Dead” so far accounting for 300,000. His seventh, “Red Sky Mourning,” is expected to publish next spring.

His cumulative sales put him in a league reached by less than 1% of all authors, according to an estimate from publishing executives. Carr’s last two novels each made its debut at No. 1 on the New York Timeshardcover bestseller fiction list.

Tom Clancy was the father of military fiction, but he never served. Carr enlisted as a Navy SEAL in 1996 and saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan before leaving Naval Special Warfare in 2016.  

“I’m bringing the feeling and emotions of somebody who fought,” Carr said in an interview. “You can’t fake that, or if you did you couldn’t do it for long.” 

Carr’s books are laced with themes of patriotism and loyalty. That authenticity is attracting infrequent readers who are normally hard for publishers to reach. 

Amazon Prime Video has ordered a second season and a prequel to ‘The Terminal List’ starring Chris Pratt. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Literary agent Shane Salerno, who represents several successful thriller writers, said Carr has “managed in a very unique way to capture young men who are often difficult to market to and even harder to get to convert to purchase a $25 book.” Carr says some fans tell him they haven’t read a book since high school.

Cole Maund, a 31-year-old aircraft mechanic from Dothan, Ala., first heard about Carr from a friend and got hooked after reading his debut, “The Terminal List.” “I barely ever read at all but this was one book I couldn’t put down,” he said. “He grabs you.” Maund has now read all six books and has already preordered the seventh.    

Carr has taken his place among the big names of the category, from Clancy to Vince Flynn to Brad Thor. But while he’s a commercial success, he’s been overlooked by the literary establishment—with few if any newspaper book reviews. “My guess is that English majors don’t groove on guns,” said literary agent Richard Pine. 

Jack Carr is a pseudonym that the author says he uses out of concerns for his security. 

Carr grew up in Northern California and says he knew he wanted to be a Navy SEAL after seeing the 1951 World War II movie, “The Frogmen,” as a seven-year-old. His mother, a librarian, encouraged him to read, and he embraced such thriller writers as Clancy, David Morrell and A.J. Quinnell.  

As a child of the 1980s, he says, he always believed he would be a Navy SEAL—and would one day top the New York Times bestseller list. 

“That was a natural part of my foundation,” he says. “I knew that was the path and never worried about it.” 

Carr says neither he nor his wife grew up with money; investing everything in his writing career after leaving the SEALs was a risk for both. A child with special needs who requires round-the-clock care has given Carr even greater focus. 

Amazon Prime Video created a TV show starring Chris Pratt based on “The Terminal List.” It has ordered a second season and a prequel.

Some readers say he injects a right-wing political worldview into his novels. Hugh Carter, a 45-year-old communications consultant based in Toronto, said he’d been a huge Clancy fan as a kid and hoped that Carr’s books would be like those. Instead, he found them “so specifically rooted in modern politics and the culture wars that it was a turnoff.”

In a reference to an Islamic militant attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, he wrote in one book that “a small group of CIA contractors fought for their lives while politicians half a world away, in no danger of being overrun, could hardly be bothered to respond to requests for reinforcements.” 

Carr at the premiere of ‘The Terminal List’ in Los Angeles in 2022. PHOTO: NINA PROMMER/SHUTTERSTOCK

Carr initially worked with a writing partner, Keith Wood, who is a lawyer and freelance contributor to gun magazines. Wood, who lives in Alabama, said the two met through a mutual friend and hit it off. They later had a falling out that focused in part on how much credit Wood would claim publicly.  

“We haven’t spoken in years, although at one time we were really good friends,” said Wood. Carr declined to comment on Wood.

Emily Bestler, an editor at Simon & Schuster, said she acquired Carr’s debut manuscript, “The Terminal List,” after a recommendation from Brad Thor, whom she also publishes. It was a good bet. 

“We have a lot of young military guys who pick up the entire series before they deploy,” said Maria Oytas, who manages Bay Books, an independent bookstore in Coronado, Calif.

Carr has worked to extend his brand beyond books. Carr’s podcast, “Danger Close,” attracts a minimum of approximately 224,000 monthly listeners, according to Podchaser, a podcast data firm, with an audience that skews 91% male. Carr feeds his social-media followers daily content about their shared interests in weapons, hunting and action movies, with references to stars like Sylvester Stallone. 

Carr’s website offers a Jack Carr Operator Hat with crossed tomahawks for $48; a Jack Carr Hunter’s Shirt for $188, and Jack Carr Revenge Blend coffee for $11.90 (“Feel free to add some cream and honey to take it like Navy SEAL Sniper James Reece.”) 

Carr believed from the beginning that readers would embrace his use of military jargon. In “The Terminal List,” he describes a soldier in Afghanistan as looking “like a creature from another world with his AOR1-patterned camouflage, body armor, and Ops Core half-shell helmet with NODs firmly in place.” 

Too much? No, says Carr. “It gives my characters legitimacy to see that the right helmet is described correctly,” he said.

Kenzie Fitzpatrick, a competitive professional shooter, recently spent a day with Carr at a shooting range in Utah. “When I’m reading his books I think, ‘That’s how I would load that ammunition,’ or ‘that’s the tool I would use to gauge my ballistic data at long range,’” she said.

Doug Downs, a professor at Montana State University who studies gun culture from a linguistics perspective, said most people look at any writing that involves guns through a political lens. 

“People who enjoy his work view guns as tools,” Downs said. “That’s not how you hear people outside that culture talk about them.” 

Others are drawn to the themes in Carr’s work, especially an optimism that ideals are worth standing up for. Don Bentley, a former Army Apache helicopter pilot who also became a thriller writer, said of Carr’s work,“The characters may be flawed, but they aspire to be the person we want to be.