Bob Lee Swagger is a character in several novels by Washington Post movie reviewer Stephen Hunter. Swagger was a Marine Gunnery Sergeant in Vietnam, and one of the world's top snipers. Typically, Swagger gets involved in a black ops situation which turns bad, and he has to complete his task while fighting off various conspiracies from powerful government agencies to supress the truth (and, not co-incidentally, to kill Swagger). The first Swagger novel, Point of Impact, became the movie Shooter, but no others have been filmed. Another Swagger novel, Black Light, involves Bob Lee's investigation into his father's murder, and the conspiracy behind it. Hunter has also written a series of novels involving Bob Lee's father, Earl Swagger, and his involvement in the CIA's dirty wars of the late 1940s and early 1950s, including an attempt to assassinate a young Cuban revolutionary named Fidel. Needless to say, this plot fails.Bob Lee, like Earl, is a deeply conservative, self-sufficient loner, highly skilled at his craft, and competent at many other skills as well, such as living off the land, much like the cowboy heroes of old, and like them devoted to fair play, honesty, and decency, all of which values he feels are mostly missing in modern times. Hunter seems to have conceived Swagger as a deliberate anachronism, but that only makes him play all the better as a hero. The only thing that Bob Lee is bad at is sizing up the characters of others, because his first assumption tends to be that if he is honest, it will encourage others to be honest too. While heroic, this is also the trait that tends to get Bob Lee into the pickles we see him in in the various novels. Hunter's writing has gotten slacker of late, and is neither as taut nor as interesting as in the first two or three novels, but he can still craft a good tale, and narrative ingenuity, after all, is not what such hero tales are about. They are rather about competence and endurance, and these qualities Bob Lee has in spades.Mark Wahlberg's portrayal of Swagger in Shooter is good, but misses by a small margin some of the peasant cunning of the character we find in the books. Even so, it would be worth seeing him reprise the role, and goodness knows, Hunter has provided enough material to keep the series going for a good long while. Show less «