Lee Child: Nine things we learned from his This Cultural Life interview
Lee Child is one of the most prolific writers in the world. In 1997, his first novel, The Killing Floor, introduced the vigilante Jack Reacher. Since then, he’s written a Reacher novel every year, selling over 100 million books in the process. Child’s career as a novelist came late in life.
In this episode of This Cultural Life, he tells John Wilson about the strict childhood that gave him a love of books, the inspirations behind his writing, and why he decided to walk away from Jack Reacher. Here are nine things we learned.
1. Fun was discouraged in his house
Child, whose real name is James Grant, grew up in Birmingham in the 1950s and 60s. His childhood home was not an artistic one. His parents were working class and expected a lot of their three sons. “There was tremendous pressure to behave… and go to school and university, as a reflection on them, rather than purely for our benefit.” He says his parents thought “anything that was liable to be enjoyable should be avoided. The only thing that was respected was books.”
2. He started reading aged three
Thankfully for Child, he loved books from an early age. “I was a huge reader from the age of three,” he says. “My oldest brother started primary school before I did and I was insane with jealousy that he was doing stuff that I didn’t know how to do.” So young Child would watch his brother reading with his mother and gradually started himself. “As a three-year-old it was all picture books with very few words, but from about four I started on books with no pictures.”
3. Goliath inspired Jack Reacher
One of the first stories that fascinated Child was David and Goliath, but it wasn’t David he was interested in. “Goliath was my favourite,” he says. “I would go over the book, over and over again, hoping Goliath would win. [Later] I realised, ‘OK, I like the big guy, not the small guy. I don’t like the underdog paradigm.’” That thinking led him to creating Reacher, a physically enormous, very skilled man, who is very much not the underdog. “My whole premise for the Reacher books was: Can Goliath be a good guy? And further than that, how do you put him in peril?”
My whole premise for the Reacher books was: Can Goliath be a good guy?Lee Child
4. He started writing after getting fired from TV
After studying law, Child worked in production at Granada Television, where he was involved in shows including Brideshead Revisited and Prime Suspect. Towards the end of his 18 years in the company, Child became a union representative. His bosses, keen to quash union action, fired him. Knowing he’d never get another job in TV, he started writing. “After 18 years, I knew what audiences wanted,” he says. “I had read tens of thousands of long-form narrative works of fiction and non-fiction. I used the instinct I’d developed to write a book. It seemed like my last chance.”
5. Jack Reacher’s name is an inside joke with his wife
The first book Child wrote was The Killing Floor, the first Reacher adventure. He calls it “basically a revenge novel”, his response to his anger at being sacked from Granada following his union work. “I hate big smug guys who think they can get away with things. And that’s the core message of a Reacher book.” The character’s name is a joke between him and his wife. “I had no idea what to call him,” says Child. Reacher is 6’4”, an inch taller than Child, and the height made him think of how often little old ladies ask him to reach for things on high shelves in the supermarket. “My wife said, ‘If this writing gig doesn’t work out, you could be a reacher in a supermarket.’ Great name!”
6. His own pen name was no random choice
Child says he writes under a pen name because that was a requirement while he was working in TV (the two careers overlapped slightly). “If you wanted to do any moonlighting… they turned a blind eye as long as you used a different name.” Unlike Reacher’s name, Child’s was carefully strategised. “Writing is an art, it’s a craft, it’s a joy – all that – but it’s also a job,” he says. “You have to make a living. So I researched quite carefully and an enormous proportion of bestsellers were by authors beginning with C, simply because of the physical shelving. People browse from left to right and they get fatigued very early, so C is a prime spot. And a name that’s a noun helps, because it doesn’t get misheard. Especially a noun like ‘child’, which for most has a warm association.”
7. He never knows his story before he starts writing
Child writes a novel every year, which takes between 80 and 90 days. “I literally have no clue what’s going to happen [before I start writing],” he says. “I do not know what the story’s going to be… Occasionally I have a line of dialogue I’m working towards, or a visual image, but I just start at the beginning with what is hopefully a strong paragraph, then keep going and see what happens.”
8. He was surprised by readers’ reaction to Tom Cruise
The Reacher books have been adapted twice: as a hit TV series, which is still going, but before that as a pair of Tom Cruise movies. The movies were not especially well received, in part because many fans felt Cruise didn't have that physicality to play the hulking Reacher. “I was a bit naïve about the impact that would have on readers,” says Child. “To me… the book is definitive, and a movie is a side project; somebody else’s opinion. I imagined readers would see that… But they did think Tom Cruise was physically not right for Reacher.”
9. He’s finished with Reacher
Child always intended to stop writing Reacher if he ever tired of it. “I made myself promise that if I ever sensed I was running out of gas, I would stop.” Lee says he felt that on the 24th book, 2019’s Blue Moon.” “A couple of those mornings, I thought, ‘I don’t want to be doing this.’ I took that as a sign I had to stop. I assumed I would just stop the series, but then I thought, ‘I’ll ask my brother.’” His brother, Andrew Child, 15 years his junior, is also a writer and has co-written the last four novels. “The 29th book that’s coming out this year is his entirely. He is now taking it into the future.”
