Photos by Brian Killigrew

In Part 1 of this interview, #1 New York Times best-selling author Lee Child described Jack Reacher, the “vigilante” (Child’s word) hero of his world-famous thriller series. He also told of his childhood in the tough city Birmingham, England, and how his frequent involvement with street violence planted seeds that later sprouted into the Reacher character.

In Part 2, Lee cited the seminal writers that influenced his own fiction; his career in British television; and the traumatic mid-life career change that propelled him into writing fiction.

Here, in the concluding segment of our three-part interview, he discusses the craft of fiction-writing; the mythological basis of the Reacher character; his maverick political outlook; and his unconventional advice for writers. (If you click on the photos, your browser may show them in an enlarged view.)

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The Vigilante Author: What, to you, is a thriller?

Child: That’s an incredibly difficult question. Ultimately, there are only two kinds of books. There’s the kind of book where reading it on the subway you end up on Coney Island because you missed your stop, and there’s the kind of book where you don’t. That’s all. It has got to be a matter of degree. If suspense becomes the preeminent factor, then it’s a suspense book. If suspense is managed by having dramatic situations and danger and violence, then it probably is a thriller.

The Vigilante Author: So, you think the defining characteristics would be action, adventure, and involvement with violence in some way?

Child: Yes. The best technical answer I can give is probably that the character relationships follow some kind of mythical, legendary path. But the more important thing is the time management in the book. A thriller or a suspense book or my kind of book, it starts and it carries on. There is never a moment unaccounted for.

The Vigilante Author: The pace is unrelenting.

Child: Yes. The pace might not be fast, but it doesn’t relent. If you read other books, like traditional mysteries, crime books, or P.I. books, often there’s a chapter that says, “On Friday, I did my invoices and did my laundry, took a shower, went to a movie—”

The Vigilante Author: Or cooked a meal.

Child: Or cooked a meal. In other words, whatever is urgent in the book is actually not all that urgent, because they’ve just taken a day or week or three weeks off. The thrill comes from managing the pace so that it’s clear the events are urgent.

The Vigilante Author: What about the issue of comparing thrillers and commercial fiction with so-called literary fiction?

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Photos by Brian Killigrew

In Part 1 of this interview, #1 New York Times best-selling author Lee Child introduced us to the lone-wolf, sometime-vigilante hero of his ongoing thriller series, Jack Reacher. He also described his early life growing up on the rough-and-tumble streets of Birmingham, England, and how those experiences contributed to the development of the Reacher character.

In Part 2, Lee describes the literary influences that shaped his own heroic fiction; his long career as a TV presentation director; and the mid-life career crisis that led to his gutsy leap to writing his first novel–and to the birth of Jack Reacher. (If you click on the photos, your browser may show them in an enlarged view.)

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 LITERARY INFLUENCES

The Vigilante Author: You grew up in a household you’ve described as white-collar, but struggling. What were some of the seminal influences on you?

Portrait of Lee Child by Brian Killigrew

Child: First of all, just reading itself. This was a time when there was very little television; we only had two channels, and they were off for periods of the day. So there was nothing else to do except read books. We had books in the house, but there was no real possibility of buying books. It was all about the library.

It was almost like a pilgrimage, that weekly trip to the library, like you were going into this other world that was so great. Just the idea of getting books and reading them was always magical to me. I read every book in the library because we only had a very small library. After two, three years, my mother would take us to the next municipality, which had a bigger library.

I just read all the normal stuff that kids read, nothing out of the ordinary. So much bullshit goes on in author interviews—you know, they say, “Oh, yeah, I was reading Dostoevsky when I was six,” and all that kind of stuff. Some say that they always wanted to be a writer. The truth is that I never wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be an entertainer, and this just happens to be the medium that I’m working in.

But as far as reading goes, I would just read all of the usual middle-of-the-road stuff. There was this children’s author, Enid Blyton, who wrote literally hundreds of books. There was “The Secret Seven,” in particular, which was a prototype mystery series that involved clues, disguises, tricks like how to get out of a locked room, that kind of stuff. And then there was a guy called W.E. Johns who wrote a series about tough guys, commandos in World War II. Then I moved pretty much straight on to Alistair MacLean, and he was probably my greatest early influence.

The Vigilante Author: There seem to be echoes of MacLean in the Jack Reacher character. Is that true?

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Photos by Brian Killigrew

Portrait of Lee Child by Brian Killigrew

Lee Child is the bestselling author of what Publisher’s Weekly calls “arguably today’s finest thriller series.” Its huge, and hugely popular, protagonist—a giant, incorruptible drifter named Jack Reacher—has been dubbed “the thinking reader’s action hero.” A former U.S. military policeman, Reacher is a modern knight errant—an indomitable force for the good in a morally blighted world. And his creator is an eloquent, unapologetic champion for the same ideals.

Born in England in 1954—real name James Grant—Lee grew up on the tough streets of Birmingham. He took his childhood love of fiction into a 20–year career as a presentation director for Granada Television. But when industry downsizing led to a major layoff, his career came to an abrupt halt in 1995.

At age 40—facing joblessness, broke, with a family to feed, yet supremely confident—Child did the unthinkable. Rather than seek a new job, he sat down to write a novel in longhand. The result was a gripping thriller, Killing Floor, that won awards, rave reviews, and the first of millions of avid fans who now call themselves “Reacher Creatures.”

Fifteen novels have followed, most with terse, edgy titles: Die Trying, Tripwire, Running Blind, Echo Burning, Without Fail, Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, Bad Luck and Trouble, Nothing to Lose, Gone Tomorrow, 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, and, just released this fall, The Affair—yet another #1 New York Times bestseller. Meanwhile, One Shot is headed to the big screen, the first in what the author hopes will become a successful Jack Reacher film franchise.

Child now lives the good life with his wife in Manhattan and in the south of France. Between novels, he reads, smokes, drinks coffee, listens to music, and watches the Yankees—all addictively. Tall, slim, with sky-blue eyes and a keen intellect, he clearly has exported much of himself into the Reacher character.

On May 1, 2007, Lee Child sat down with me and photographer Brian Killigrew at Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers in New York City, and later at Da Umberto Restaurant, for a wide-ranging, captivating, and inspiring interview. It was first published in the July/August 2007 issue of The New Individualist, a magazine that I edited at the time. It’s reprinted here with the permission of the magazine and its publisher, The Atlas Society.

Thanks to Lee and to his publicist, Maggie Griffin–who is also proprietor of Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers–for their generous gifts of time, space, and captivating conversation.

(Note: If you click on the photos, you may get an expanded view of them on your browser.)

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“For a so-called noir or hard-boiled writer, my books aren’t really very gray. There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys win—count on it.”

—Lee Child

The Vigilante Author: I love a quotation from one of your previous interviews about how in your books, the good guys always win.

Lee Child: Well, that quotation was referring partly to the genre descriptions that we’re all saddled with. The retail trade is always keen on specifying exactly what kind of book it is. Is it a mystery, is it suspense, is it crime fiction, is it hard-boiled, is it noir? Most of those genres involve a certain amount of grayness. Typically, hard-boiled fiction is about bad things happening to bad people. Crime fiction is about the effect of a crime on a family or a community.

I’m not really into that at all. My books are straightforward, old-fashioned adventures where there is a clear-cut, binary choice: You are either with the hero or against him, and that determines your fate. And Jack Reacher will never lose, and he will never be gray in any way.

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