Lee Child hands over Jack Reacher series to his brother Andrew
Best-selling author Lee Child is handing over his wildly successful Jack Reacher series to his brother. Why?
The end of a dirt track in the American wilderness is not where you’d expect to find a British-born writer whose gritty thrillers top the international bestseller charts. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, about a US military police veteran turned itinerant crime fighter, is ranked among the world’s most valuable publishing franchises. Every 13 seconds someone buys one of his books in one of 101 countries. In total, an estimated 100 million copies have been sold.
Yet for the past nine months Child has been pumping his own water from a borehole and driving three hours to collect groceries from the nearest store. Moose and elk wander up to the door of his timber house, and raptors hang above the distant Snowy Mountains. “It’s breathtakingly beautiful,” he says. “The mail is left 10 miles away in a locked box on the roadside, so it is unbelievably remote. If I go back to New York, I can walk one block to the store at midnight and see more people than I’ve seen here in two months.”
Child has just turned 66. He retreated to Wyoming in February with his American wife, Jane, to the same tract of wilderness where his youngest brother, Andrew Grant – also an established thriller writer, albeit with a smaller audience, and 14 years his junior – lives. At first Child’s move was temporary, to recharge his writing batteries and bring some respite from the rush and crush of life in New York. Then he got snowed in. Then lockdown happened. Then he fell in love with the place. “When I open my front door in the morning I see thousands of square miles of conifer forest,” he says. “Wyoming is larger than the United Kingdom and yet it has way less than 1 per cent of its population. Most of it is uninhabited, except for the wildlife.”
Child’s new surroundings may be idyllic, but there’s a problem… and it’s Reacher. The get-out-of-my-way drifter has taken on a life of his own. When Child moved to Wyoming his intention was to take his foot off the pedal. Instead sales have accelerated. He’s a rarity: a best-selling author who has piled on readers each year since 2013. There have been two Jack Reacher films, which earned $380 million, and there’s a forthcoming television series on Amazon Prime. Which would all be great, if Child didn’t want out.
“I’m running out of energy, I’m running out of ideas and, crucially, I’m getting old,” he admits. “The world is moving on without me and you’ve got to be sensitive to that. You can’t be arrogant and gloss over it. The culture is moving ahead of where I am. From day one I promised myself I would never give less than 100 per cent, purely out of respect for the readers. The readers have created a fabulous life for me and I owe them a lot. It’s a bit like being an athlete or a football player – I did not want to be the embarrassing guy who sticks around for a season too long.”
He had planned to put down his pen three years ago, after 21 books, but his publishers had other ideas and persuaded him to write three more. One long winter, Child pondered how he could kill Reacher off. “Initially I had the idea that in the last book he would die in a blaze of glory or bleed out on some filthy motel bathroom floor,” he says. The final book even had a title, Die Lonely. But when he mentioned it to fans they would “groan in dismay”, so he had to rethink.
His mind turned to his brother Andrew. Perhaps he could help him keep Reacher alive. The brothers have uncannily similar CVs. Both graduated from Sheffield University, both met and married American women and emigrated to the US – Lee to New York, Andrew to Chicago, before he upped sticks to Wyoming in 2017. When Lee followed suit and bought a place 5km down the road they became next-door-but-one neighbours.
“I got this fantasy: suppose I could wake up years younger with all that energy I used to have, with all the ideas, with the connection to life itself. Then I thought, ‘I should ask Andrew to do it’. It sounds stupid, but literally we are the same person, just 14 years apart. He’s the best tough-guy writer I know, so I just thought, ‘Could he do it? Would he do it?’ The ‘would’ part was more important. Andrew is very self-directed. To be blunt, he’s the most stubborn and obstinate person I know and does not work well with others.”
Child raised it during a road trip with his brother. “I remember tentatively introducing the question, ‘What do you think about this?’” The result of that journey is the newly released The Sentinel , the 25th Jack Reacher book, written jointly by Lee and Andrew Child – a double pseudonym.
Born James Grant, Lee Child was an affectionate nickname he and Jane had for their daughter Ruth (Lee is a deliberate mispronunciation of the French “le”). He chose to use a pen name for the first book, 1997’s Killing Floor, because he thought it would boost sales: Lee Child fitted perfectly between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie on bookshop shelves. He has written a new Jack Reacher novel every year since, twice hitting No 1 in the paperback and hardback charts simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic – a record.
A former military police major, Reacher roams the US, not looking for trouble but finding it. With no goal or destination, just a toothbrush and a few dollars in his pocket, he pinballs between hick towns, diners, seedy bars and down-at-heel motels. He takes on bent cops, drug barons and biker gangs, while briefly falling in love, and then moves on. He has made his creator hugely rich. As well as the Wyoming ranch and the Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park, Child has a home near St Tropez and a house in England set in 18ha of farmland (he owns a whole postcode).
The brothers will co-author the next few books before Andrew goes solo. Employing a Greyhound bus metaphor, they will “ride together for a few stops, then I’ll get off, adopt a dog and, yeah, Andrew will sail on into the future without me”, Child says. Will Reacher survive the transition? At stake is one of the world’s most lucrative literary brands, worth an estimated billion dollars from book sales alone. It has always relied on Child’s two-fisted prose and attention to detail. If it works it won’t be the first time a series has changed hands and thrived. The Bourne series was extended by a dozen books after Robert Ludlum died. In theory there is no reason why Reacher can’t carry on indefinitely.
One sticking point may be the critics. Back when Reacher became too popular to ignore, Child attracted plaudits from the literary establishment; he was even interviewed on stage by Bill Clinton, a fan. But it’s a fragile acceptance. Child is at heart a pulp-fiction writer. Reacher is a laconic loner who never admits frailties and uses brute force to settle arguments – not what you’d call a modern man. It wouldn’t take much for Reacher to be reclassified as a symbol of toxic masculinity, even though the series is popular with women.
The books aren’t meant as a model for how to behave, Child says, but as therapy for the lack of justice people encounter in their daily lives. “In real life, everything drags on forever and never gets resolved. If your house gets broken into, you’ll never get your stuff back. Fiction supplies what we don’t get. A bad thing happens and is put right, neatly tied up in 400 pages. That is consoling.”
The fast-paced plot of the new book, devised by Andrew, chimes with the US election. Reacher hitchhikes into a backwater town where a ransomware attack has disabled everything from traffic lights to police radios. It turns out to be a practice run for a plot to throw the national election and undermine democracy. Nothing that can’t be solved by Reacher with a few well-aimed blows to the gut, obviously. Contrary to popular belief, Reacher is not a Republican, Child claims. “He has a lot of [Republican] characteristics – ex-military, his lifestyle, his mannerisms... they seem to be red characteristics, but really he’s a liberal who, instead of arguing with you for four hours over something, he’ll just punch you in the face.”
Reacher a liberal? That may surprise fans, although the clues are there. When Reacher talked about his disillusionment with the military in Nothing to Lose (2008), some readers saw it as unpatriotic. They showed their dissatisfaction by ripping out the offending pages and sending them to Child smeared with excrement. “It wasn’t soldiers who objected to it,” Child says. It was hypocritical armchair warriors.
At 193cm tall, Child is only a little shorter than his musclebound creation, albeit much skinnier and without the scars. He’s an enthusiastic smoker. “Every year my new year’s resolution is to keep on smoking,” he says. He smokes enough – “maybe 20 a day” – to make it financially advantageous to live in Wyoming, where cigarettes are cheap. “This house pays for itself on that alone.” Does he worry about the effect on his health? “I’m sure if I was hit by a truck tomorrow and they did an autopsy, they would figure out, yeah, this guy is a smoker. But I’m perfectly all right. I don’t have any diagnosed or current problems from it.”
He can indulge his other smoking habit over the border in Colorado, where cannabis is sold legally. He doesn’t write while high, but over the years he has used cannabis when reading back his first drafts to give him perspective. “Not long ago I passed 51 years as a pothead,” he says. “It’s a great clarifier. On Wednesday I did the moonshine run. Colorado has a one-ounce limit per visit. So, yeah, I go in and on Wednesday I bought an ounce of what they call Rocket Fuel, which is a particularly strong strain. I grind it and smoke it in a pipe.
“When I think back to the squalid circumstances I used to have to deal with – walk down to Union Square [in Manhattan] and find some guy, take whatever he had, for whatever price he wanted – this is just spectacularly civilised. And it’s really not a risk. Sadly, an old white guy in a decent car is never going to get stopped and searched.”
Up here among the rabbits and raccoons, Child is dug in. The access road over the mountain pass is closed by snow for eight months a year and it’s 16km over dirt tracks to reach the main road. What if he needs a doctor? “I almost never go to the doctor for anything, but I know that if I had a broken leg, say, I’d go to the doctor and they’d say you need to give up smoking. It’s pointless.”
He has no plans to move on, and has twice turned down the chance to take over writing the James Bond books. Now that his brother is doing much of the heavy lifting, Child has time to dabble in other things. After winning author of the year at the 2019 British Book Awards, he was invited to be a judge for the Booker Prize – further evidence that if you sell enough books you can storm the ivory towers of the literary world.
He also had a hand in selecting the lead actor in the forthcoming Reacher TV series. It was a long process, he says – “like looking for Cinderella, only with an army boot instead of a glass slipper”. He was keen to avoid a repeat of the backlash that happened when Tom Cruise was cast in the role. The films were successful at the box office, but fans complained that at 170cm Cruise was 25cm shorter than the character he portrayed. “There are very few tall actors around,” Child sighs. “Daniel Craig was suggested, but he’s only knee high to Reacher.” Last month Child and the producers finally settled on Alan Ritchson, who has appeared in The Hunger Games and CSI: Miami. And, most importantly, he is 188cm tall.
Between occasional moonshine runs for Rocket Fuel in his Toyota 4Runner 4x4, Child is planting a wildflower rockery and playing his guitars, which, since you ask, include several Fenders and a vintage Martin. Is he happy to be on the glide path to retirement? “It’s more a case that I’m retiring because I’m happy,” he says. “I always had a fear of being mediocre. I hope I’ve put that ghost to rest.”
