In lockdown with Lee Child

By Sam Leith

Isolation suits Lee Child. When I catch up on Zoom with one of the world’s bestselling thriller writers, he appears in the frame amid a halo of smoke, dressed in a striped T-shirt and faded blue denim jacket. On the wall behind him is a vintage poster warning of the evils of marijuana, another of Child’s vices.

Child is in lockdown at his ranch in Wyoming with his wife Jane and 40-year-old daughter Ruth. He describes his surroundings to me with a terseness characteristic of his fiction: “Sagebrush and scrub and conifer trees...high desert shading into the Rocky Mountains...moose, elk, deer, antelope and occasionally bears and mountain lions”. Even in normal times they rarely see another living soul: “I can’t overemphasise the solitude,” he says.

Child is famous for creating another lone ranger: Jack Reacher, star of his 24 thrillers, is a former military policeman turned vigilante who owns only a folding toothbrush and the clothes he stands up in. In a typical novel, Reacher blows into a small town in America, minding his own business, only to find himself accosted by trouble in one form or another. Fortunately Reacher is mountainously built, acquainted with investigative techniques and extremely good at fighting. Written in prose precision-engineered to keep the pages turning, the story rushes on.

It’s not just the writing that attracts readers but the character of the protagonist. Reacher is the embodiment of two types of freedom. He is free to do anything he likes – he has no obligations to people or place – and he is free from any material load, with no possessions to weigh him down. Nothing threatens him. Pace and liberty have proved to be a winning combination: Child has sold more than 100m copies of his Reacher novels, in 49 languages.

At 6’4”, the 65-year-old Child is nearly as tall as his fictional hero. But whereas Reacher is built like a brick outhouse, his creator is beanpole thin and doesn’t so much sit on the chair he’s talking to me from as fold himself into it. He has short, cropped sandy hair and a long angular face that would look fitting atop a totem pole.

After two decades living in America any trace of the Birmingham accent of Child’s early years has long been erased by mid-Atlantic tones. Indeed, much of his life, it seems, has been a conscious or unconscious attempt to erase this past. Child was born Jim Grant, the second of four brothers raised by parents who had what he calls “a ridiculous stern Edwardian fantasy” of bourgeois respectability, and an absence of “laughter, fun, discussion, digression, spontaneity, affection. In 92 and 90 years respectively, my father or mother never once said ‘I love you’ to any of their children.” His laconic delivery remains unruffled even as he compares his childhood home to a religious cult, albeit one that “had no religion involved whatsoever except the religion of middle-class aspiration…It was very isolating.” (His experience left him “determined to love my own child unconditionally”.)

One of his few outlets growing up was football. He developed what he calls a “tribal allegiance” to Aston Villa. Before covid-19 intervened, we had planned to meet at a game at Villa Park, though Child is quick to remind me that the current players aren’t a patch on the “swaggering, piratical” team of his youth: it would, says Child, probably have been a “miserable 90 minutes”. As a self-reliant and solitary youth, he “became addicted to essentially the hysteria of a crowd”, where collective emotions could be experienced anonymously. But he also enjoyed the game because “it became the only thing in my life that was not my fault…It was something you could be totally invested in, but there was nothing you could do about it. It was not up to me. Everything else in life was.”

The industrial Birmingham of Child’s youth was a tough place. Child won a scholarship to a “very posh” school that required a uniform, so “every morning I would have to fight my way out of my neighbourhood, and then every afternoon I’d have to fight my way back in.” He carried “a book in one pocket and a knife in the other”. Being “huge”, as he describes it, he discovered that he relished a brawl: “I liked it. I was very, very good at it.” Decades on, the fictional fights that Reacher engages in come from Child’s “muscle memory”: some are blow-by-blow transcriptions of scraps he got into aged nine or ten.

Child fought his way up and out. He studied law at Sheffield University, not because he intended to practise it, and only incidentally because it pleased his parents, but because it touched on many of his interests: “history, politics, language, sociology, economics”. Then he met Jane. He thought they “might manage a couple of weeks of sensational sex and then move on”, but they’ve been together ever since.

After graduating, Child got a job working in provincial television. He worked his way up over the course of 18 years, but in 1995 he was made redundant from his production job when Granada TV was restructured. His anger at getting sacked powered his first novel, “Killing Floor”, published in 1997, and the next few too: he has described himself as writing “with a fury that was a perfect balance of creativity and financial necessity”. He took his pen-name from a family in-joke based on the mispronunciation of the Renault “Le Car” by a Texan whom he once met. The books took off fast and he has written one a year ever since.

Though Reacher has a rigid sense of justice, the novels remain largely unencumbered by social commentary (though one recent volume grappled awkwardly with the opioid crisis). Nevertheless, there has been a subtle shift in the books. As the series has gone on, the prose has got even sparer. And, as Child’s rage has propelled him to riches and recognition, so his hero Reacher has become less weighed down by his own past.

Jack Reacher has become an industry. Tom Cruise starred as Reacher in two films, and a TV series is in the works. This success has allowed Child to move to America, a place where he’d always dreamed of living, and brought him into contact with “two presidents, kings of countries, Oscar-winning actresses and all this kind of thing”. In 2001 Bill Clinton, “a huge fan of the genre”, sent Child a handwritten note of regret that he couldn’t make it to a reading Child was giving in Chappaqua. They struck up a friendship, in which they talk “60% about politics...and probably 30% is music”.

Yet even after years of fame, Child still feels like something of a misfit in this milieu: “I was never quite able to shake off that sort of scruffy little kid from all those years ago.” He tells me about being invited to a dinner with Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate: “I said, you know, ‘what a pleasure, what a privilege it is to meet such a titanic figure in our history.’ And he said: ‘Oh stop all that. Tell me what you think about Tom Cruise.’” In that world, his pen-name serves as a protective shell: “Both the good stuff and the bad stuff – you know, the extravagant praise, the nasty criticism – that’s all happening to another guy.” These days only his close family calls him Jim.

Child’s amused detachment extends to his creation too. He recently announced that he was retiring from writing and says, with a hint of swagger, that he won’t miss Reacher at all. “I don’t particularly like him – or I make it absolutely certain that I like him less than you like him.” As he was completing the last book, “Blue Moon”, he started to think, “Wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to do this again?” What at first seemed “a routine kind of internal complaint” hardened into a decision.

He canvassed his younger brother Andrew, who has found more modest success as a thriller writer, about taking over the franchise (Child hasn’t spoken to his other two brothers in years). Andrew agreed. He’ll write under the pen-name Andrew Child and, taking a softly-softly approach with the Reacher fan base, the first book will appear in the autumn under their joint authorship. Child is aware of the trepidation that Andrew may feel about writing in Lee’s shadow, but “the difference between the living I make and a mid-list writer is just so enormous that no sane human would turn that offer down.” If Andrew had done so, says Child, “I would have just said: ‘all right, that’s the end of the series.’”

Child claims to have no further interest in writing for publication. The relentless succession of hotel rooms, red-eye flights and signings from book tours has left him with little desire to travel either. Now he plans to read, listen to music and smoke. The latter hobby, he says, was a reaction against his parents’ “pursed-mouthed caution”: “They were teetotallers and disapproved of smoking. I decided to live in the opposite way.” He adds: “It was a decision I took as a kid – that I was going to live full throttle, and aim to have more fun in 60 years than anybody could have in 100 and the devil take the consequences.”■

Illustrations Luis Grañena