LEE CHILD
The king of crime thrillers
Lee Child hits the Hay
Festival this year to talk
about his award-winning
novels and famous
character Jack Reacher.
He tells Heather Arnold
how he went from being
unemployed to becoming
a worldwide best-selling
author.
N
othing says success for an author more
than a Hollywood superstar bringing one
of your characters to life, except maybe
the sale of over 80 million novels worldwide and owning a flat in New York worth over £5
million. Lee Child has all three under his belt.
Did Child expect such success when he embarked on
his writing career?
“I hoped, but I didn’t expect,” Child states; “that
would have been delusional”.
Before embarking into the world of thriller novels
Lee Child (whose actual name is Jim Grant) was
a presentation director at Granada Television for
over a decade, working on iconic shows such as
Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel In The Crown.
Corporate restructuring and new management
completely changed Child’s life at Granada, as the
job he used to love got destroyed by the politics
“I hoped, but
I didn’t expect...
that would have
been delusional”
of the time. With redundancies being made left
and right, Child soon found himself in the role of
Granada’s union representative.
He then spent the next two years fighting with upper
management, until he came back from a week-long
holiday in 1995 to hear a phone message telling him
he was fired. Child was now jobless for the first time
in his life, and less than pleased about it.
Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and it
is perhaps Child’s anger at his redundancy that
has made him so successful. His most notorious
character, Jack Reacher (who has featured in 18 of
Child’s novels thus far and is played by Tom Cruise
in the 2012 Jack Reacher film), is one focused on
anger and revenge.
Much like Child himself, Reacher was once a military
policeman, but was let go after army downsizing.
Now he hitchhikes around the world, taking his
aggression out on bad guys and sticking up for the
downtrodden along the way.
The creation of the career-defining Reacher clearly
came naturally to the embittered Child. “I knew
enough not to come up with a shopping list of
desired characteristics. I just sat down and wrote
and waited to see what would happen – and Reacher
was the result.”
Child’s first novel, The Killing Floor, was published
in 1997 and won him more than one award for Best
First Novel. Now, 17 years later, Child is a bestselling
author both in the UK and the USA.
But what is it about Child’s work that people seem
to love so much?
“It’s the good-versus-bad stakes, the pace, the
excitement; these stories are why we learn to read,”
explains Child, “I’m an ordinary, average person
– so I think my interests and concerns are shared
by many.”
This year Child’s will see the second Jack Reacher
film and the release of his 19th Reacher novel
Personal – but first he heads to the Hay festival:
“This will be my first visit to the Hay festival. I’m not
sure how long I’ll be there, but I’ll see as many events
as I can!”
Lee Child Talks To Sarah Crompton,
Hay Festival, Hay-On-Wye, Sat
31 May, 8.30pm. Tickets: £8.
Info: www.hayfestival.com
BUZZ 53