In creating the Jack Reacher character, Lee Child launched a series of books that now boast 100 million copies in print and have been turned into movies and a popular Amazon streaming series.
Today on the show, I talk to Lee about what makes Reacher so compelling and much more. We first discuss how Lee didn’t get started with writing until he was almost forty, and what prompted him to change careers. We then unpack the Reacher character, discussing the ancient, archetypal roots of this vigilante, drifter detective, what he has in common with the knight errant, and the enduring appeal of the lone wolf. We also talk about Lee’s writing process, why midlife is the best time to write, and why, after writing more than two dozen Reacher novels, he’s chosen to hand off the series to his brother and fellow writer, Andrew.
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. In creating the Jack Reacher character, Lee Child launched a series of books that now boast 100 million copies in print and have been turned to movies and a popular Amazon streaming series. Today in the show, I talk to Lee about what makes Reacher so compelling and much more. We first discuss why Lee didn’t get started with writing til he’s almost 40 and what prompted him to change careers. We then unpack the Reacher character, discuss the ancient archetypal roots of this vigilante-drifter detective, what he has in common with the knight errant, and the enduring appeal of the lone wolf. We also talk about Lee’s writing process, why mid-life’s the best time to write, and Why, after writing more than two dozen Reacher novels, he’s chosen to hand off the series to his brother and fellow writer, Andrew. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/reacher.
Alright, Lee Child, welcome to the show.
Lee Child: Thank you. Great to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are an international best-selling author, who has created one of the great detective characters in English literature, Jack Reacher. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are fans of your work. They’ve read the books. They’ve maybe even watched these series on Amazon. And I know my dad, Tom McKay, a huge fan of your work. And I hope today in this conversation, we can maybe get to the bottom of why you think Reacher has such a broad appeal. But before we do, before we get to the Reacher character, let’s talk about your background. I’m sure a lot of people don’t realize you didn’t start your writing career until midlife. In fact, a job layoff started your writing career. So how did a layoff from a television network lead you to start writing?
Lee Child: It was really a desperation move in as much as I’d had this intense almost 20 years in TV in a very specialized role in the British Commercial Network, the rival to the BBC. It was a 14-station network, but coordinated and worked together. My job was like an air traffic controller, essentially, to keep the whole broadcast going. There were five of us. We rotated through 24/7 duties. And then it was a complicated job. And back in the day, we had a good union, and we made decent money. And then in the 1990s, we had that thing where shareholder value was suddenly just a burden cost, cutting supporting jobs and getting cheaper people. So all of us, old, expensive veterans, were laid off. I was 39, very nearly 40 years old. And it seemed to me to try and stay in TV would be a very negative experience, because it was clearly on a downward spiral, the fund was gone, the luxury of doing your job properly was gone, and so it was the question of what else? And the problem was, there was nothing else that I was qualified for. I was hyper-qualified for the thing I just got thrown out of and really nothing else.
So I panicked a little bit, and then, I said, “No. Wait a minute. Just take one step back. And what is it fundamentally that you’ve been doing?” And fundamentally, what I’d been doing, obviously, was entertaining an audience, but beyond that, knowing what the audience wanted, having some kind of sense of how they were gonna react. So it seemed to me, I’ll just stay in something that has an audience. And then quite independently of all of that, I had been a reader all my life, just fantastically, enthusiastic reader, just reading all the time, loving it, but strangely, never really thinking, “Where do these books come from?” I’d never really inquired about that. To me, they just existed, sitting there to be consumed.
And I put two and two together. I thought, “Well, look, you love books. You’ve read literally tens of thousands. Why don’t you try writing one? That is, fundamentally, the same proposition. I think modern TV movies, modern entertainment, we all swim in the same river. A book is not that different from a TV show.” So I thought, “I’ll try that.” And I was really wanting to be my own boss. After that very negative corporate experience, I wanted to be my own boss. And writing is something that is entirely down to you.
It’s difficult in TV. If you have a big hit in TV, it’s not really to your credit because there were 100 other people working on it. If it’s a total failure, it’s not really your fault, because there were 100 other people working on it. Whereas writing, yeah, of course, there are editors, there are publicists, there are booksellers, and so on, but fundamentally, this is one-on-one, the author to the reader. It’s a one-on-one communication. It is totally down to you. If it fails, yes, it is totally your fault. If it succeeds, yes, you can take the credit for it. So I thought, “Let’s give it a try. See what happens.” And here we are all these years later.
Brett McKay: You said you read a lot. Was there a genre that you liked to read, or did you just read whatever?
Lee Child: I’d started out… And in principle, I read whatever. Anything at all, that… Just looking around my room here, I’ve got a big stack of books to be read. I got one on the psychology of music. There’s one about fentanyl. There’s… Anything and everything, I’ll read. But as a reader, yeah, you do get in touch with what turns you on personally. And I migrated to the crime and thriller genre. That was the thing that I most enjoyed reading.
Brett McKay: Was there a particular author you enjoyed?
Lee Child: Oh, there were a lot. I’m not one of these pretentious guys who says that, “When I was 7 years old, I was reading Tolstoy or something.” I was reading all the usual kids stuff, and then all the usual thrillers. Your dad has, maybe, got them on the bookshelf. And so I would say there was an English kids author called Enid Blyton. Like everybody, I started out with that and then I migrated… My first real love was a Scottish thriller writer called Alistair MacLean, and that cemented my feel. Yeah, I wanna write adventure stories, I wanna write thrillers, crime stories, things of that nature.
Brett McKay: How did your experience in visual story-telling shape your writing style? Because of the things I love about your writing style is that it’s Spartan. It’s sparse. But it’s really punchy, and it just… It flows.
Lee Child: Yeah, that’s the thing that I felt. There is very little that you can take from TV to writing, because they are fundamentally very different. In as much as TV, the viewer just sits there and it comes at them. It washes over them. With writing, it’s gotta be interrogated by the reader. The book is passive. The book is doing nothing. It’s just sitting there with strange black marks on white paper, and it is the reader’s brain that creates the story inside the reader’s head. So there’s not that much you can transfer directly, but what you do transfer is a very specific understanding. This is not about you. This is about the audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cool guy. It doesn’t matter if you smoke French cigarettes and wear a black leather jacket. It’s not about you. “Is the audience having a good time?” That is the only question. And that part, I transferred like stock and barrel. That is really important.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about the Jack Reacher, ’cause he’s got a lot of fans. And it’s a very wide-ranging fan base. You’ve got, men in their ’70s, like my dad, and then there’s also women who are big fans of Jack Reacher. How did you come up with the Jack Reacher character?
Lee Child: Well, it was a kinda two-stage thing. Vaguely, in principle, what I wanted to do was be a success, because I was out of work and I was broke. So this was not a kinda hobby, this was not a kinda like to do it sort of thing, it had to work. So part of it was about a real consciousness that this had to be popular, but completely contradictory to that was what I’d learned in the entertainment business up to that point, which is that you cannot plan anything like that. It is not possible to plan a major popular success, because if you do, you just end up with a limp car body thing that is basically a shopping list of everything that you think you should do.
So I knew enough to know that it was gonna be kind of fortuitous or accidental. So I knew I had to metaphorically close my eyes and just write and just see what came out. And so Reacher was something that just came out. And I didn’t wanna think about it very much. I didn’t wanna interrogate it and think, “Okay, why is this work? And how can I improve it for Book two? How can I improve it for Book three?” I wanted to not burst the bubble. I didn’t wanna look at it that closely, but then much later when I felt safe and secure about it, I could look back. And what makes Reacher popular, I think, is that he represents… Clearly represents something that has always been with us as humans.
You were kind enough to say I invented this character. Well, did I? I think, actually, Reacher is a character that has always existed, going back through the history of storytelling, possibly even thousands of years, the idea of the mysterious stranger who shows up and solves your problem and then rides off into the sunset. That character has been around really forever. All the way back through all our recorded narrative, there’s always have been a character like that. And so I think Reacher is just the modern iteration of that. And you gotta ask yourself, “Why has this character been invented over and over again?” And the only answer to that is because people crave such a person.
They want such a person. We’ve all got problems. Hopefully, they’re only trivial. Some people have real serious problems. Wouldn’t it be great if one night there’s a tap at the door and there’s a strong, silent guy there who fixes your problem, chips his cap and moves on? We crave that. We fantasize about it. And so that’s why people love reading about it. They either wanna know that character, or they wanna be that character.
Brett McKay: Yeah. What’s interesting is that there’s this idea out there that the kind of hero people want is someone who’s broken. They want a vulnerable hero. Reacher is the opposite of that, but he’s still really compelling. Why do you think that is?
Lee Child: Yeah, that is such a great question, because people want an interesting character, people want a memorable character, and there are ways to achieve that. And certainly, yeah, if you go back to, let’s say, Raymond Chandler writing about Philip Marlowe, there is an alienated man, a lonely man, somewhat dysfunctional, we might say by, modern standards, and that was a great paradigm. And then many, many years later, let’s say, there’s James Lee Burke, writes Dave Robicheaux, who was a copper, recovering alcoholic, absolutely tormented by his demons.
That was great. But that was the first time we’d seen that particular trope. And the problem with writing is that authors tend to copy what’s already been done. And in order to stand out, they inflate it. They make it worse. So instead of just an alcoholic cop fighting his demons, we’ve got a divorced alcoholic cop, and then a divorced alcoholic cop, who’s teenage daughter hates him, and then the divorce alcoholic copper’s teenage daughter hates him, accidentally shoots at a fleeing shadow in the dark, and it turns out to be a 12-year-old boy so that life is a tragedy now, and they go and live in the woods by themselves, with a metaphorical, or sometimes literal bullet lodge next to their heart, and the relentless inflation makes that character miserable.
And my view was, people don’t really wanna read about miserable characters. They wanna read about interesting characters. So how do you make somebody interesting without giving them all these problems? And I think what happens with Reacher is that he is profoundly eccentric in all of his lifestyle choices, but the thing is, he does not know that. He thinks he’s perfectly normal. He has none of that navel-gazing going on. He is who he is, and it is the reader who makes up their mind about what he’s like. And that is super important, that an author cannot force the reader to come to a certain conclusion. You cannot make anybody like your character. All you can do is present them in an authentic way and hope for the best. And the more that you try to make a reader like your character, the more embarrassing it gets.
Brett McKay: So talking about those things that make Reacher interesting. First off, he’s larger than life, literally. He’s 6’4″, 250 pounds, just a monster. And what I love about him too, is sometimes there’s that idea like, “Oh, the hero is not sure about his strength of whether he can overcome these bad guys.” Now, Reacher can always take care of the problem. And he doesn’t have a cell phone, and he thinks that’s just normal, to not have a cell phone. And his clothes. He just buys cheap clothes at Academy and jeans and t-shirts, and then doesn’t really carry a wardrobe with him.
Lee Child: Yeah. All of that stuff. Part of that was a reaction against what else was being done. It fit very neatly for me, because like I say, I needed this to be a success, and so why go head-to-head with what other people are doing already so well? And if you looked at every other series, really ever, they’re fundamentally a soap opera, and I say that with the greatest respect. I’m not being disparaging about soap opera at all. It’s an incredibly difficult genre to do. It is incredibly powerful in terms of the narrative engine. Having worked in TV, we all depend on soap operas. They’re fantastic.
But I didn’t want to write one in competition with everybody else who was doing it so well. Everybody else, the hero has got superiors, has got colleagues, juniors, neighbors, they have a house, they have maybe a favorite bar, they have a dog or whatever. I didn’t wanna do that. I thought, “Let’s be different.” So it was a really epic avoidance for me that the idea of the knight errant, the mysterious stranger. He doesn’t have any of that stuff. That’s the whole point of that character. He’s completely mysterious and unexplained. So I felt I could do a different lane, or a different channel, that nobody else is doing.
And so that explained it to a large extent. I just wanted Reacher to be distinctive. And the rest of it was based on logical thoughts of my own. “If I was living like that, what would I do about clothes? Would I wanna carry a backpack around with me all the time, or would I just buy some old stuff at Goodwill every few days and junk the previous stuff and just move through life?” That seemed logical to me. And clearly, it is logical. That’s the way you gotta do it.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned Reacher’s kind of like the knight errant. Did the stories of the knight, like the Arthurian tales, did that… Was that in there? It sounds like you weren’t consciously pulling on that. It was there in your subconscious, ’cause you read these stories as a boy and as a young man, and they just came out in Reacher. Knights had this idea of nobleness. How do you think Reacher has a sense of nobleness?
Lee Child: That’s another good question. Yeah, the idea of the knight errant is that he must have been a knight in the first place. The classic Arthurian tales, he is… Sir. Lancelot, for instance, banished from the court for some indiscretion and sentenced to wander the land, doing good deeds. And that myth replicates everywhere. The Ronin myth in Japan. A samurai who’s been disowned by his master and sentenced to wander the land. It’s a perpetual part of human storytelling. So that’s why it seemed to work well enough that he can be… He needs to be completely unattached. He happens to other people.
And you can trace it right back. A lot of people in America say, “This is really a Western.” It’s like Shane or any Zane Grey story, where you’ve typically got a very isolated homestead and all the men are away on a cattle drive and there’s something going really bad. And at the very last minute, the mysterious rider comes in off the range, and in exchange for a woman-cooked meal, he will unsheathe his rifle, take care of the problems, and then he moves on. But that was not invented by Zane Grey or the Westerns, that is an import from medieval Europe, where the Black Forest was this immense uncharted waste, and a band of pilgrims would be in terrible trouble, and then a mysterious knight rides out of the trees and solves the problem.
This same story has reoccurred over and over again. So it’s really about the community in trouble. Reacher happens to them. It’s not that the community happens to Reacher.
Brett McKay: So Reacher is a lone wolf. And the idea of the lone wolf often gets criticized. We’ve had plenty of podcast episodes where the guests have criticized it. And I understand the criticism. Relationships have been shown to be central to mental and physical health. But I still find the idea of the lone wolf viscerally appealing. And I imagine a lot of other people do. What do you think the appeal is?
Lee Child: Well, I think first of all, Reacher acknowledges that central conundrum there. Yeah, we do. We do crave relationships. We need them for the reasons that you just mentioned. And Reacher does too. The thing about Reacher, he’s constantly balanced between really liking his solitude and also really being worried that he’s lonely. So there’s an acknowledgement of that. But I think the true appeal for Reacher is that people can imagine being him. And so many people, men and women alike, are bogged down with responsibilities and chores and duties. And their week is just an endless slog of working their job, looking after the home, paying the bills, paying the mortgage. All of these things that tie them down. And as a fantasy, they love to, for a day or two while they’re reading a book, they love to live in Reacher’s head. None of those responsibilities, none of those burdens.
If you’re not having a good time, you just move on. You’ll be somewhere else tomorrow. And I think that is a huge fantasy appeal for a lot of people.
Brett McKay: And it sounds like too, you’ve been playing out this tension between connection and autonomy. Like you mentioned earlier, the reason why you went into writing was you wanted to be your own boss. You kind of wanted to be a lone wolf.
Lee Child: I did, and I put a line in the first book. Reacher says it, but it’s really me saying it. He says, I tried it their way, now I’m gonna try it my way.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so I do think there’s something that we shouldn’t just dismiss the lone wolf completely. I think the fact that it holds such an appeal tells us something. Like we shouldn’t literally be lone wolves, but we can adopt some of that ethos, keep part of ourselves that’s comfortable with solitude and self-sufficiency. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Another idea that gets criticized quite a bit is this idea of revenge. And it seems like a lot of Reacher’s missions are ones of revenge. People say we should rise above the need for revenge and that just poisons you. But do you think revenge can be something healthy? What do you think Reacher can teach us about that?
Lee Child: Yeah, it’s a great issue because revenge is fundamentally negative even though it feels great at the time. But the thing about Reacher is he’s not doing it for himself. It’s not a question of somebody has hurt him or insulted him and he’s gonna get revenge on them for that. It’s always a third-party issue. And that takes us back to the Night Heron. It takes us to a kind of noblesse oblige that if you can do something for somebody, you really ought to. From he who has to he who needs. And I think that takes it out of the revenge track just enough to make it super satisfying.
And then, of course, the whole business of fiction is very mysterious in that sense because generally speaking, book readers are the more civilized amongst us, the more thoughtful, the more informed. And of course they understand that you can’t have a guy who just walks into town and starts murdering people like Reacher does. I saw a fantastic online comment once that says the Jack Reacher series, the only series where the detective commits more crimes than he solves. And people understand that’s completely unacceptable. That is not how we should live.
These are not textbooks for how to live. But it is some corner in the back of their brain, the reader finds it so satisfying just to see a bad guy get a punch in the face as opposed to a legal arrest and a trial with rights and with lawyers and with procedure and all that stuff. They know they need that in real life. They want that in real life, of course they do. But it is so satisfying, so consoling just to see brutal justice meted out in the moment. So people lap it up. Like I’m sure your dad, who enjoys the books, loves those scenes, but there’s no way he thinks that’s how society should run. It’s like an escape valve.
Brett McKay: Yeah, no, my dad was in law enforcement. That was his career.
Lee Child: There you go.
Brett McKay: He was a federal game warden. So yeah, he knew the procedures. He respected the rule of law. But I think, yeah, I think he does. It’s fantasy.
Lee Child: It is fantasy, but then a lot of crime fiction is fantasy because the Reacher universe, people might say, it’s fundamentally unrealistic. But then so is all crime fiction, to be honest, because what happens even in a really grounded, so-called realistic type of crime fiction book, you will have a trace of DNA. There’s a droplet of blood. So they rush it to the lab and three hours later they get, yes, this guy. That doesn’t happen. It’s three or four months, possibly even longer if the lab is all backed up. In real life, things take forever. And then probably there’ll be some kind of miserable, unsatisfying outcome to it. There’s a technicality. The guy gets off. People are frustrated by that. And so fiction is to give people what they don’t get in real life. And so that instant visceral type of satisfaction, seeing a bad guy get his just desserts is something that we secretly love, but we’re civilized enough to know that it can’t be real.
Brett McKay: How would you describe Reacher’s moral code? ‘Cause he… Like you said, he has this idea of revenge, but it’s for a third party. But why does he get involved in stuff that doesn’t really have to?
Lee Child: Because he gets annoyed. There are certain things that annoy him. And there’s a line in one of the other books where there’s a flashback to when he’s in the army and one of his friends is asking him, why did you choose the military police? Reacher’s a West Point graduate. He could have done pretty much whatever he wanted. His friend says, why didn’t you go to special forces? Why didn’t you go to the armored divisions? And Reacher says something anodyne like, oh, I wanna take care of the little guy. And his friend says, really, you care about the little guy? And Reacher says, with total honesty, Reacher says, no, I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug guys who think they can get away with something. And so it’s not a pure motivation on Reacher’s part.
His moral code is firm, it’s solid. He basically has a heart of gold. But he’s not just a do-gooder. He is annoyed at certain injustices and he will stop at nothing. Not to put him right, because he knows he can’t put everything right, but just to punish one big smug guy who thinks he’s getting away with something, that’s what Reacher lives for.
Brett McKay: And I’m sure that’s another reason why people find the character appealing. ‘Cause I’m sure we, all of us have big smug guys in our lives that we’d love to bring down a notch.
Lee Child: I’m sure we’ve all got like 10. That’s what I say at a book event. I say, I look out at the crowd who are all book people and I say, you’re lovely, civilized people, but I guarantee every one of you has got a list of 10 people you would cheerfully shoot in the head. And everybody agrees, they can’t deny that.
Brett McKay: You’re British, but you’ve made Reacher an American and set most of his books in the United States. Is there something about America and the American character that allows you to do different things with Reacher that you couldn’t do if he was British?
Lee Child: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s not so much character, although that is distinctive, but it’s the geography. The idea of a nation that inhabits a giant continent, some of which is very densely populated and some of which is virtually uninhabited. And so it is plausible to have secret things going on in a remote town where, you know what it’s like out West where it could be 50 miles or 100 miles before the nearest police department. It is absolutely plausible that you can have secret locations. Whereas in Britain, the dynamic is totally different. It’s crime fiction there tends to be very internal, very psychological, because there is not the physical space or the physical separation between people. The landscape is not the same. Like my second book, Reacher intervenes in a kidnap and gets thrown in a van with the kidnapped victim and they’re driven 2000 miles to a remote Rocky Mountain hideout, which is obviously possible in the US.
But if I had been kidnapped where I lived in England and driven 2000 miles, I’d be in the Sahara desert by that point. So it’s about the scope, the big skies, the big landscapes, the possibility that a wandering man can come across an isolated situation where something bad is happening. That is plausible in America. It’s really not plausible anywhere else.
Brett McKay: You said earlier that an author can’t force people to like a character. Like they have to see what he’s like and then make up their own minds. Do you like Reacher as a person, as a character?
Lee Child: That’s a great question too, because I think the way fiction works with a character-based series is the author needs to like the character less than the reader is gonna like him. The author has got to maintain that critical stance, that slight detachment, so that the character will always appear authentic, warts and all, the bad parts as well as the good parts, an honest portrayal. And if you start to like your character too much, then that falls apart and it becomes, you protect the character. You only show the good parts. It all becomes very idealized and very sugary. And so I worked very hard to like Reacher less than you’re gonna like him. And that’s what keeps him vivid, I think.
Brett McKay: So you’ve written, like you’re about to come out with the latest Reacher novel. There’s like 28 you’re coming up on?
Lee Child: Yeah, is it 28 or is it 29? I’ve lost track. It’s somewhere up there, yeah.
Brett McKay: You’ve written a lot. I’m curious, what’s your writing process like?
Lee Child: It is literally chaotic, other than I always start on the same day, which is the 1st of September. And that was a practical decision because if you’re gonna publish a book a year, you’ve got to write a book a year. And so you’ve got to have some shape and structure to your year. So I would always start on the anniversary of when I started the first book. It seemed not only logical, but also somewhat sentimental. So I would always start on the same day, but with really no firm idea. I would often have a feeling about the temperature or the landscape. Is it a cold, hard book? Is it a hot, sweaty book? I would have that kind of basic idea, but other than that, nothing at all. And so it was a question of just, you sit down on the 1st of September, you write the opening paragraph, you sit back and you think, okay, that’s pretty good. Now what about the 2nd paragraph? And then it carries on like that through the whole book, just inventing it as I go along, which made it, it feels slow day to day.
My word production per day is often less than other writers, but I only do it once. They’ve planned this beforehand. They’ve written an outline. They’ve at least jotted notes on index cards so that they can shuffle around. I don’t do any of that. I just make it up on the spot. So all the thought and all the research is distributed daily rather than being done in a chunk in advance. So overall, I think it’s as efficient as any other system. And for me, it brings total spontaneity. What I want is always based on how I feel as a reader. And what I want is the reader to have that unique sensation that I think we’ve all had from time to time where you’re into a really great book and you’re loving it. And then for some reason, dinner is ready or a visitor comes, you’ve got to stop and you’ve got to put the book down.
And that gives you a kind of flavor of annoyance that you get nowhere else. And so I wanted to feel that as a writer. And the only way you can do that is by not having a plan. I would sit down just desperate to know what was gonna happen. Same as if I was reading it. And I think that really helps, certainly helps my process. I think it helps the quality of the book. And the first time I knew this was gonna work for me was in the first book, I’d written some of it and I was looking forward to writing the scene that I had in mind next. I was gonna do that in the morning. But my wife said, no, we’ve got to go to the store and do this and that. And I remember feeling really annoyed that I couldn’t sit and write that scene in exactly the same way as I would have felt annoyed if I couldn’t sit and read that scene. I thought, yeah, this could work.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we had Beau L’Amour on the podcast a while back ago. He’s the son of Louis L’Amour, famous Western writer. And he said his dad had a similar writing process. It was all just from his subconscious. He just started writing and he just wanted to see where the story went. And it sounds like you have a similar process.
Lee Child: Yeah, very similar. And that kind of relates back to something you said at the very beginning about me starting in midlife. I was 39, almost 40 when I first started that book. And a lot of writers do that. Writing, a successful writing career is almost always a second phase career because it is good to wait till you’re older. Writing is wonderful from that point of view. It’s not only something that you can do when you get older. It’s something that you should do when you get older because by the time you’re 40, you’ve got almost 40 years of reading. You’ve got almost 40 years of experience of meeting people. Your first career, whatever it was, has had all kinds of ins and outs and problems and highs and lows that teaches you something so that by the time you are in the middle of your life, you’re ready. You’ve got gas in the tank. You’ve got ideas stored up.
You’re still young enough to have the energy and stamina to deal with it, but you’ve got something in your head. I think it’s really difficult to write when you’re young. I get asked to go talk to school students or college students and it’s a miserable experience. What can you say to them? All you can really say honestly is don’t do it now. Read for the next 20 years and then do it.
Brett McKay: You said you do some research, but it’s like on the spot. Like you don’t research and then write. When you do research, what’s your research process like?
Lee Child: Well, it’s for small details that need to be right. Like the number of bullets in a gun or, the barrel length of a gun or this or that or what car you could use or the name of a helicopter. And my process is so linear. I remember one book where the first sentence was, the man was named Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a… And I had to stop there. After just a few words of the book, I couldn’t just leave it and go back to it later. I have to know in a linear fashion. So I had to actually go out to the store and buy a book about helicopters and select one and put the correct model number in that sentence. So yeah, research for me is small things like that, but the larger issues, I don’t think you can research, not when you’re on a book a year schedule, because if you think, okay, I’m gonna do this research for this year’s book, that research is gonna be too fresh, not digested.
It needs to percolate. You need to know which parts of it are important and which parts are not. And so for the larger issues, I always depend on what I already know, what I read years ago sometimes, what I experienced two years ago. The big things are always already settled and it’s only the minor details that need checking. And that is, I mean, I’m the perfect example of somebody who has bridged the analog and the digital era. I would do it with gun catalogs, or as I say, a helicopter book or something of that nature. Now, of course, and I was a pretty late adopter, but now it’s mostly internet-based.
Brett McKay: Do you do any revisions on your work?
Lee Child: Sort of, yeah, I mean I do, I write all day and then the beginning of the next day I check what I wrote the previous day and I will smooth it out if necessary, I’ll add a comma, I’ll change a word and then I’ll plow on forward and repeat the same process the following morning. So it’s a constant kind of churning aspect so that every single bit of it has been re-read and smoothed and corrected at least once in a forward-moving momentum. But then when I reach the end, that is the end. It is a strange thing in my head, I mean I’m completely normal, I’m a completely rational person, but while I’m writing the book it’s as if this is really happening for real and I never change anything because that would seem to me dishonest. The editor will say to me, wouldn’t it be better if this happened after that? And I’ll say probably, but it didn’t. It’s real at the time I’m writing it and so to massage it later seems to be cheating to me.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so it sounds like you’re doing like some grammatical stuff, but you’re not making major edits. Once you’re done with the book, you’re done with it. That is not like F. Scott Fitzgerald who was massaging The Great Gatsby, even after it got published, he was still editing the thing.
Lee Child: Sure, and you look at writers and you figure out why they’re doing that. And really, the real reason for endless editing and worrying about it is a kind of fear of letting it out into the world, fear of people’s reactions to it. And so you find ways to procrastinate and delay that. You think you’re polishing it, but what you’re actually doing is you’re showing that you are afraid of the reaction to it. And I can understand that completely. It is a huge thing. A book is so personal. It is your mind just spilled out onto that paper. It is very much who you are that specific year that you wrote it. It’s like a brutal psychological X-ray and you’re gonna show that to the world. It is a little intimidating, but you’ve just got to, as soon as I’m done, I kind of sense when the book is finished. I remember one book sitting there thinking, this is nearly done, another chapter will do it.
And then I suddenly realized, no, the book is done right now. Right where you are is the end of the book. And so I sent it off without giving it another thought because you can end up paralyzing yourself if you go over and over it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You got to be like Reacher, no navel gazing, just move on.
Lee Child: Exactly. Yeah. Just do it once and do it right. That is Reacher’s motto.
Brett McKay: So you are transitioning Jack Reacher to your brother, Andrew, the transition of a beloved character to a new author is rare in literature. Why did you think the time was right to hand off Reacher?
Lee Child: Well, because going back to my life as a reader, I would get into those series, starting as a kid, continuing as a young person. And I just loved that feeling of you thoroughly enjoyed a book and you knew there were 10 more or 20 more. That was such a gift. It was such a valuable feeling. And I would rush to the library and I would start devouring the series one after the other. And too many series got sagged after a while. You could sense the author getting lazy or running out of energy or running out of gas and beginning to phone it in. It happened time after time. And as a young naive reader, I felt so betrayed by that. Something that I had loved before was now no good. And I promised myself I would never do that. If I ever felt I was running out of gas or running out of energy, I would stop before I found it in. Because I love my readers and I don’t want to give them a substandard product. Now I was probably a little hyper vigilant about it, but it meant a lot to me.
Also what meant a lot to me was as a young person, as a teenager, as a young adult, I hated the way that old geezers just hung on forever. They would not get off the stage. They would not leave room for anybody else. And I thought on a bound to stick to those two feelings, never phone it in and get off the stage, let somebody new take over. And so I felt obliged in a way, morally obliged to stick to those promises I’d made to myself. So I did feel myself running out of energy, running out of gas. I’d been doing it for a quarter century and I felt it was time to bow out. And the idea of my brother taking it over did not occur to me at first. I thought I’ve just got to stop, think of a satisfying final plot and just stop it right there. But I felt people would be so upset to miss Reacher. They’d grown to love him. They’d been so nice about him.
I felt it would be gratuitously cruel just to take it away. And so I started developing these fantasies about, wouldn’t it be great, go down to the crossroads at midnight and sell my soul to the devil in exchange for a potion that would make me 15 years younger, full of the old energy, the old stamina that I used to have. And of course, that’s a fantasy. There are no magic potions like that. But then I suddenly realized, wait a minute, you idiot, you know yourself 15 years younger with all the energy and the stamina, which is my younger brother, who is a lot younger than me, almost 15 years younger. And he was a writer. So I said, would you like to continue it? And to be honest, I thought he’d say no, because he’s a proud, stubborn boy who had his own thing going. I thought he’d want to continue with his own thing. But he’s been involved with Reacher from the beginning.
Lee Child: He was the first person that ever read Reacher, because he was the only person I knew who could give me an informed opinion. He’s a thriller reader, very much in the same genre as me. So I showed him the very first manuscript in pencil and basically asked him, is this any good? Should I continue? And he happily said, yeah. So he’s known the series since day zero, so that there was no learning curve for him. He just stepped right in.
Brett McKay: What do you think is in store for Reacher in the future now that your brother Andrew is taking the baton?
Lee Child: Well, I mean, Andrew’s slightly more of a planner than I am, but I’ve encouraged him just to busk it, just see what happens, just start each book, see what happens. And so neither he nor I have any idea what’s going to happen to Reacher. I’m sure every year he will get into some scrape and he’ll sort it out. And hopefully it’ll last for a good long time.
Brett McKay: And so this next book that’s coming out, In Too Deep, did you both collaborate on it?
Lee Child: No, this is the first one that is entirely his. We collaborated on the last four as a sort of transition period. And now he’s striking out on his own with In Too Deep. And so I was, funnily enough, it was like that feeling a quarter century ago when he read my manuscript. I read his manuscript with the same kind of trepidatious feeling. What was I going to think of it? And it’s actually a great book. It’s a great Reacher book. He’s really nailed it. He’s got exactly the right start to it. The development is just improvised and random, just like I would have done it. And it reads really well. So I’m not only proud of him, but also very happy that the series is in good hands.
Brett McKay: What was that like reading a book that’s based on a character that you created, but you’re going into it like the readers that have been reading your book for the past quarter of a century?
Lee Child: Yeah, I’m going into it like the consumer. It’s like me watching the movie or me watching the TV series. This is something somebody else has done with my character. But fundamentally, it’s a very satisfying feeling because people find it as if it’s difficult. They say, how is it giving your character away? And my answer to that is, that’s the whole point of writing fiction. You’re desperate to give your character away, first and foremost, to the reader. The reader owns the character. Soon as a reader reads the book and enjoys it, they own the story. They own the character. The whole point of writing is to let the ownership of the character migrate outward, to belong to other people. So it wasn’t difficult to give it to the movies or give it to TV or to give it to Andrew. It kind of feels perfect. This is what it’s all about.
Brett McKay: Well, Lee Child, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Lee Child: Really, my pleasure, Brett. It’s great to be with you.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Lee Child. He’s the author of the Jack Reacher series. You can find more information about this series at jackreacher.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/reacher, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give viewing up a podcast for Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would be something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM Podcasts to put what you’ve heard into action.
