“It was going to be called Die Lonely, and the final scene was going to be Reacher bleeding to death on a filthy motel bathroom floor,” says Lee Child, taking a long drag from the fifth, perhaps sixth cigarette he’s burnt through during our hour-long interview.
The author, who once described himself as the only person on earth his fictional character Jack Reacher feared, seriously considered killing off his creation in 2019. “When I started, I made myself a promise that if I ever sensed that I was going to run out of gas, I would stop because that was the only honest thing to do.” Just over two decades after writing Killing Floor which launched his rapid rise into thriller- writing-royalty, he did run out of gas. Killing Reacher would have meant an end to a lucrative franchise. Not that he needed the money. By then, the books alone had generated more than $1bn in sales. More than 100 million have been sold in 49 languages in over 100 countries. There have been movies and a series on Amazon too.
He considered a dramatic finale where Reacher takes a bullet for someone he is protecting – a befitting end for a hero whose stock-in-trade is violence. While the author was ready to let go, the fans weren’t ready to bid farewell to the lonely wanderer traversing the vastness of smalltown America dispensing swift, righteous justice to the scores of bad guys who with unwitting regularity cross his path.
“People really liked this guy, and I felt that (killing him) would have been gratuitously cruel to the reader. So, I developed a metaphorical version of that where Reacher solves the problem, heads off to the bus station but half way there he thinks: ‘You know what, I kinda like it here, maybe I’ll adopt a dog and rent a house…’ and that would have been the metaphorical death of Reacher, but the readers wanted more and that felt like a big responsibility.”
If killing Reacher was a bridge too far, allowing him to retire with a white picket fence and a dog was akin to a soppy Hollywood cop-out and that didn’t sit comfortably either. It may have made sense for Child to simply stop writing once he completed Blue Moon, the 24th in the series, and the last he penned solo. That would have left his readers to conjure up their own ending. In the books at least, Reacher has no emotional ties to anyone. His last relative, a brother, is killed off in the first book, and he is never in one place long enough to form long term connections. It’s feasible that Reacher could just vanish, and no-one in the fictional world Child created for him, would miss him. Whatever happened, he knew he could not continue: “When I was young, I hated it when you would be into an author or into a series and you got like the 8th or the 10th instalment and the author was now lazy, bored, phoning it in, you know, probably retired to Switzerland as a tax exile and drunk all the time or whatever. And it was such a betrayal to my young self as a reader. I hated it.”
Instead, Child, the eldest of four siblings, born James Grant in Birmingham in 1954, asked his younger brother Andrew to adopt the family pen name and co-author the next four books, and continue the legacy. The 29th in the series, In Too Deep, is Andrew Child’s first solo effort. Lee’s name remains dominant on the masthead “because it makes commercial sense.” Lots of writers are doing it: James Patterson has made a fortune through collaborations, including two with Bill Clinton, the late Wilbur Smith still has new releases carrying his name and Robert Ludlum, the author who brought us Jason Bourne, has been more prolific in death than in life. His estate has published 32 books carrying his name on top of the 20 he completed before his death in 2001.
“That is the biggest decision I have ever taken,” says the author who expected Andrew, a thriller writer in his own right, 13 years his junior, whom he describes as a “menopausal mistake” and “a very stubborn independent boy” despite his being 56, to decline. He accepted, with some conditions of his own. “We had one specific discussion about the first of the collaborations, which was called The Sentinel. And, uh, we had a two-way discussion. I didn’t intend it to be two-way. I thought I was just going to tell him what I wanted to do. But then he came back and told me what he wanted to do.” One of those was to make Reacher less technologically inept and bring him into the 21st century: “Reacher was way behind the curve because I am. I am just not technological.”
How hard is it to give up a character some of whose motivations mirror those of the author? Like Reacher, a former military policeman frozen out of the army as post-Cold War budgets thawed with Glasnost, Lee Child was downsized out of a Granada television job he loved in the 90’s. He avoided the instinct to find a job to replace his income and opted instead “to write a bestseller” and imposed the anger and betrayal he felt on the character. There is a line in the first book where Reacher says: “I tried it their way, now I will try it my way.” It was fiction mirroring fact. James Grant, as he was then, had seven months of expenses in his bank account, seven months of mortgage payments, seven months of groceries. He sold the first book in month six and became Lee Child.
This is another big transition.
“I totally step back, and people imagine that that it’s hard. It’s not. You want the reader to take ownership of it. You want the reader to claim the character, and ignore the author, like James Bond and Sherlock Holmes who now belong to the world. They don’t belong to the author anymore.”
Surely Reacher has a shelf-life?
“Reacher is merely this era’s version of a character that’s been around literally forever. You go back to the Westerns and Americans assume that Reacher is a Western character really invented in America. But they are themselves imports from medieval Europe who were versions of the Scandanavian sagas who were versions of Anglo Saxon battle poems, you could even say religious myths, the arrival of a saviour, the knight errant who would show up unexplained, do the good thing and then ride off into the sunset. That character has been around for thousands of years, so therefore the idea of getting tired of Reacher is not possible. He will be reinvented for the next several thousand years.”
Child has spent nearly thirty winters in the company of Reacher, deciding every plot line and every twisted action of the bad guys he encounters. What does the winter of 2024 hold if he is not going to be immersed in Reacher-land?
“As a writer, one of the great frustrations I have is that I have not had time to read. That’s what I am going to do. Read.”
Lee Child’s episode of The Art of Deciding shares his take on ‘not being timid’ among other thoughts on his decision making process for characters, and legacy. You can catch it here https://podfollow.com/the-art-of-deciding
