David Remnick: Now, you might say with more than 25 Jack Reacher novels out there, plus a couple of Tom Cruise movies that maybe we don't need a Jack Reacher TV series, but who can ever get enough of Jack Reacher, that former military cop who roams from town to town like some crew-cut samurai setting things right with his unerring and incredibly violent code of morality? The eight-episode series Reacher just premiered on Amazon.

Jack Reacher: Well, a smart move would be to shoot me right here, but you haven't done that yet. Maybe you don't want to draw attention firing outside a crowded bar or maybe you have orders to take me to your boss so we can find out how much I know. Whatever it is, it means that when I make my move, you're going to hesitate. You guys know what Cato said about hesitation, right? "He who hesitates--"

David: This all-American tough guy is the creation of Englishman Lee Child, who was born James Grant. He graduated law school before beginning a career in television all before his immensely successful run writing action-thrillers. I had a chance to talk with Lee Child back in the summer of 2018. It was just before the Jack Reacher novel Past Tense had come out. Lee Child, it's an absolute delight to have you here. You've made so many summers come alive from me reading you. I never read on the beach. I don't know why people do that, but at least I go outside and I read a Lee Child novel. I'm a happy, happy boy.

Lee Child: Well, I'm very glad to hear that. Thank you.

David: I'm full of questions. Naturally, I want to ask you about the way this all began. You were working as an executive in 1995 and you got fired and decided, "The hell with it. I'm going to work for myself and become a superstar writer of thrillers."

Lee: Well, it wasn't quite that linear. I was a television director and very happy where I was. It was in Britain during what, in retrospect, looks like a golden age of drama as well, I remembered. My company did Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Prime Suspect, just some really terrific shows, but it was also a fabulous news station, documentary station. It was really the height of the height. Then broadcasting in Britain like, I think, everywhere in the world got shook up, particularly by Rupert Murdoch's influence and the whole thing started to fall apart.

David: You lost your job because of Rupert Murdoch?

Lee: Yes, pretty much. Rupert Murdoch wanted to bring his satellite service to Britain. In order to do that, he needed to attack and weaken the terrestrial services, the BBC, and the independent broadcasters. It was a pretty transparent deal with the Thatcher government. "You let me do this, help me out a little bit, and I will support you in my papers and on the air."

David: You were named Jim Grant still then?

Lee: Yes.

David: Why did you get fired?

Lee: Because I was 39 years old, an expensive veteran with a big salary and benefits, a pension, and all that kind of thing. They discovered that they could get recent graduates to do the work for a quarter of the price.

David: Now, what made you believe that you could walk out the door, sit down, change your name, and become a great writer of thrillers?

Lee: Well, I didn't necessarily believe it. I just thought that at that age, at that stage of your life, this is probably the last chance to try something new, to make a big break. I did not want to leave the world of entertainment. I'm just totally in love with that idea. You very kindly mentioned. You sit outside in a chair and read my book and enjoy it. I just absolutely love that transaction that I can do something that somebody else is going to enjoy. Television satisfied that for a long time. When I left television, I wanted to stay in that world basically. The question was, how can I stay? What can I do that will supply me with the same feeling?

David: You did a particular thing, not just one, a series of particularities. First of all, you invented Jack Reacher and stuck with him. He's an American, you are not. He's a complete loner. Malcolm Gladwell and others have compared him to a cowboy. It's like the form of a Western, a man who wanders into a town. In his case, hitchhikes in. No change of clothes. His only possession is a toothbrush. He senses trouble and complications begin. Former military policeman. How did you invent him? Why is he an American?

Lee: Well, it was a whole batch of reasons that, happily, all pointed in the same direction. First of all, really, the hardest thing about being a writer or I suppose an artist of any kind is that you have to believe several different things. Some of which are contradictory, but you have to believe them all 100% completely wholeheartedly. Of course, I believe that this is an art. It's a craft, it's a joy, it's creative, all that good stuff, but it's also a job. It's a business.

I had a vague eye on the business side of it, which was that so many other people-- In fact, everybody else that was writing a series was writing, essentially, a soap opera with a fixed location. It would either be location-based or employment-based or both. The hero would have probably colleagues and a superior he didn't like and subordinates that were difficult.

He would have possibly a partner, an apartment, a favorite bar, a favorite restaurant, neighbors, the whole thing, classic soap opera, which I'm in no way denigrating. I worked in television. I made my living on soap operas for nearly two decades. They're incredibly powerful and actually quite sophisticated form of narrative. Everybody was doing it, so I thought, "Well, let's not do that. Let's do the anti-soap opera."

David: Strip it down.

Lee: Yes, where there's only one character. There's no repertory cast surrounding him. There's one character. There's no location. He can be anywhere. He has no job, so he can do anything. It was really a study in loneliness, alienation in a way. That had to be in America because Malcolm Gladwell talks about cowboys. Well, yes, that's fine, but where did cowboys come from?

The cowboy myth is, essentially, a development of a medieval myth from Europe, the knight who is somehow transgressed against the court and has been banished, sentenced to wander the land and do good deeds. Same thing in Japan. Japanese culture, the ronin, exactly the same thing. A samurai who's been disowned by his master and sentenced to wander the land doing good deeds. It's really that tradition and you can't do that in Britain. Britain is too small. It is too densely populated. There are no empty areas. There's no mystery about it. America has the frontier feel.

David: Wandering into the Cotswolds wouldn't work in the same way as Nebraska. [laughs]

Lee: No, it wouldn't be because everybody in the Cotswolds knows your business immediately and everybody knows everything. There's no possibility of hidden secrets. It has to be the wide-open spaces.

David: Now, I can't believe you write the way you've described this. You sit down every year on September 1st. You don't sit down with an outline. You don't do research even though some of your novels seem to indicate a knowledge of opioids or a knowledge of place. Then you just start and off you go. That's a very strange way to write any kind of novel, much less what I would thought a Jack Reacher novel would be pretty heavily plotted and you'd have charts on the wall.

Lee: Absolutely not, nothing on the wall. It's summertime now. I'm acutely aware that September the 1st is approaching and I'm thinking, "I have zero idea."

David: How do you feel about that? Is it an impending doom or--

Lee: Yes, half my mind is impending doom. The gas tank is empty. Finally, I've been found out. Finally, it's all going to fall apart. Then I think, "Well, wait a minute. You felt like that for the last 20 books, and so you've managed them before, you can manage this one." For me, it's always about the story. I want the story to be organic, naturally unfolding. I feel that if I wrote an outline, it would be a rather artificial structure. I'd be forcing the story into an artificial route that it probably didn't want to take. I just start in the beginning and I hope to get a good first sentence or a good first paragraph. I think, "Right now, what happens? What happens now?"

David: Do you ever go 75 pages in and it's a bust and you have to go again?

Lee: Never.

David: How is that possible?

Lee: Well, two reasons. First of all, that would be very inefficient. It would drive me mad to do that. I can usually tell before about seven words if I'm heading down a bad track. I can tell pretty early. Sometimes it leads to seven words, but that hurts quite a lot, I'll tell you.

David: [laughs]

Lee: One thing leads from another in a very organic way. For instance, the new book, Past Tense, I wrote the first sentence. Well, the first paragraph anyway. There were two things in it. One, I had mentioned Maine. Reacher has to start from somewhere, so he's in Maine for the summer. Now, he's planning to head South for the winter.

David: He gets to New Hampshire.

Lee: Right, he only gets as far as New Hampshire, but he's planning to go all the way South to Southern California like the birds migrate. I have a pretty mellifluous sentence there in the beginning about the migration of birds and typical species. I just wrote that thinking, "Okay, this is a good place to start." Then immediately, first of all, the birdwatching. Well, years ago in one of the books, it was mentioned that Reacher's father was a birdwatcher because I wanted the contrast between a pretty vicious marine soldier and his hobby, which was birdwatching. I found that an interesting contrast.

In the back of my mind, "Okay, why have I started this with a reference to birds? Maybe this book ought to be about Reacher's father." I start on September 1st because that's the anniversary of when I started the very first book, so it's a sentimental day to start. I start on the 1st of September and work every available day until the book is finished, which is usually around the next March because a lot of other things get in the way.

David: Oh, you do leave your desk, you leave town?

Lee: I have to. I've got family stuff. They want to do Christmas and all those kinds of things.

David: It's horrible, isn't it?

Lee: Yes, they drag you away.

David: [laughs] Now, this is one of the most amazing things. At a certain point, I think you were writing Make Me. An English academic named Andy Martin sat there with you in your study and watched you write a novel. 30 cups of coffee a day like Balzac.

Lee: Yes, possibly more. I think my record is mid-30s. Mugs of coffee, not just little cups. Let's get serious about this.

David: That's impressive. You have an impressive stomach.

Lee: Yes, it would happen very short notice. He's a freewheeling academic from Cambridge University. Literally, days before I started that novel, he came up with that idea. Probably, if I'd had longer to think about it, I would've said no. Because time was short, it was my 20th book, I just thought, "Let's do something different." To a certain extent, I wanted to have it on record, not for me personally necessarily but for all of us in this genre because there is a lot of cheap talk about how it's somehow easy to write these books. There are various terms. You just crank them out and so on, which is actually very much the opposite of the truth.

David: Even the way you describe it, it sounds easy. You sit down on September 1st. You don't write a 2nd or 3rd or 50th draft. No outline. What is the difficulty? Describe that.

Lee: Well, really, the difficulty is with a readership, the size of a successful genre writer is readership.

David: What is this? Kill me. Go ahead and kill me. What is the scale of your readership? [chuckles]

Lee: Well, millions of people globally. Around the world, a Reacher book sells every nine seconds. There's a lot of people reading them. You cannot look at that as a monolithic mass because with an audience that size, they're very striated. They're very different. At the center, you've got the expert readers who just read all the time like Malcolm Gladwell. Mine is not the only book that he reads that week. Obviously, he reads constantly, so do a lot of people. They have to be satisfied. On the very far edges of the audience, so the people that read one book a year on their vacation, on the beach, that's all they will read. You've got to satisfy both those readers and everybody in between.

David: You feel them out there. You feel that immense audience.

Lee: Yes, because you meet them. You meet the extremely unlikely people that are fans and then you meet people who are, clearly, the one-book-a-year person. Touchingly, the biggest compliment that they can pay you is they will say, "I loved your book. I finished it," which is a huge achievement. They feel that it's their achievement.

David: It's an unusual act.

Lee: Yes, they finished a book. They're very satisfied. They're happy with themselves. Of course, they're happy with the book because the book has aided them to do that. How do you do that? The real skill and I think the skill that Andy Martin observed day to day is the rhythms of the book. The book has got to be a locomotive that drives people through without being noticeably such.

David: Finally, will Jack Reacher ever leave us or leave you?

Lee: Yes, I'm fascinated with the whole showbiz thing of, "Leave them wanting more. Don't be the embarrassing guy that sticks around two seasons too long." We see that all the time in shows on television. We see it with athletes. You've got to pick your time to go. I do not want Reacher to become an embarrassing old character that's bought out of habit or sentimentality.

David: You might leave him behind and write about someone or something else?

Lee: No, I would leave him behind and retire completely. Do not forget, I'm from Europe. I have no work ethic.

David: [laughs]

Lee: Retirement is a phase of life that I'm keenly looking forward to.

David: Are you?

Lee: Yes.

David: What would you do on September 1st?

Lee: Read. That's the only thing I'd resent about writing is the time it takes away from reading. Literally, I've got rooms full of books just stacking up just waiting to be read.

David: What's the biggest masterpiece that's just sitting there staring at you and saying, "You have not read me"?

Lee: I've never read Jane Austen, which is shocking for an English person. The Russians of the 19th century, maybe Flaubert, stuff like that. Then, of course, the fabulous thing about books is you don't know what the classics are. There's something sitting there in my living room right now that could be the best read of my life. I don't know what it is yet because I haven't tried it.

David: Well, Lee Child, I'm incredibly grateful to you, but don't leave Jack Reacher too soon, okay? You can squeeze in Jane Austen somehow.

Lee: I could probably read her in the evenings after I finished writing Reacher, but that would be quite a contrast.

David: [laughs] Lee Child, thank you very much.

Lee: Thank you.

[music]

David: I spoke with Lee Child in 2018. The most recent Jack Reacher novel is called Better Off Dead and it was co-written with his brother, Andrew Child. The eight-episode series Reacher premiered on Amazon on Friday.

[music]

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