Bookclub - Lee Child on His Hardman Hero Jack Reacher

Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available on Sunday 1st December and will be available to listen online or for download.

Lee Child didn’t know when he was made redundant from Granada Television in 1995 that it was the best thing that could have happened to him. He’d worked there through its glory days and knew a good script when he saw one. He was angry, and he needed to find something to do. So he wrote. And the result was Killing Floor, the first of eighteen novels featuring Jack Reacher, ex-military cop and loner, adrift in America. On the first page we learn that he’s in trouble, and we don’t know why. For many readers, it has been the beginning of a long journey.

Lee – he changed his name to write, and he’s adopted the persona completely – has turned Reacher into a magnetic character who’s hooked millions of readers around the world. He’s six feet five inches and eighteen stone, a lumbering figure who finds himself cast loose on the street, as angry as his creator and ready for anything. Lee told this month’s readers on Bookclub that the first story represented the rawness of his feelings at the time. His own frustration was bottled up in Jack Reacher.

It’s important on the programme that we never give away the plot of a thriller to listeners, and we stuck to our rule, but Reacher’s experience in his first adventure sets the scene for his subsequent travails and triumphs. He’s jailed unjustly and fights for revenge, turning as he does so into a force for good. He may be a rough diamond, but we learn by the end of Killing Floor that imprinted inside him is a moral code that he won’t break. He’s a dangerous man, but we’re safe in his presence.

Lee talked about the way he had come up with a character that springs from one of the oldest literary traditions – the stranger who turns up unexpectedly and gives order to the chaos, the knight errant, the man who’s always looking for the next frontier. Reacher, Lee says, is as much a mediaeval European figure as he is an American.

I wasn’t surprised to learn, when we turned to the craft of writing, that Lee has an affection for some of the American writers who can chisel a sentence from the hardest rock – Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler. ‘I get great joy out of a sentence,’ he said, but the reader shouldn’t notice. The secret should stay locked under the bonnet of the car.

Killing Floor is a violent story, and the reason is obvious. Lee describes himself as having been in a rage when he wrote it – ‘in a fury’ – and found himself starting to write from an extreme position. In the second of Reacher’s adventures he changed tack and, as he puts it, took a different a position. It was then possible to manoeuvre between the two. Disarmingly, he told us, ‘It’s difficult for people to start off soft and become more violent later.’

Through the stories, Reacher suffers all kinds of threats and takes off on every kind of adventure. But he doesn’t change. Lee told one reader that since she had done him the compliment of reading eighteen books in a row, the least he could do was to promise that Reacher would be the same man next year, a familiar figure who could bestow some reassurance.

And we learned one of the most important facts about him. Lee’s wife said after he left Granada that if all else failed he could stack shelves in a supermarket, and she coined a word. He could be a ‘reacher’. And Jack was born.

The next edition of Bookclub is broadcast on Sunday, 5th January at 4pm (repeated on Thursday, January 9th at 3.30 pm) and we’ll be talking to Donna Tartt about her first bestseller, which became a cult book, The Secret History.

Our next recording is in January, with Naomi Alderman, one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists 2013. We’re discussing her debut novel Disobedience. If you’d like to come, tickets are free. For more information go to the Radio 4 Bookclub website.

Happy reading.

Jim



Listen to a clip of Lee Child discussing Jack Reacher with James Naughtie and a group of readers.

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