17-02-2025
Lee Child: ‘I've been a pothead since 1969'
Lee Child shouldn't be here. The master of the killer thriller is supposed to be 'a retired guy', enjoying the fruits of his 28-year writing career: the four homes, the lifetime earnings he estimates at $200 million, the Renoir and the Fabergé watch that 'cost more than my Jaguar'.
After writing 24 bestselling novels featuring his all-American 'knight errant' Jack Reacher, he handed the baton over to his novelist brother Andrew, 15 years his junior – working on four books together before leaving the youngest Child to it.
So why is the 70-year-old sitting in this hotel suite in London's Soho talking to me? 'It's not really working out great,' he quips of his self-inflicted redundancy.
In fact, the Jack Reacher franchise – based on the character he came up with in anger in 1995 after being let go from Granada TV – is not contracting, but expanding. First, there was the mixed blessing of Tom Cruise as a supposedly 6ft 5in, 17-stone ex-military police major in two films. Then there is Prime Video's Reacher, the third series of which – adapted from novel seven, Persuader – he is here dutifully to promote, having been remunerated three times 'for the IP [intellectual property]' as executive producer and as consultant.
This season, Reacher finds himself inside a vast criminal enterprise while trying to rescue an undercover informant whose time is running out.
The creators of the show, starring Alan Ritchson, are also working on a spin-off, Neagley, focusing on the protagonist's right-hand woman, played by Maria Sten. 'They want both halves of the year to be somehow dominated by the Reacherverse,' says Child of the drifter hailed by his literary agent, Darley Anderson, as the 'James Bond of the 21st century'.
Child no longer spends each September 1 – the date he sat down to begin his first instalment, Killing Floor – launching into a new book, but celebrates 'not starting'. Otherwise, his lifestyle sounds remarkably unchanged. He used to drink up to 36 coffees a day, smoke 20 Camels and light up a joint while reclining on a 9ft sofa, poring over his drafts.
'I mean, I still drink a ridiculous amount of coffee and I've been a pothead since 1969 and so that's never going to change. It hurts my back to sit at a right angle so I love being horizontal. Yeah, it's a great life.'
That said, there is one big shift. Child was born Jim Grant in Coventry, the son of housewife Audrey and John, a tax inspector, but had lived in the States for a quarter of a century. Last summer, he started pondering a move back to Blighty 'if it all goes bad in November', explaining he was 'too old and too tired to deal with the tsunami of crap that would be coming our way'.
In so doing, he joined a galaxy of celebrities who said they would abandon America were Donald Trump to enter, or re-enter, the White House. Bruce Springsteen talked in vain about Australia, Barbra Streisand considered Canada and Cher joked about Jupiter. However, like his literary avatar, Child is a man of action.
'The morning after the election, I flew back to Britain, and bought a house in the Lake District,' he says, his slender frame – only one inch shorter than Reacher's – nestled in an armchair. 'So that's where I plan to spend most of the next four years.'
Has the Trump presidency been worse than he feared? 'Hideous, yeah,' he says with a grimace. 'Hemingway said about bankruptcy, it happens at first gradually and then suddenly, and Britain needs to be vigilant about not letting it happen here.'
I wonder, how do we go about that? 'The media has to take a very elevated view of truth over partisanship,' he says in his transatlantic drawl. 'Maybe it's inevitable, maybe we're moving into an era where everybody has their own reality, but the sense of what is real and what isn't seems to have totally disappeared.'
Child has already given up his home in the south of France because climate change brought 'North African weather and North African insects'. He says he will also have to sell up his ranch in Wyoming, where he lived a life not dissimilar to that of his 'noble loner'. He now concedes that somewhere that involves a 90-minute round trip to get milk and where it is 'physically impossible to get out of the house because snow has drifted against it 20ft thick' is no place for a septuagenarian. (That leaves his brownstone townhouse in New York and 'winter escape' in Colorado). Yet even during his decades abroad, he never truly left England behind. Both he and his brother are Aston Villa fans, and he regularly named characters after former players.
The author, who reads up to 300 books a year, has always been brazenly commercial. He chose his pen name because it is a word that evokes warmth and, alphabetically, sandwiched him on the shelves between the crime titans Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.
But he admits to one costly error. Reacher's proud lack of possessions – Child relished the review that called him 'Sherlock Homeless' – has written off a plethora of sponsorship opportunities, even though a survey once found he was the 'strongest brand in publishing'. He consumes as much caffeine as his creator and there is a Jack Reacher coffee. 'But apart from that, I blew all the marketing opportunities completely,' Child says with a chuckle.
What about branded toothbrushes – the only item Reacher carries, apart from his passport? 'Could have a toothbrush, yeah, and people send me them all the time, as a sort of token. Literally, I've got a huge cardboard box full in my office.'
He has also received less savoury bathroom products. When he included a verbatim passage he had been emailed by a US soldier in Iraq criticising the US government, readers tore out the page. 'Sometimes it was used as toilet paper and sent to me.'
More recently, Reacher has been caught up in the culture wars. Last year, New York magazine said he was 'a glaringly white fantasy' and asked: 'Is it any wonder that Reacher has an entrenched right-wing fanbase?' The Daily Dot website reported that many 'celebrate Reacher's violent retribution as an example of what Trump will do to the libs'.
'They're talking about the psychotic Maga manifestation of right-wing, which is really something completely different,' says Child, who is married with one adult daughter. And he points out that he has had hate mail when Reacher's love interest has been black. 'Is he a white supremacist or is he in favour of mixed-race relationships? They can't have it both ways.'
Child developed his pragmatic political instincts while working as transmission controller, and union shop steward, at Granada from 1977 to 1995. Battling mass redundancies, he, Reacher-style, commissioned the cleaners to fish any useful paperwork out of the bins.
Among the documents was a psychological profile of Child. 'They called me cynical, and I've run into that many times. The pragmatism is somehow mistaken for cynicism.' What else did it say? 'That I'm stubborn, obstinate and so on, which is absolutely true. There is no human being more stubborn and obstinate than me.'
Like all purveyors of 'commercial fiction', Child has absorbed the brickbats of critics – while reportedly shifting one staccato-sentenced novel every nine seconds. But slowly, more and more esteemed fans crept out of the woodwork, from Philip Pullman to Kate Atkinson and Haruki Murakami. 'What page-turners, what prose, what landscapes, what motorways and motels, what mythic dimensions!' gushed Dame Margaret Drabble. 'He does all the things I could never do.'
Antonia Fraser is another admirer, but failed to persuade her late husband Harold Pinter, who sneered: 'I cannot understand the mentality of one who is awaiting the next Lee Child.'
'I mean, I don't need Harold Pinter's approval in any way whatsoever,' says Child himself. 'To be an entertainment professional who doesn't understand how parts of the market work is profoundly silly.'
The Booker Prize committee understood, inviting him to be a judge in 2020. But is it about time that writers of his ilk were eligible for Bookers or Nobels? 'Nah,' he shrugs. 'It's greedy. We make a fortune compared to those literary guys.' A half-smile forms. 'I'd rather have my sales than their prizes, put it like that.'
Season 3 of Reacher premieres on Prime Video on 20 February
