He's a soft-spoken, languid Englishman, but don't be taken in by his guile, thriller writer Lee Child has a steely side, writes Arminta Wallace.
As I sail through the automatic doors of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, on my way to meet the thriller writer Lee Child, an uneasy image flashes into my head: a voice recorder, sitting at home on the kitchen table. Hah, I chuckle to myself. Mine's in my bag. Isn't it? Fruitless rooting in said bag confirms that the kitchen table is indeed the location.
Oh, great. Imagine having to face a guy who routinely writes sentences such as: "It was like taking a high-torque power drill and fitting it with a foot-long halfinch masonry bit and drilling right through a limb" with a girly tale involving a change of batteries, an unexpected phone call and the wrong handbag. But Child is a man of surprises. Tall and languid, he stands up, shakes hands, sits down again, smiles and says, "Make it up. It'll be fine." The first surprise is that he's English. Though all 11 of his high-octane Jack Reacher books are set in America, Child was born in Coventry, grew up in Birmingham, and attended the same school as JRR Tolkien. "Though not at the same time," he says, quick as a flash. It's a perfect deadpan Reacher one-liner.
For 18 years, Child worked as a presentation director at Granada Television, where he was involved with such series as Bridehead Revisited, Prime Suspect and Cracker. Then ITV was re-organised and Child was declared surplus to requirements. In best tough-guy thrillerwriting fashion he didn't get mad, he got even, producing one of the most successful series of recent times at a time when the competition in the crime genre is, to say the least, cut-throat.
Had he always been interested in the idea of writing a thriller? "Well, I've always been interested in reading," he says. "I've been a voracious reader all my life." As for writing thrillers, there was never the slightest chance that he'd write anything else. "I read everything," he says, "but my main interest has always been in thrillers. To me, thrillers are . . ." Here my mangled notes dissolve into an incredulous scribble. Did he really say that thrillers, to him, represent the most important storytelling activity of the human race? The literary folks must love that. Child smiles his polite smile. "Well," he says sweetly, "the literary folks are barnacles attached to our ship." Ouch. Child and his creation clearly share a hint of steel as well as a sense of humour.
"If you look back at the art of storytelling, which goes back as far as we do, and ask yourself what kind of stories were the first ever told, it's more than likely that they were thrillers. The idea of a group of people being in danger and then being safe again; that story arc is the central one of human experience. And it turns up again and again throughout the history of human narrative." Thus we get the group of medieval pilgrims, scooped from disaster by a mysterious knight-errant who appears from nowhere and, having sorted the problem, rides off into the sunset. Ditto the gunslinger beloved of Western movies.
And Reacher. "The wish for salvation in the nick of time is an inveterate human desire," says Child. "Reacher is contemptuous of the system, and willing to intervene in a very brutal way - which is pure wish-fulfilment for many readers. Lots of people in the world would like to shoot their boss. But they can't, because they live in the real world." Reacher, by contrast, lives everywhere and nowhere. And like his creator, he's a man of surprises. On the surface he's standard ex-army issue with unparalleled expertise in military hardware. You name it, if it's a boy's toy Reacher can drive it, fire it or explode it. Get beneath the surface, however, and you'll find a soft-centred hero with a keen interest in social justice and a plentiful stock of wry one-liners.
The strange thing is that though he wanders from one end of the US to the other, he carries nothing with him - not even a spare set of underpants. Everybody loves Reacher - both in the real world, where the Reacher Creatures organisation numbers thousands of fans from all corners of the globe, and in the fictional one, where he always gets the girl, and a scrumptious girl at that. How does a man who never has any clean underpants always get the girl?
Child raises an enigmatic eyebrow. "Aha," he says. "Well, you have to ask, 'Does he always wear underpants?' Because if he doesn't wear them, then they don't get dirty." In an odd sort of way, this ambiguous statement helps explain the ambiguity of Reacher's politics. He won't fly with Alaska Airways because they place a scripture card on their meal trays. He's a real underdog man, sympathising with gays in the military and with illegal immigrants. He reckons America is a police state.
But doesn't Child have to steer a careful path as far as his readers are concerned? Aren't lots of his fans members of the NRA? "It's a risk, absolutely is," he says. "I have a wide readership the States, and statistically, 50 per cent of them will be Republicans. But what stands to me is that Reacher has such impeccable credentials for rednecks. They'd hate it if a European liberal such as me said those things. But if Reacher says it, they have to swallow it."
They're going to really hate his next book, Play Dirty, he says. Due out a year from now, it's about "a lonely little town in Colorado, a metal recycling plant and the Iraq war". Will Reacher ever die? "Eventually," says Child, "he'll have run his course. As long as he's popular I'm happy to continue writing about him. And then he'll go out in a blaze of glory. As will I." What - no Rebus-style reincarnations? "No." No ventures into literary fiction? "No. When Reacher finished, I'm going to retire and sit on beach." A happy ending - now there's story we can all identify with.
Bad Luck And Trouble, by Lee Child, is published by Bantam Press (£11.99 in the UK)