Over one hundred million books sold, yes you read that right - 100 million! Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York.

It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. 

We had the 2012 action thriller film written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, starring Tom Cruise as the eponymous hero and based on Lee Child's 2005 novel One Shot. Now Jack Reacher has been adapted for screen as a major TV series on Amazon Prime, and we're big fans over here.

To say that Lee Child's Jack Reacher books are popular feels like an understatement. The series started in 2010 with Killing Floor, and was reviewed for us by Sarah Broadhurst, who described the titular main character as "the perfect action hero for men and women alike". The Jack Reacher series has an impressive backlist of 28 books, with the 29th (and the 5th written alongside Andrew Child) In Too Deep coming next, hitting a bookstore near you on the 22nd October 2024. Although of course, you can pre-order it now on LoveReading!

Safe Enough, the latest release for Lee Child is a series of twenty thrilling short stories (including an exclusive new Jack Reacher and Maggie Bird story by Lee Child and Tess Gerritsen) which showcase Child's trademark suspense, sparse style and character craftsmanship to full effect. Our editorial expert Joanne Owen called it: "An engrossing anthology of 20 twisty, razor-sharp short stories from the master thriller writer."

Given the longstanding popularity of the Jack Reacher series here at LoveReading and far further afield, we were thrilled to have the opportunity to have Lee Child as our Guest Editor and even more delighted when we discovered his chosen topic. This piece is an ode to reading and creative writing as much as it is an insight into the inspiration behind Reacher. So enjoy! And welcome to our Guest Editor, Lee Child...

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Header Photo credit: Copyright Sigrid Estrada

The Books That Built Jack Reacher

You don’t need formal qualifications to become a writer. You don’t need a college degree, or a licence from the government, or a permit from city hall. You don’t need prior experience. You don’t need to sit an exam or pass a background check. Or a drug test. You don’t need references. All you need to do is write a book.

That needs something, though. Before I was a writer, I worked in TV. For a short time I was on a panel, interviewing applicants for vacant positions. A standard question was, ‘What are you loving on TV right now?’ The answers were often perceptive and illuminating. But occasionally we got an applicant who said, loftily, ‘Oh, I don’t watch much TV.’

That was an instant fail. How can you work in an entertainment medium you don’t consume? That you’re indifferent about? You need to be steeped in it. You need to remember the joy of watching your childhood favourites, and the equal joy of finally figuring out – maybe twenty years later – why exactly those shows pushed your buttons. You need to remember the bitter disappointment of a show that went bad in season two. You need to remember an under-the-radar sleeper that you ended up loving. Why wasn’t it talked about more? Was it just you who liked it?

It’s exactly the same with books. The only qualification for becoming a writer at some time in your life is to have been a reader for all of your life. You need a gradually developed, life-long, gut-level instinct about how stories work, why some of them fail, why some of them succeed, why most are forgotten, why a special few are remembered forever, why you loved some with a passion and threw others against the wall. You only get that from reading and reading, fiction and non-fiction, good and bad, anything and everything, year after year. No other way.

I learned broad lessons from that process, but more importantly narrow lessons too, about what turned me on, personally. That was crucial, because inevitably it defined what I would eventually write, because ultimately we all write the book we want to read. Looking back, as a reader not yet knowing he would be a writer, I see that I was being gently and lovingly nudged by one fabulous story after another, slightly toward this point of the compass, then that, and then a third, and then a dozen more, until I was somehow electrostatically suspended in a summed web of voltages coming in from all my different influences, hanging there at a literary latitude and longitude I could one day claim as my own.

What’s there is what you find in the Reacher books. How it got there is the product of a hundred influences. To choose just five is tough. But these titles are representative. Maybe more than that. They were important way stations on the road that ran from when I learned to read to when I learned to write.

The Golden Rendezvous by Alistair MacLean

MacLean was a wildly successful Scottish thriller writer who dominated the adventure genre during the 1950s and 60s. He started with three novels set during the Second World War, and then came what I think of as ‘peak MacLean’ – a magnificent run of six novels from 1959 to 1966, from The Last Frontier (The Secret Ways in the US) to When Eight Bells Toll. All were set in contemporary times, but crucially with plot and character backstories firmly rooted in the recent wartime conflict. It was clear that wartime experience served as a permanent and automatic calibration for MacLean, in terms of peril, tension, stakes, worth and duty. I learned a lot from the patient way MacLean set up the story and sucked me in, slowly, with great self-confidence. Often the first many pages covered actions only seconds long. His heroes tended toward a stoic, lantern-jawed archetype, but Maclean’s unique talent was to bring them to the edge of absurdity, but never let them fall off the cliff. I’m picking The Golden Rendezvous – a reluctant-hero seafaring story full of intrigue and breathless tension – but all the peak-MacLean titles are equally fantastic. A huge influence.

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Forsyth was an unemployed foreign affairs journalist who, like unemployed people everywhere (me included), decided to write a thriller to pay the rent. The result was this seminal, year-zero novel which single handedly changed the genre forever. Two things stood out. It’s a genuinely suspenseful twin-track thriller – an assassin hunts his target while law enforcement hunts the assassin – but, Forsyth being the journalist he was, it’s written like a hyper-detailed retrospective true crime account. And secondly, the intended victim was a real person – Charles de Gaulle, the president of France. We knew he was still alive – he was in the news all the time – so we knew in advance that the assassin must have failed. How did that not short-circuit the foundational suspense? I learned that the how question was as important as any other. We knew the who, where, why and when. But we didn’t know how the assassin was going to do it, or how he was going to be stopped. Fifty years later, it would be interesting to get reactions from newer, younger readers, for whom de Gaulle is just a name from ancient history – or possibly a made-up character. Would the book work as well for them? I suspect it would.

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Smith was a fanatically dedicated fiction writer who honed his craft by running a 1960s pulp magazine in New York. The content was pacy, robust and manly short-story fiction. Smith commissioned work from writers such as Ted Irish, Dr Emile Korngold and Sol Roman – all of whom were himself, typing like mad under pseudonyms. But his aim was a big novel idea he had – a Soviet detective solving a sensitive crime in Moscow, thereby mining the exquisite difficulties faced by a diligent policeman working inside a rigidly bureaucratic and hostile structure. Smith saw his detective as a reluctant Party member, possibly the disappointing and underachieving son of a Soviet hero. His name would be Arkady Renko. The result was brilliant – a milestone thriller that blended American hardboiled energy with a weary, wary, old-country ambience. Later – as a Brit writing about America – I took great comfort from Smith’s necessarily limited research. You couldn’t just show up in Brezhnev's Russia and wander around with a notebook and a camera. There was no internet. No Street View. But Gorky Park felt totally authentic. I had been to America more times than Smith had been to Moscow, so I took his triumph as a form of permission.

Daddy by Loup Durand

Durand was an obscure French crime writer, but this novel – impeccably translated into English by J. Maxwell Brownjohn – hit me like a freight train. It’s fundamentally a chase thriller, in which the chaser is the Gestapo agent Laemmle, representing the might of Hitler’s Third Reich, and the chased is an eleven-year-old French boy named Thomas, the only living person who knows the long strings of numbers that can unlock his late great-grandfather’s bank accounts, which contain hundreds of millions that the Nazis want. Laemmle is a gourmet and an epicene, but cruel and ruthless; Thomas is scared and powerless, but a genius savant, who calculates his next moves like a chess master. The close calls and near misses create breathless tension inside a dreamlike narrative that reflects young Thomas’s confusion. But what stood out most for me was Thomas’s inherited band of loyal family retainers, all Spanish peasants, always watching from the shadows. They formed a preternaturally, implacably reliable and competent force of nature. In one scene, Thomas, eating an apple, threatens Laemmle, who scoffs at the apparent emptiness of the threat. So Thomas, despite not having seen his Spaniards for days, tosses the apple high in the air, and it’s immediately shattered by a rifle shot from a distant hillside. Almost supernatural, but I loved it.

The Lonely Silver Rain by John MacDonald

This was the big one for me – the proximate cause, the inciting event, the tipping point. I chose it at random in an airport bookstall in Miami. It turned out to be the twenty-first and last installment in the Travis McGee series, which ran from 1964 to 1985. McGee was a boat bum from Florida, taking his retirement in advance by working only when he had to, usually by retrieving stolen property from thieves and fraudsters. He was a big, scruffy, rawboned character. The series as a whole stands as one of the finest ever. It’s markedly ahead of its time about nature and the environment (but very much of its time about gender relationships, jarringly now) and it’s technically fascinating in that generally nothing happens on page one, yet you already can’t put the book down. But for me, some happy alignment of the planets meant that while I was thoroughly enjoying the series as pure entertainment, I was also seeing the skeleton beneath the skin. It was like a blueprint. Suddenly, and really for the first time ever, I saw exactly what a novelist was doing, and why, and when, and how. Maybe I could do that too, I thought.

Thanks to Lee for joining LoveReading this month and for sharing this with us. That was an education.

You can view, and buy all of Lee Child's books, via his author page.

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