Jack Reacher may be one of the most iconic action book heroes of all time. Over 100 million copies of author Lee Child’s books have been sold. But the author who has taken over the series is perhaps a little less well known. Andrew Child, who also writes under the name Andrew Grant, is now carrying on the legacy of Jack Reacher for his older brother. He came to Portland for the 2024 Portland Book Festival to talk about the 29th book in the series, “In Too Deep.”
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Jack Reacher debuted in 1997. He has since been featured in 29 novels that have sold over 100 million copies, making him one of the most iconic and indelible literary characters of the last quarter century. Reacher – those of us who read him and love him refer to him with just his last name – is physically and mentally imposing. He is 6′ 5″ of muscle and brain. That helps because wherever he seems to wander – and wander is what he does, he’s a retired military policeman who just travels now from place to place – he always ends up running into bad people doing bad and mysterious things. It falls to him to solve the mysteries and punish the bad guys.
Reacher was created by the British writer Lee Child. A few years ago, Lee decided he’d had enough but that Reacher hadn’t. So he asked his younger brother, Andrew, to take over the series. Andrew Grant, who now writes under the name Andrew Child, came to Portland for the 2024 Portland Book Festival to talk about the 29th book in the series. It’s called “In Too Deep.” I talked to Andrew in front of an audience at the First Congregational United Church of Christ.
[Audience applause]
Andrew Child: Wonderful. Thank all of you for being here today. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here in Portland, Oregon, and it’s lovely to see so many faces in the audience. So thank you for giving up your Saturday morning to join us.
Miller: I have been a Jack Reacher fan for 15 years or so, and I’ve long thought “what would it be like to interview the author of these books?” I am so excited to get to do this.
I thought we could start where you start in the new novel. You set up a lot of challenges from the very first page for Jack Reacher. Where does this new novel start?
Child: This is the 29th in the series. That gives you some interesting opportunities, but also some challenges. A lot of people are gonna be familiar with Reacher, and a lot of people are gonna know that Reacher is enormous, he’s really good at fighting, he’s really good at solving problems and good at investigating. So you need to find a scenario that is gonna challenge him, otherwise the book’s not gonna be very exciting.
So sometimes, you go for a kind of slow burn, throw in some clues, lead the readers along so that they gradually build up a picture of what’s happening, and only after a few chapters you realize how dire the situation is. Well, this time around, I thought now we’re just gonna jump in with both feet on page one. So this book opens in pitch black. Reacher regains consciousness in a darkened room. And he realizes that he is shackled to a table. He’s got no memory of how he got there, and he finds that his wrist is broken. We’re really stacking the deck against Reacher right from the first line.
Miller: It’s not just that. He also has some vertigo and dizziness, and it turns out, memory problems. I’ll be very careful throughout not to give spoilers, but we find out pretty early on he has a concussion as well, and serious memory gaps. What is the pleasure of including memory problems in a thriller or a mystery? This is not in the first person, but we’re learning about what’s happening largely through his understanding, but there are huge gaps in it.
Child: There are. Over the years, talking to to guys like you at you know conferences and literary events, a lot of people have said to me that one of the things they like best about the books is they like to think along with Reacher, they like to be presented with this seemingly impossible problem, and they like to see how Reacher goes about peeling back the layers until finally he figures out what’s going on. So by messing with Reacher’s memory, it just adds another layer of complication to that process of Reacher finding out what’s going on. If he knew where he was at the beginning and if he knew how he got there, he would be several steps ahead in terms of figuring out who the bad guys were, what their scheme was, and what he needed to do to put it right. But he doesn’t know any of those things. So it just makes his challenge that much greater, and hopefully the experience of thinking along with him but much more enjoyable.
Miller: When people say [they] like to do that, how often do they tell you that they actually got there before the reveal of what Reacher has figured out? I ask this because I almost never do. He is simply a smarter character than I am as a reader.
Child: That’s a really interesting point, because we do sometimes hear that. Quite often people will say “oh yeah, I had it figured out on page 20″ or whatever.
Miller: Do you believe them?
[Laughter]
Child: Well, the interesting thing about how my brother set out writing these books and how I’ve continued, is that actually we don’t plan them, we don’t outline them, we don’t follow a script at all. So the thing is that on page 20, we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know who the bad guy is or what’s happening. If people really had figured it out, then you know I’d love to know what they think the lottery numbers are gonna be.
Miller: I’ve heard both of you say that before, and it actually is truly mystifying. How do you write a thriller, a mystery, a crime novel … I don’t think Reacher fits neatly in any one genre, and genres are meant to be exploded anyway, I suppose. But how do you write something where it is a puzzle and you don’t know what the picture is, for which you’re making pieces?
Child: What we do is we start off essentially with a feeling. We wanna start off by saying what do we want this next book to feel like? Is it gonna be a claustrophobic book where everything’s happening in one restricted place? Do we want it to be a hectic book, maybe on the streets of New York with everything bustling around, and chaos, and noise, and sound. Do we want it to be a lonely book, Reacher out on his own, figuring something out? Do we want him to be with a group of people, like some of the prequels when he’s back with his army buddies? What do we want it to feel like?
And then, generally from there, we’ll try to pick an image of some kind. A good example of that was the book that we did called “Better Off Dead,” where we had this picture of this huge barren landscape with a single tree. I don’t know where that came from; it popped into my head one day. And I had the idea “what if the tree is the only living thing in sight and someone has somehow crashed their car into it?”
So what you’re then doing is you’re establishing, you’re either directly asking or you are implying a question. Who was just driving that car? How did they come to crash into that tree? Or in this new book, how did Reacher get into that darkened room, who brought him there, what are they doing? You prime the reader with a question. Humans, I believe, are hardwired. If they’re presented with a question, we must find the answer, and that’s why we turn the pages so that we will keep going until we discover.
And there’s two ways that you can proceed towards revealing the answer to that question. You can plan it all out in advance. Or you can distribute that planning into little tiny chunks that you do as you’re writing. And there’s not a right or a wrong answer. It depends enormously on your own preference and your own personality. Lee really started the distributed planning way, simply because he feels if he had an outline written and all he had to do was expand that outline, he’d find it boring. So every day, when he sat down to work, he wouldn’t be excited about it. And if you’re not excited when you sit down to write, I don’t think the excitement comes out in the finished book either.
Miller: That was your brother. What about you? Do you feel the same way?
Child: Well, I’ve adapted somewhat. Because when I was writing some of those previous books that you kindly mentioned, particularly the ones that were set in Birmingham, Alabama, I had a thing going where I had three separate storylines that would intertwine. And I had decided ahead of time … and a lot of decisions when you write books are really kind of arbitrary, they’re just what you feel like.
Miller: And then you’re stuck with them.
Child: Yeah exactly, you feel like doing it a particular way for some reason or maybe even you might have a reason for, which turns out not to even be valid. But you set off down a certain path. And that path for those books that I set off on was I didn’t want there to be consecutive chapters dealing with the same of the three storylines. I wanted to always be one after the other. So I had to put a certain amount of planning into making sure that that didn’t happen. So I did plan those a little more.
When we started working together with Reacher, the first one we did together was “The Sentinel.” And he’d always said that he didn’t plan, he didn’t outline. And I always thought “you know, he’s exaggerating, he probably does secretly have an idea.” So we got to the end of the first scene, we worked on it until we were happy with it. And then I said to him “OK, what happens next?” And he said “no idea.” And I was like “no really, you must, come on.”
Miller: “You can tell me, I’m writing it with you!” [Laughter]
Child: Exactly. But no, he really didn’t. And I think, as I’ve worked with him more and as I’ve started working without him now, I’ve tried to impose a little bit more planning on the Reachers – and it has not worked. I’m a very visual person. I always think of things as pictures in my head. And it seems to me that if you’re doing an outline – and I don’t know if there’s anyone here who would agree with this or disagree – it’s as if you are drawing a map. It’s like you’re looking down at a landscape and you’re imagining walking from one corner to the other corner, and you’re imagining what twists and turns you might take as you go on that journey. You’re looking down on it and you’re looking at it from some distance.
So when you come to the actual writing, it’s as if you’re no longer looking down, you’re now looking ahead. You’re actually on that map that you’ve created and you’re walking through it. You’re seeing it completely differently. What you see as you walk through that forest is different from if you’re looking down at the top of the trees. So the experience is completely different.
Also, if you have just made some tiny mistakes when you’re putting that outline together, you might be one degree off at each decision you make, pretty soon those one degrees add up and they become 180 degrees. And you find that you’re actually heading in completely the wrong direction. So then you’ve either committed to that path and you’re stuck, or you have to throw all of that away and start again. I hate having to waste anything like that, it’s difficult. So I don’t wanna do that.
Miller: Is there also a moment when you realize as the writer, “oh, this is what happened, this is who did it, this is what Reacher is chasing”? Is there sometimes a moment when it clicks into place for you?
Child: Absolutely. That’s really normally a culmination of several moments that build to that. In the scenario that we’re talking about with this book, Reacher wakes up in this darkened room, he’s strapped to this table. It’s probably not a big spoiler to say that he escapes.
[Laughter]
Miller: I mean, it’s probably not a spoiler to say that he survives and thrives by the end of the book.
Child: Exactly, exactly, which is one feature of writing a series.
Miller: But I paused there because I thought, is he gonna hit me for this?
Child: No, no no. It’s no surprise to say Reacher escapes. But having escaped from this room, what does he do next? And I find that if you have decided ahead of time “oh well, he’ll go and do such and such,” there’s a high possibility that you miss something that could have been better, or you accidentally send him on a path that you realize he just wouldn’t have done that.
Miller: We’ve talked a lot about Reacher and we’re gonna talk a lot more about Reacher. But I’m curious about his foes. Because Reacher is almost always the biggest, strongest, not necessarily fastest but most physically smart person in any room he’s in. He’s, I think, always in the end, the smartest. He’s a superhuman, he’s a superman. How do you think about the villains?
Child: Well, the villains are absolutely critical. Because Reacher is so capable, as you’ve rightly explained. So, in order for the book to seem balanced, you have to have a villain who is worthy of Reacher. You’ve really got to put some thought into that. And one of the problems that it can easily create, we call it villain inflation. Because say you write a book where you have a villain who is going to explode a nuclear bomb in New York City, right? Reacher stops them. But then what does the villain in the next book do? Does he explode two nuclear bombs in Portland? Then is it four, is it eight? You’ve got to be careful that you don’t get dragged into this procedure that will then lead to just things being implausible and ridiculous.
One thing we always try to do is make an element of the villain just something that is personally obnoxious. He’s gonna be a bully or he’s gonna victimize people in some horrible way, so that you feel on a small scale, not some “the world is gonna be destroyed” type scale … You know this person because you’ve had a boss like that, or you’ve had a neighbor like that, or you’ve had an ex like that, something that just on a personal level makes your skin crawl so that you can’t wait for Reacher to dispatch the guy.
Miller: It’s interesting that you put it in terms of the reader’s desires, because to me it also is directly connected to Reacher’s own inclinations. Clearly, he would want to stop a dirty bomb from exploding in the middle of Times Square. But I think he would want just as much to punish a bully. It seems like that is at the core of his particular sense of justice, a more powerful person treating somebody who’s less powerful in a bad way. And we hear it all the time from his experiences dealing with bullies as a kid or his mom’s experience. It’s deep in his psyche, about not liking bullies. So it’s not just us as readers, it’s his own inclinations, I think.
Child: Absolutely. And that really comes from Lee and me. You can’t help the hand that you’re dealt. And we both, for some reason, were both dealt this hand that if we encounter a bully, we have no choice, we have to do something about it. We have got ourselves in so much trouble over the years as a result of this.
Miller: Still? What are examples?
Child: Still now, yeah. Well, you come across somebody on the street, on a train. I was in England a few years ago. I was on a train going down to Bristol. A stupid example really, but I was sitting in this carriage … Another thing we share in common with Reacher is we both are completely addicted to coffee. So at a certain point I got up because I needed to go get a cup of coffee. And I saw down at the other end of the carriage, there were a bunch of guys all sitting in their seats, heads down, noses buried in books or newspapers. And there was a guy harassing a woman who was sitting on her own, just absolutely harassing her, would not leave her alone. She was trying to stay very calm and kept saying to him “do not want to talk to you, please leave me alone, please go away.” He wasn’t listening, these other people were just hiding.
So I went down and I said to him “she’s asked you to leave her alone, that’s what you need to do.” And he said, “well what are you gonna do about it?” And I knew we were about five minutes away from Birmingham New Street Station, so I said “There’s two options: You can either leave her alone like she’s asked you to do, or you can leave the train.” And he says “are you gonna make me?” You might have noticed there’s a Reacher book called “Make Me.”
Miller: This entire story sounds like a Reacher story. Even just saying “there are two options.”
[Laughter]
Child: And so I threw him off the train. Afterwards I thought “God, what a stupid thing to have done, he could’ve … "
Miller: Wait, you toss that out like it’s like a standard thing. But you literally picked him up and threw him off the train?
Child: Yes.
[Audience applause]
Miller: The reason I’m pausing is, as evidenced by those other guys who were pretending not to notice what was happening, stuck in their books or their newspapers, I think that’s not uncommon. I think there’s a lot of fear that they would be hurt if they step in. You weren’t scared?
Child: Well, not in the moment. We just have this sort of mental deficiency where you don’t think about the sensible thoughts, like you might get hurt, he might have a knife, you might get arrested afterwards. It just doesn’t occur to you. It’s just in that moment, you’re a little kid on the playground at school again, and somebody’s doing something wrong and they have to be stopped. That’s what Reacher is all about, and that’s where it comes from.
Miller: Do you remember the first time that you read a Reacher book? Was it before “Killing Floor” had come out?
Child: Yes, that was back in the mid ‘90s. Lee, this is a similar thing – he was working at a commercial TV station in England called Granada TV. And when he joined, it was just a magnificent place to work. They made some incredible shows. “Brideshead Revisited,” “Cracker,” “Jewel in the Crown,” just some wonderful, wonderful TV. But then there was a corporate takeover, some new people came in who only cared about making everything cheap. So the whole place started to go to hell in a handbasket. And one of the things that they did to make it easier to get rid of people and to dumb down the quality of the content was they started out by picking on the union organizers, and got rid of all of them.
So my brother became the shop steward. And it was inevitable that people were going to lose their jobs, so he wanted them to at least get a fair settlement when they left, he wanted to try to slow down that process. So he really got targeted. They went after him, and after a couple of years they got rid of him as well. He was left with no job, and he was then blackballed in the industry so he couldn’t go work for any other TV company. And he made the really, really smart decision that, in order to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, he would write a book. Because everybody knows that is a surefire path to fame and fortune, right? [Laughter]
So he sits down. I still do this now – we always start the new book on September 1, because he got fired on August 31. So September 1, he went to WHSmith, the big stationary store in the UK, and he bought a few pads of paper and a pencil. And he still has the pencil, it’s about this long now. And he wrote “Killing Floor.”
And then the thing was, that by the time he finished it, he’s thinking, “OK, what’s next? I’m gonna have to try and find an agent, and all of the steps that you have to go through in publishing.” But he was a little nervous cause he’s thinking “is this book any good, is this gonna be good enough to make a living with?” I was the only one in the family who really reads much, and who really knows about crime fiction because I read it all the time. So he sent it to me and said “will you read this and let me know what you think?”
Miller: You were the first reader?
Child: First reader. I’m the oldest Reacher fan in the world. [Laughter]
Sometimes get a book, maybe it’s from your favorite author or maybe it’s one that’s recommended, and you have that feeling of absolute excitement about reading it? This is the opposite, this is absolute terror about reading it, because I’m thinking what if this is no good? All of his hopes are riding on this book. I’m gonna be the one who has to call him and say “sorry, it’s terrible, do something else.” And then what am I gonna have to do, am I gonna have to send him food parcels? [Laughter] Am I gonna have to let him sleep on my spare room floor?
So I was terrified when I read it. But of course, I needn’t have worried because it was wonderful. And it was the start of everything that’s come since then.
Miller: And it’s remarkably fully formed. Reacher is Reacher from the beginning.
So you liked it. I’m not gonna ask if you thought that it would turn into what it’s become, because it’s a kind of one in a million literary success. But did you think that it would find an audience?
Child: Absolutely, I really did. What Lee always says, advice to writers, is don’t ever try to chase a bandwagon. Once you can see what the bandwagon is, you’ve already too late to get on it. What you have to do is write a book that you would enjoy reading. Because then if at least one person will like it, hopefully more will. The only question is how many more? And that is beyond your control, that is just luck. You just have to roll those dice and hope that more than a few people will enjoy it.
I knew that people were gonna like it. I had no idea how many people were gonna like it.
Miller: More than 100 million, is that number right?
Child: That’s the number that we hear. No idea.
Miller: Too many to count?
Child: Yeah.
Miller: Can you tell us about, what I’ve read is it was a car ride, when your brother broached the idea of you taking over. Is that true, you’re actually in a car?
Child: Yeah, that is true. And it turns out that he planned the whole thing really deviously.
Miller: Of course he did.
Child: You know when you look back and you think “how could I not have seen this coming?” I really didn’t. The last book that I’d written in the janitor series is called “Too Close to Home.” It was launching and I was having a launch event. This was pre-COVID. Luckily, we’re back here doing this in person again, but there was a big gap during COVID. And it was 2019. We were still doing launch events in person. We live in Southern Wyoming, so the nearest big bookstore is in Denver, Colorado. So I said to him, “do you wanna come down to my launch event?” And he said sure. So part of the setup that I didn’t notice happening, he said, “well, let’s go in my car.” He smokes like a chimney and I won’t let him smoke in my car. He said, “let’s go in my car so I can smoke.” So it seemed plausible, right?
We drive down, we do the event in Denver. And then on the way back, he says, “OK, I drove down, you drive home.” So I’m driving, it’s January, it’s late at night, Northern Colorado going into Wyoming. We have what they call a ground blizzard, where you’ve got snow and ice blowing, horizontal right in front of you, up to about 30 feet – you cannot see a thing. It’s horrendous to drive in. And he’d anticipated this. He figured if I’m driving in this kind of weather, most of my brain will be focused on just not crashing the car.
Out of nowhere [he] says, “yeah, I’m thinking of retiring.” And it wasn’t my finest moment, because if I was a nice brother, I would have said to him, “absolutely, yes, you should retire.” He’d written 24 Reachers at this point. He’d brought so much pleasure to so many readers, he’d helped so many authors and other people in the industry. I should have said to him, “yes, retire, enjoy the fruits of your labor, have a good time.”
But instead, I said, “well, wait a minute, what about Reacher?!”
Miller: “What about us? You owe us more of this literary production! So go back to your room and keep writing.”
Child: Exactly.
[Laughter]
Miller: But then he said, “no, I’d like you to take over?”
Child: Yeah, yeah.
Miller: What went through your mind?
Child: Well, several things did. Part of it, it sounded like a challenge, would I be up to it? And again, I’ve got into so much trouble over the years with anything that sounded like a challenge. My father had this figured out so well when I was a little kid. If there was anything he thought that was maybe a bit of a stretch for me, he’d always say, “Oh, Andrew I’ll never be able to do that.” And that was it, I had to do it twice and then buy the t-shirt. The challenge part was big.
But the other thing about it was, I wasn’t being entirely flippant when I said I was the original Reacher fan. I know what it is like to wait a year for the next book, how much you look forward to that, how exciting that is. And he always told this little story, he said that the final book was gonna be called “Die Lonely,” and Reacher was gonna bleed to death on the floor of a filthy motel room bathroom somewhere.
Miller: Couldn’t he just decide he wants to stay in one place and open up a B&B somewhere?
[Laughter]
Child: Well that was plan B. He could buy a dog and retire.
When we had this idea to start working together and we had to talk to the publishers about it, I had to talk to the ones in London and they took me out to lunch. They were very nice. They were very friendly, very polite, but you could tell that there was a question coming. And finally it arrives – they wanted to know what plans I had for the series. And I just couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I’ve already got the first one outlined. What’s gonna happen is that Reacher is going to be leaving his therapy session and he’s gonna be in a little bit of a hurry to get back to his minivan, so that he can drive to Home Depot and collect his new lawnmower.”
[Laughter]
Miller: I hope they laughed.
Child: Well, there was a moment of absolute horror, until they realized I wasn’t serious.
Miller: It does get to something I’ve been wondering, which is how much leeway do you have? I said earlier that it seems like Reacher came almost fully formed from the beginning. Readers will know all of his quirks, that he has a toothbrush that is essentially the extent of his possessions. He loves black coffee. The one thing that we know he likes aesthetically is blues. We know a lot about him, and he’s a drifter. How much can you change that? Obviously, he’s not gonna, in the novels, open a B&B. But do you have any leeway at this point to add aspects that would, in anything close to even a moderate way, change what we think we know about him?
Child: Well, the thing is, I don’t really see it as whether I would have leeway. Because when I first started writing under my old name, Lee of course was already established. So I phoned him up and asked for his advice. And when you’re an author, you get to go to lots of author events, book conferences, you meet other authors, agents and booksellers. And people get very caught up in the insular world of publishing. And that tends to be what they think about. How do you look good in front of the other authors? How do you get on a good panel? All these things.
But he said to me, “There are three priorities if you’re an author: The readers, the readers, and the readers. That’s what matters.” So really it’s not what I wanna do with Reacher that counts, it’s what you want me to do with Reacher that counts.
Miller: And I’m glad you phrase it that way. How much leeway do your readers want?
Child: I talk to as many readers as possible: “Tell me what you think, tell me if I’m wrong.” But the thing with Reacher, the thing that we do which is kind of counter to the rules of writing and the rules of having a series, is that we don’t have character development with Reacher, we do not. And that is a deliberate choice. As a Reacher fan myself and from Reacher fans I’ve spoken with, I don’t believe that people want him to change. I think that there’s a kind of transaction, that you guys work hard all year long, your hard earned money on the new Reacher, you want to know what you’re getting. Our father – he was Irish so he could get away with it – had this expression, “the same, only different.” You don’t want it to be identical, but you want the same elements.
Lee actually describes it as being like if you ever watch the Winter Olympics, you know there’s ice dancing. If you want to enter that competition, there are certain things that you must do, there are certain moves that you must make, certain things that you must have in your performance in order to get the marks for technical merit. But the marks that you get for artistic merit come from how you combine those. So there are certain things you must have. It’s probably not a big surprise to find out that Reacher is gonna have some fights, he’s gonna solve some puzzles, and that he’s gonna come out on top.
Miller: There may be a woman he meets. Not always.
Child: Not always, but often. There are certain things that you expect to see in the book. How they’re organized, how they’re combined, what order they come in, that is going to be different. And that’s where it becomes difficult because after 29 books, making sure that you do it in a way that still seems fresh and different is really, really important.
Miller [narrating]: Andrew had previously said that in his solo novel writing career, he had to work to not sound like his older brother. Now, he has to actually emulate him. I asked what he had been trying to avoid before that.
Child: Aside from the character of Reacher, one of the things that’s very distinctive about these books is the voice, the way that it sounds in your head when you read it. And that comes from the vocabulary, it comes from the sentence structure, it comes from the way that the paragraphs work, all of those things. So when I was writing my own books, I would try to avoid some of those short sentences that are used, some of the way that the repetition is used to build and to echo certain words.
Miller: Was that a challenge because it naturally was the way you might have written? Or more that you’d read so much of your brother’s writing that it had sort of just entered your own consciousness?
Child: I think it was really [that] we’re very similar people and we react to pretty much every situation in exactly the same way. The same things make us angry, the same things happy. Our wives will always say, “oh my god, they’re the same person,” because one of us will do something ridiculous, my wife will call his and she’ll say, “oh yeah, I know, it’s the same with … "
So the writing style, the way we express ourselves is similar. I had to consciously avoid it before. And then it’s one of those things you don’t necessarily anticipate immediately. I knew it was gonna be a challenge. But it took a little longer to adapt than I’d kind of hoped that it would. I had to rewrite a lot more in the first ones that we worked on together.
Miller: Am I right that the new book, “In Too Deep,” is the first one where basically it’s all you?
Child: Lee, originally his idea was he wanted to retire, and that’s why he wanted me to join him. But then when we talked about how we were gonna do it, it seemed sensible to work together on the first few. So that’s what we did. But now, he’s really at the point where he does want to just lie on his couch and read. So it was time for the transition to continue.
Miller: So now that it’s you, do you still call your brother up or go to his house and say, “what would Reacher do in this situation?” Or is that done?
Child: Well, that is just something that we have been doing for fun. When I started working with him, we’d been doing it for a quarter of a century. Now, we’ve been doing it for more than 30 years. We would always just sit around together whenever we got together, we would just talk about Reacher as if he was in the room with us. He would be like an imaginary extra brother. We always said it’s a good job there’s no psychologists here, because we’d be in big trouble.
So we would always talk about him. Writers are constantly daydreaming. You’re constantly saying, “What if this happened? What if that happened? Wouldn’t it be funny if this happened?” And it’s just an extension of that – what would Reacher do about this or about that? So really, the difference is that I just have to write it down now as opposed to doing it purely for fun.
I don’t call him up specifically because there’s something in the book I want to talk to him about, but we’ll just be chatting and I’ll be going, “oh yeah, this is what Reacher was doing today.”
Miller: As you’re saying all that, I think that is the experience of Reacher fans. He becomes a little voice every now and then. I say this for myself and other people I know who love these books, we say, “what would Reacher do in this situation,” or “I’m gonna Reacher this.” He sort of gets into your psyche a little bit.
Child: He does. He was actually quoted in the New Zealand parliament once.
Miller: In what context?
Child: There was a debate over some policy. And it was a policy that was designed to kind of protect from some future danger, so some of the politicians weren’t wanting to spend money on it because it wasn’t necessarily going to happen. So the person proposing the bill said, “no, we need to think like Reacher, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.”
[Laughter]
Miller: Alright, in that context of politics, we’re just a couple of days away from a U.S. presidential election. Does Jack Reacher vote?
Child: There have been a couple of references in a couple of the stories where Reacher said something. Some politician is mentioned in the paper or something, and there’s been mentions that Reacher hadn’t voted for him, which I took to mean that he probably hadn’t voted at all. It would be very difficult for Reacher pragmatically to vote, because he doesn’t have a home, he doesn’t have a registered address.
Miller: He doesn’t have a valid current ID, right?
Child: He doesn’t. That’s right.
Miller: Last I heard he has a passport that’s no longer valid.
Child: Yeah, it’s expired.
Miller: So he can’t vote. Even setting aside the legal logistics, he seems very mistrustful of government at this point. I don’t know that he would want anybody to represent him.
Child: Well, he is mistrustful, but not in a kind of paranoid, prepper way. He’s somebody who has a fair dose of cynicism in his character. He’s somebody that spent his professional career investigating crimes, which puts you in contact with people whose motivation is not good. And every time we meet him, he’s involved with somebody who has some nefarious schemes.
Miller: He has unbelievably bad luck.
Child: He does, yeah.
Miller: But the people who are being bullied around him have unbelievably good luck.
Child: They do, they do.
Miller: To me, one of the magic tricks of Jack Reacher as a character is that if you had told me, in kind of bullet form, some of the aspects of his personality and his proclivities, I would see him as a kind of conservative fantasy. He is a vigilante who goes around and metes out justice on his own terms, not worrying about due process or the judicial system. But he doesn’t come off as that. And this is the magic trick that I’m wondering how you pull off, how you create a kind of nonpartisan character, who I think is appreciated by a pretty broad swath of the American electorate? How do you do that?
Child: Well, I think it comes down to, you can look at Reacher at two on two levels. One level is the contemporary, the 20th or 21st century former soldier who now has no fixed abode, wanders the country and has weird traits like only having a toothbrush. You can look at him in the here and now.
But you can also zoom out from that and you can look at him as really the latest iteration of an eternal archetype, which is the knight errant. We’ve all come across this. This exists in pretty much every culture on every continent, way back to the time that humans first started telling stories. Humans are fascinating when it comes to language because pretty quickly after we learned how to communicate facts, we almost immediately learned how to communicate fiction as well, which is really strange in a way. So in our fiction, we have always had these characters that we depend on. You can look at it in the Japanese ronin, the European medieval tales, the westerns in the United States, the Icelandic myths, all the way back to ancient Greece. Even if you think about it, in religion, the savior who appears out of nowhere, fixes everything and leaves again. That’s what the knight errant does.
And the critical part of the knight errant actually … People focus often on him arriving. That’s certainly the most difficult part in the storytelling, because you have to have that coincidence that puts Reacher where the bad guys are and make that plausible. So you have him arrive, you have him fix the problem, which is kind of the fun part. But he always leaves. And that is critical because what if he didn’t, right? Imagine if he arrived and he fixed your problem. That’s great. But what if he moves in next door? What are you gonna do? Are you gonna have to mow his lawn every weekend for the rest of your life? Are you gonna have to buy him coffee every morning? It would be a disaster. It would change the experience completely. So leaving is absolutely critical. One of the reasons that he appeals universally is the fact that he is an extension of that universal paradigm that, for as long as humans have been able to tell stories, we have craved.
The second thing is that Reacher is completely data driven. He is completely dispassionate. If he is presented with a problem, it doesn’t matter what other people think, it doesn’t matter what other people say, it doesn’t matter who tries to influence him. All that matters are the facts that he can see and that he can discern for himself. Some of the things over the years that people have latched on to, the fact that in Reacher books there are always really strong female characters. That was unusual back in the mid ‘90s when Reacher started. But the reason was Reacher is data driven. He looks around himself, he sees what women are actually like, that they are strong and resilient, and therefore that is how they appear in the books, that is how he treats them. And it’s the same for any group of people, any phenomenon, any social issue that he encounters. The buzz, the hype, what people say on social media doesn’t matter. The facts are what matters. He drills down into those facts and he draws logical conclusions that you can’t really argue with.
Miller: Do you see it as a bug or a feature that the initial creator, and now the current writer of Jack Reacher novels, that they’re British?
Child: I think it actually is something that helps us enormously. Because we are immigrants. We are not native born Americans. So as foreigners, we see things differently. It’s the same if you guys came to England right now, there would be things that I don’t notice because they were that way since I was a kid and I never thought about them. And you’ll be saying, “Wait a minute, why are the light switches on the outside of the bathrooms? This is weird!” There are things that you would see in England that I don’t notice.
Likewise, there are things here that I noticed that just fades into the background because it’s always been that way. So I think that it doesn’t have to be an English person writing in America, it could be any kind of a foreigner riding anywhere, you notice things differently. I think that if you are trying to write a scene or a or a passage that comes across as distinctive, having those little details that people think, “Oh yeah, that is right. I hadn’t thought about it, but yes, I recognize that now.” I think that makes it very powerful and I think that seeing things through an outsider’s eyes is helpful.
I think also that helps with the appeal that Reacher has universally because we didn’t grow up attached to … In England there are three parties, here there are two. We didn’t grow up with any loyalty to one or the other. A lot of people you talk to: “My family’s always been X or my family’s always been Y.” And it’s a big part of how they approach things. We don’t have that, we are complete outsiders. There’s nothing that draws us one way or the other.
Miller: I want to turn to the movie and television versions of Reacher. As probably many folks here know, first there were two Tom Cruise movies. They got a lot of flack just basically for his body size. Reacher is 6′5″, 250 [pounds] or something. Tom Cruise is 5′7″, I think. But you’ve said that that’s missing something, that it’s an unfair critique. What do you like about the Tom Cruise versions?
Child: Yeah, the movies did catch a lot of heat, and a lot of that was focused on the obvious thing which was Tom’s size. I think that there’s really two things missing from that assessment. One of them is the fact that, sure enough, we can’t get away from how big he is. But as an actor, he captured a real essence of Reacher. He could see that world-weariness in Reacher: “I’m not looking for trouble. But if you start some, I’m sure as hell finish.”
There’s a scene in the first of the movies where Reacher’s alone in the diner, trying to have his burger. There are six local bad guys who have been sent to deal with Reacher, they need to get him outside so that they can beat him up, they think. So they try to provoke him by sending in this woman to aggravate him. And you can just see Reacher as he puts his knife and fork down, and looks at her. He absolutely captures the, “God, here we go again. I’m gonna give you fair warning.” Because, as you mentioned, his mother insisted before you beat anyone up, you’ve got to give them the chance to walk away. So he tries to give her the chance to walk away. She won’t take it, so all bets are off. And he captured that brilliantly. He has that ability that some actors have to communicate without words. The way he looks, his expression, the way he looks at the camera – fantastic.
But I think a bigger problem with the movies is back to what we were saying about people liking to think along with Reacher. You want to see Reacher presented with this insurmountable problem that somehow he manages to figure out, manages to peel back the layers until he solves it. That takes a lot of time. We’ve got 100,000 words to do it in a Reacher novel. In a movie, you’ve got about 90 usable minutes. And you simply can’t go into the depth, you can’t. And so the discoveries that he makes and the conclusions he draws have a tendency to come over a little cartoonish, because you don’t have time to follow them through.
But in the TV, you’ve got what, eight hours? You can explore all of that, you can explore every nuance. And you can use the time to create pace. Everybody talks about thrillers, pace being really, really important. And the mistake that some people make is they think that what you have to do is make everything fast to maintain the pace. Well, I think that if everything is fast, nothing is fast. You must have slow bits to contrast with the fast bits, else you don’t notice that the fast bits are fast. And in the movie, you lose that, because there’s not time. You don’t have time to spend on the quiet parts, everything has to be loud.
But in the TV you can, you can have a little nuances, and the weird little quirks of Reacher’s character, when he’s musing about how such and such is a prime … If Reacher was here, he’d be counting how many people were in the audience and working out whether it was a prime number or not. Weird things like that that he does that you can’t do in a movie because there’s no time, because you have to move on to the next car chase or the next fight. But in the TV, you can.
Miller: I read a month-and-a-half ago that the army buddy, Frances Neagley, who was in the first two seasons of the Reacher TV show, that there might be a spinoff, a new series dedicated to her. Is that gonna happen?
Child: I’m told that it is gonna happen, yeah. And that’s an interesting thing, because Neagley … Well, we always have this issue because, to us, if you see something written down, you have in your head a way of pronouncing it [and] we always think of her as “Nee-gly.” But in the TV, they call her “Nee-ly.”
But she actually wasn’t in the first book, she doesn’t appear until later. But one of the features of the Reacher books is that you have very few recurring characters. That was a deliberate choice that Lee made at the very beginning, that he didn’t want there to be that kind of soap opera element of an established cast.
Miller: But soap opera is an important word that goes against, I think, one of the standard tenets of TV shows where you bring people into your homes – people plural.
Child: Exactly, and that was the concern. When they were getting ready to make the Reacher series, they were very excited about doing it. But the only concern was there aren’t any recurring characters. So how are the audience gonna react? They made the decision to bring Neagley into season one of the TV, even though she didn’t feature in the book, in order to make her a recurring character. And the combination of the script writers and the actress, they have done such an amazing job of bringing her to life on the screen that people have then had the appetite for a separate series focused on her.
Miller: Give the audience what they want.
Child: Exactly.
Miller: Andrew, thanks very much.
Child: Thank you.
[Audience applause]
Miller: That was Andrew Child, talking about the Jack Reacher series at the 2024 Portland Book Festival from Literary Arts.
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