Lee Child: 'I'll never be without Jack Reacher'

With his famous Jack Reacher character now in the hands of his brother Andrew, British author Lee Child is tight-lipped about the subject of his new book.

“My brother is really writing the books now, but I have started writing something, I'm not going tell anybody what it is right now, but yeah, it's a habit, it's something that you build you your life around, it's structured in a certain way and I guess I'm still suffering from that,” Child tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

So, is his latest tale Reacher-related?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we would say that, I can't say another word at this moment.”

Child is one of the world's leading thriller writers. It's said one of his Reacher novels is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. Two of his books were turned into films starring Tom Cruise.

His most recent is autobiographical - Reacher: The Stories Behind the Stories is a collection of 24 reflections on Child's life and work across over three decades.

The book is intimate, akin to a diary, he says, giving readers an insight into where he was at as he wrote the Reacher novels.

“I just decided I would tell people where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking, how I was feeling in the months that it took to write the book and if possible where the idea came from or where certain features of it came from, just like a very personal diary and description and I hope it does interest the fans.

“I hope it is a bit of a guide to the novels, it certainly explains the reasons behind them, and maybe also a bit of how to, because people think writing is so mysterious and it really isn't, it's a job like everybody else's job. You go to your office, you sit down, you do your work.”

Child sat down to write his first-ever Reacher novel in pencil - the stub of which he still has.

“I moved this year and so it's in a box somewhere, but believe me, it's safe. That's a very precious little artefact... a writer has a relationship with a pencil like that, that wrote a whole book, that built everything for me.”

There’s little of the precious tool left now, he says.

“You say 'pencil' and you expect the full-length thing, right? Well, imagine that about maybe one-sixth of as long. It's been sharpened so many times. I can barely hold it.”

Child has recently moved back to his native UK after years living in the US. Life there became too polarised, he says.

“I live for pleasure, and there was no pleasure to be had in America this year, so I left.”

The move was about more than just politics, he says.

“I can take the rough and tumble of politics. I don't expect my party to win all the time, but you know the unpleasantness, I'm just too old and too tired to deal with it.”

Britain is currently in better shape than the US, Child says.

“But every country should learn a lesson that these things happen first of all gradually and then suddenly.

“I know that Britain has issues with some of the same type of talking points as America, but so do plenty of countries in Europe.

“So does Australia, so does New Zealand probably, and so we need to be very aware that discourse is great, but it's got to be true, otherwise things get bad very, very fast.”

Child shares a kind of rootlessness with Jack Reacher, he says.

“He's not tied to anywhere. He doesn't belong to anywhere. Why did I write him that way? Well, probably because secretly that's what I'd like to be, and I've loved it.

“I was in America for a long time without ever becoming a citizen because I didn't want to be a citizen of where I lived. I wanted always to be the outsider or the stranger; you learn so much more.”

While he may have handed over the Reacher reins to his brother, the character still lives within Child's mind.

“This character is not only in my head, but in lots of other people's heads. There has been, for centuries, the idea that there is a mysterious stranger out there who can help you when you need it. That has always existed in human narrative, and I think that we all imagine ourselves as either that person or getting help from that person.

“So I'll never be without Reacher, just like nobody is without their version of this character. The whole point of writing a book is that people read it, and the more the merrier. If lots of people are reading it, then the ownership of the character is actually theirs now, not mine anymore. The ownership has migrated outward.”