Author Jeff Abbott

A CONVERSATION WITH LEE CHILD

Photo © Sigrid Estrada

Lee Child is one of the top thriller writers in the world. His Jack Reacher series—finely honed novels about a nomadic ex-military policeman—have been bestsellers worldwide. A winner of the Anthony and Barry Awards, Lee grew up in England and now makes his home near New York City. Lee's novels have been called "addicting" (Denver Post) "gratifying" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) and "perfect" (Playboy).

Visit Lee's official site here.

Jeff: I mean this with great respect: I view you as the official contrarian in the mystery world, because some of your decisions re your writing career seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom: a hero with no supporting cast, a series with a different setting in each book, moving from first to third person. You've pulled this off with enormous talent and verve. Is this just who you are? Or were these conscious decisions?

Lee: Jeff, I'm loving this interview already. You say the nicest things. "Great respect ... enormous talent and verve..." Very kind words indeed. I don't deserve them at all. Yes, I am a contrarian by nature. But for me, all the decisions both conscious and subconscious were pulling in the exact same direction as the cussedness anyway. Initially I was aware that someone once said, "If you can see a bandwagon, it's already too late to jump aboard." And what I could see in the writers who had started just ahead of me were some truly great series, all of which were rooted in the traditional ways, with repertory casts, atmospheric locations, and so on. So what's a poor boy to do? Try to compete? I don't think so. That would have been a dumb choice. Growing up in England, I remember the early Sixties ... divide the entire male population of the British Isles aged 16 to 24 by four, and that was the exact number of Beatle clones trying to get a break. All are long forgotten. The ones that made it were the ones who carved out different niches of their own. So I was like, OK, Harry Bosch is a cop, so Reacher won't be ... Patrick and Angie are private eyes with an office and business cards, so Reacher won't be. People are writing hometown novels about LA or Boston or Chicago or Baltimore, so Reacher will be a footloose wanderer. And, happily, this is where the subconscious joined the conscious and the contrariness—that was exactly what I wanted anyway. I wanted a one-man show, where the one man was lonely, isolated, alienated, and rootless. So happily all the various imperatives were pointed in the same direction.

Jeff: Jack Reacher is a character who, at first glance, is pared down to the bone. Short name, no middle name, few ties, no possessions, a mind of great precision. Yet over the course of the series he has become the most complex continuing character in suspense fiction. Did you have a plan for Reacher, or did he just assert himself as you wrote each book?

Lee: At the beginning all my plans were incredibly short-term. I had just been fired and was broke and unemployed. And unemployable, because as well as my day (and night) job as a television director I had been a pain-in-the-ass union organizer with some real Reacher-style guerilla victories under my belt, and therefore nobody was lining up to hire me back.

Jeff: I'm almost afraid to picture your Reacher-style guerrilla tactics in network television.

Lee: Looking back, those were fun days, in a way. Management was very vulnerable to in-your-face confrontation. And they were very slow to catch on that while they worked nine-to-five Monday to Friday, we worked 24/7. So as soon as the last of them was out of the parking lot, I had SWAT teams ready to go. I trained the cleaners to check the trash baskets and tape together torn-up first drafts of memos. I had engineers copying their hard drives. We steamed open their mail. I was the best informed shop steward in the history of the union movement, believe me.

Jeff: But the most unpopular.

Lee: Easily. Therefore back then my idea of a long-term plan was that my family should eat tomorrow. But looking back now from a perspective nine years later I see that Reacher's success comes from the fact that I didn't really invent him at all. He's a 1990s-eye-view of a very basic character in the history of human narrative. He's the knight-errant that has been around more or less unchanged for thousands of years. You can trace a direct line backward from Reacher to the Golden Age detectives, to the Zane Grey Westerns, to the medieval chivalric sagas, to the great Norse poems, all the way back to the Odyssey, and then presumably way back to where we lived in caves and storytelling was oral and we don't have records. It's all the same character type. And because of that long history we have to assume that type is very important somehow in terms of human psychology. There must be a deeply atavistic human need to hear about characters like that. Maybe there's a permanent desire for the comfort and the consolation and the elusive sense of justice that their deeds represent. And because of that importance, those characters work much better when they're pared down to the bone. Too many details would get in the way of the myth.

Jeff: Myth theory is huge in film writing. Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars," Ripley in the "Alien" movies, Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz"—they are all characters who are formed and work within a highly disciplined myth structure of a heroic journey. Do you think your work in TV influenced your choices about Reacher?

Lee: No question ... TV and movies. Han Solo is maybe a better mythic prototype if we're talking Star Wars. He's straight out of the WW2 movies I watched as a kid. I think there are two basic myth structures, both of them dating back to our days as cave dwellers. There's the huddled-community-looking-outward-and-being-scared paradigm ... way back we had the smoky fire burning in the cave mouth and we could hear the chilling howl of the night predators ... that structure shows up today in the serial killer novels, and movies like "The Birds." Then there's the paradigm where one of the cave dwellers ventures out and returns days or months or years later with fantastic tales of what lies beyond the hill. That's the mythic-journey stuff, and it's where Reacher loosely fits.

Jeff: One of Reacher's most admirable qualities is his bravery, and it makes me think of a quote that's become popular on the Internet from (for lack of a better term) a noted hippie:

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."—Ambrose Redmoon

Is this an apt observation for the kind of bravery Reacher has?

Lee: Maybe. Probably. Certainly it's a great quote. And certainly Reacher will always focus on what needs to be done, rather than potential obstacles in the way. But mostly—I think—I wrote Reacher the way he is as a kind of catharsis for myself and others at the time who were simply weary of feeling worried and uncertain. Don't forget that with the recent unemployment and so on I was in an unsettling situation and I wanted the vicarious thrill of hanging with a guy who just doesn't give a damn—a guy so physically and mentally self-confident that the chances of meeting a situation he needed to be afraid of were very remote.

Jeff: One of the few times Reacher is deeply afraid is in a terrific scene in Die Trying where he is crawling in a narrow mountain shaft, no flashlight, under a billion tons of rock, no guarantees that he won't get stuck and die a long, excruciating death. The scene was simultaneously very hard to read and impossible to put down, just because it is impossible to imagine anyone not badly shaken by such an experience. It made Reacher more human that despite his high kick-ass factor he could still be frightened in that kind of situation.

Lee: Everyone is vulnerable about something. And that's where the "Write what you know" thing comes in. In general I think "Write what you know" is terrible advice, because maybe three people in the world actually know stuff worth putting in a thriller. But in order to get real passion either positively or negatively, you need to "Write what you feel." I have a problem with claustrophobia—not small rooms or elevators, but situations so cramped you literally can't move. So to generate chills in the reader, I need to generate chills in myself, which is why I wrote that scene that way.

Jeff: Who were the writers you enjoyed growing up, and who do you think most influenced you?

Lee: To be strictly honest, all the regular mainstream people, with an inevitable UK bias, I guess. The first books without pictures that I had were by Enid Blyton. She (was she a she? or a sweatshop?) did a number of parallel series for kids that were a great introduction to the various genres—adventure, suspense, mystery.

Jeff: I sometimes think I was the only American kid who read Enid Blyton-our library was stuffed with her books.

Lee: Weren't they great? Then Capt. WE Johns, especially the Gimlet series. Then whatever my parents had around—can't remember authors or titles, but I can remember the stories ... pirates, explorers, the Empire and so on. Then Alistair Maclean. Then Robert Parker. I came late to John D MacDonald, but he was the biggest influence. For some reason I felt I could see the skeleton beneath the flesh of the Travis McGee series. They were like how-to guides for me.

Jeff: McGee, another knight-errant, perhaps the greatest of all. Plus, I agree, the MacDonald books are probably among the best-crafted in fiction. I often reach for one when I feel stuck or uninspired. I see how great those books are and it pushes me to go on and get over my problem.

Lee: I wouldn't dare do that if I was stuck. That would just make me feel worse. I usually grab one of my previous books. I say to myself, "See? You did it before, so you can do it again."

Jeff: You have the most fiercely loyal readers in fiction. Tell me what your readers have meant to you and why are they so devoted.

Lee: They mean everything to me. Not just because of the obvious sentiment and gratitude I feel toward them, but also because I have a Zen-like belief that a book is created as much by the reader as the writer. A book is a transaction. It needs to be written, then read, then it exists. Like the tree-falls-in-a-forest thing. (Or my current favorite, if a man speaks in a forest, and his wife isn't there to hear him, is he still wrong?)

Jeff: Fifty percent of the time, yes.

Lee: Only fifty? Can I spend some time with your wife? But what's fascinating to me is the way that characters like Jack Reacher migrate outward and pass from the writer's sole ownership to being community property. Why the loyalty? I couldn't really say. Clearly the affection is for the character rather than for me ... but that's a description, not an explanation. The really loyal readers tend to be women, and I have a theory that women are much more outraged by unfairness and injustice than men. And the arc of a typical Reacher story is that what starts out unfair ends up fair, big time. Maybe that's what they cherish. For a so-called "noir" or "hardboiled" writer my books aren't really very gray. There are good guys, and bad guys, and the good guys win. Count on it.

Jeff: You had to write Killing Floor before the unemployment ran out, right? So are you still a fast writer?

Lee: I guess I'll always be as fast as I need to be. Right now I'm in a comfortable pattern where I take six months to do a book, soup to nuts.

Jeff: That's really fast.

Lee: You think so? I'm not so sure ... because I feel that if for some reason I needed to do it in three months I'd be OK. Or two. I worked 18 years in live television where sometimes I would have spontaneous deadlines of five minutes or so. Once I wrote a crucial piece as the thirty-second end-credit sequence of the previous programme was playing. It went straight on the air. Not a novel-length piece, obviously, but you get the idea. I still live by those old maxims—some of them contradictory—like, "Do It Once And Do It Right" or "Don't Get It Right, Get It Written."

Jeff: You are a master of starting scenes in the middle of action without losing the reader. Was this always easy for you, and if not, is it easy now?

Lee: Mostly I write very instinctively, but the one rule I trust is that the first line is the most important line, the first paragraph, the first page. Most bookstore browsers check out the first page, and that's where you've got to hook them. Same principle for each subsequent chapter. You've got to start with action, or a question, or the promise of something imminent. So for me, it's not like that's a part of writing that may or may not be easy. It is writing. I don't really see how to do it any other way. You don't risk losing the reader. You lose the reader if you don't do it. There are always plenty of other books in the store or on the bedside table.

Jeff: The opening chapter in Persuader was, I think, one of the smartest first chapters ever, ranking up there with the opening of Geoffrey Household's classic Rogue Male or John D. MacDonald's Darker than Amber. How long did you work on that opening? How did it come to you?

Lee: Well, thanks for the outrageous compliments. That opening kind of ties in with the previous answer. In strict chronological terms, that book should have been constructed like this: Chapter One, Backstory Exposition; Chapter Two, Initial Action; Chapter Three, Off To The Races. But no way could I start with backstory exposition. So I realized that if I started with the initial action, I could hook the reader two ways—first, because action is always compelling, and second, because by doing it without previous explanation, there would be a huge "What the hell is happening here?" component ... which is always the fundamental question that drives a narrative forward. The big risk was that although Situation A is quickly revealed to actually be Situation Z, Situation A was in itself initially rather unattractive ... I knew long-time Reacher readers would stick around, but new readers might conclude, well hell, I don't like this guy at all, and throw the book at the wall before the reversal happens and the truth is revealed. But overall I think it worked.

Jeff: It did work. And I suspect new readers had the sense there was much more to Reacher—after all, he is saving a life at the beginning, that's our first impression of him. The momentum carries the reader to that end where the truth comes out.

Lee: And that truth certainly gave a big punch to the final line of the chapter. It was exactly the kind of "Oh My God" moment I love as a reader myself. I didn't really work on it very long. It seemed like the obvious way to do it. The only downside is that you can't do it again. It has to be a unique surprise. That's the thing about "good bits" in a series. They're one-time things.

Jeff: One area where I don't think you get enough praise is in dialogue. It's very fast, rat-a-tat, yet manages to show volumes about the characters who speak it.

Lee: I love the whole theory and practice of dialogue. Written dialogue in books is the furthest possible thing from natural, but the aim is to have people think, wow, that guy writes really natural dialogue. Real-life speech is broken up, incoherent, partial, repetitive, it stops and starts, changes direction, it's full of er and um sounds, and y'knows. In books people speak in complete coherent sentences. I don't even use final hyphens or ellipses. Yet by careful word choice and construction you can make speech seem very natural. The main thing for me is rhythm. The line has to sound good aloud, because then it sounds like it could be spoken. And rhythm and word order can suggest mood and accent and personality. I love doing it.

Jeff: You said in your NPR interview that you felt if you needed to research a book to write it, you shouldn't write it. I found that disheartening. Do you really do such little research, or is your brain a walking armory encyclopedia?

Lee: Well, I'm certainly a walking trivia compendium, but that wasn't really my point. I think books always have two levels of "stuff" in them, the deep background and the surface detail. To take examples from one of your previous interviewees, the deep stuff in Laura Lippmann's books is the gut-level, in-her-pores sense of what Baltimore is like to live in. The surface detail is ... well, the surface detail. I'm sure Laura doesn't research the deep stuff. It's just there, like a constant background hum in her life. What I meant to say on the radio is that a book-a-year novelist from, say, Rome, Italy, can't just up and decide to write a Lippmann-style book about Baltimore, Maryland. Can't set out and research what Baltimore is like to live in. He would have to know already to stand any chance of producing a convincing, organic book. Same for Harlan Coben. His answers show that the researched and plotted parts of his stories overlay a deeply instinctive background sense of what it's like to be a suburban family man who loves his kids. You can fake—or check—the surface stuff but you've got to be deeply familiar with the underlying stuff. I guess that's what I meant to say. So I stick to themes that I've read about, seen, talked about, thought about all my life, because you can't start from cold, not on our schedules. Not for the key components. But certainly I check reference books for how big of a magazine a particular SIG has, and stuff like that.

Jeff: Does the Army need Jack Reacher back now? Would Reacher go back?

Lee: Well, technically he's still a reservist, I guess. If he had an address or a phone number he'd be called back. And he'd go. And he'd be ready to kick butt, because I think he would feel very offended by the way the current civilian leadership has corrupted the tone and the ethos of the army. On my recent tour for The Enemy I got a lot of questions about the Military Police and the prison scandals. Reacher is certainly not above slapping people around to get information. But the main point is that he would do it himself, as a Major. He wouldn't order some hapless grunts to carry the can for him. And he wouldn't listen to any civilian contractors. Some shadowy guy from Cheney's office orders Reacher to bend the rules, that guy would go home in a bucket.

Jeff: There is a great tone of confidence in your prose. Are you that sure of yourself in real life?

Lee: As a writer? I'm a wreck. The current book is always the worst piece of crap any human has ever committed to paper. I'm always certain I'm washed up and my career is over. I had a very formative experience back in grade school. I was about nine, I guess, and I started in a new class one September, with a teacher we didn't know and who didn't know us, and the first thing we had to do was paint a picture. Now, I was pretty good at reading, writing and arithmetic, but I was a hopeless painter. But the thing came out good. Pure fluke. Total fluke. And the same thing happened the next week. Another fluke. So this teacher got the idea I was a good painter. Then we did a class project, and he assigned me to do the wall art. I was dying with anxiety inside ... like "They were flukes, man. No way can I do it again." That's how I feel as a writer, day to day.

Jeff: I think this sort of self-doubt, though, is absolutely crucial to succeeding as a writer; otherwise you sink into laziness and complacency. But you also come across as very confident in just who you are.

Lee: Am I self-confident in real life? Kind of. Or, I've been faking it so long that the illusion has become reality. At four years old I was a serious, earnest, naive little boy, and due to circumstances beyond my control we moved from a pleasant suburb to a real inner-city hell-hole in England's equivalent of Detroit. Some inner sixth sense—I remember it well—led that earnest little boy to understand that life was going to be sink-or-swim now, and that surface image was going to be critical ... so I built a very convincing "You do not f**k with me" demeanor, and I have kept it going ever since. Eventually it became more real than the truth, which is that I'm no more sure of myself than anyone else, I guess. Although in some ways my brain ended up wired differently. I literally trained myself over the years to replace fear with aggression. I'm not scared of the things that scare most people. One Halloween we were at Universal Studios in Orlando, after dark, and they had these guys dressed as the guy from the Chainsaw Massacre movie, and they were suddenly jumping out at people with leaf blowers tricked out to look like chainsaws ... vroom vroom ... people were screaming and fleeing...but with no conscious control at all I just hit my guy in the face. Instant reaction. Bang. Never back down, never back off. Lessons learned long ago. They've gotten me in all kinds of other trouble ... the idea of ever being defeated in anything was so dangerous to the image that it led to me accepting ludicrous challenges, like for instance eventually becoming the union organizer, and the uninhibited way I did the job, which was definite suicide professionally. But there was also some kind of noblesse oblige in there too. It needed to be done. I could do it, temperamentally, therefore I should do it. I built some of that stuff into Reacher. Maybe I'm trying to explain myself to myself.

Jeff: What haven't you done yet as a writer that you'd like to do?

Lee: There's a lot of internal tension built into that question, I think. I could say, I'd like to write a really great book. But for me, I wonder whether I enjoy the journey more than the destination. I wonder whether if I did actually write a book I considered 100% great, maybe I would stop writing at that point. Maybe the chase is better than the prize. Or I could say, I want to be a consistent #1 best-seller. But I wonder whether that way lies madness. I've had decent periods on the lists here and in the UK and in other countries, and I've already detected a kind of craziness about it. The first major list I really cracked was the UK. The early books made brief token appearances but the fourth book lodged at #7 for multiple weeks. I was in a limo back to Heathrow airport with my agent at the end of that tour, and we were saying, well, #5 would have been better, or #3 would have been really great ... and the driver—the car service was used by publishers all the time, so he knew the scene—turned around and said, hey, just shut up and smell the roses. That's the problem. You can drive yourself nuts. Let's say you make it to #1 for five weeks. That's great. But immediately you're upping the stakes, mentally. You want ten weeks next year. Then twenty. Then fifty-two weeks at #1 on every printed list in the world. The horizon is always receding. So at the risk of sounding unambitious, there's really nothing more I want. This is a great life. Nobody gets hurt. I'm not selling crack or prescription drugs. All book purchases are voluntary. Nobody has to fail because I succeed. People read the books and enjoy them. Occasionally there are bits that reassure people or help them through. Occasionally lives are touched. I'm happy. And ironically the more relaxed I've gotten about sales, the better the sales have become. Maybe there's a lesson there.