Lee Child, writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:48My castaway this week is the author Lee Child. His fictional creation, Jack Reacher, is a giant, literally and figuratively. Six feet five of pure muscle with book sales to match. Apparently everyone stopped counting once they shot past 100 million. For 30 years, Reacher has travelled across America from town to town and book to book, uncovering dirty secrets and meting out rough justice before disappearing off into the sunset. The man behind the Enigma may have been born a world away from his hero, in 1950s Coventry to be precise, and grown up in Birmingham, but they do share a few qualities.

1:23There's their height, which inspired Reacher's name, and their initial motivation, revenge. Lee Child was born Jim Grant, the son of a tax inspector and a housewife. His buttoned-up childhood led him to escape into books, and after winning a prestigious scholarship, he studied law and found a career in television. His Reacher moment came when cost-cutters arrived at the company he'd been with for 20 years and began instigating rafts of redundancies. He led the fight back as union rep. Then, when they eventually got him, turned to writing, determined to prove them wrong with his success. Reacher was an instant hit and 30 Books On has inspired Hollywood films and a major TV show.

2:02He says, it's an accurate self-diagnosis that I'm seeking the love and approval that I never got as a child. Lee Child, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you. It's great to be here. So Lee, you'd always start a new book on the 1st of September. I mean, tell me about that moment when you're staring at the blank screen in front of you. What's going through your mind? That is the best moment of all, because there is something unique about the first line, obviously. It is the only line that doesn't have to follow a previous line. So you can do anything. And actually, I never really know how it's going to start.

2:39And every year I have this sort of imposter syndrome thing where I'm like, yeah, I've got away with it 25 times before, but now I'm going to blow it. Now I'm going to be found out. So in August, I'm feeling kind of desperate, got no ideas. And then toward the end of August, suddenly an opening line or something might pop into my head. And I always write it down, even if I do not know where it's going. I put that down, the first line, the first paragraph. And I never, ever change a first paragraph because it has a freshness. It has an organic quality. And if you start messing with it, it just gets worse, not better.

3:21And interestingly, you know, on that note, you're not one of these writers who has index cards all around their study and intricate kind of spider webs of plots laid out around them. You are pulling this story out of where? I just want the story. And if I mapped it out in advance, if I did the outline, then I would have told myself that story and I'm done with it. I'm ready for the next one. For me, it's really important to have the same feeling that I have as a reader sometimes, where I'm sure you know what it's like. You're into a great book, but you've got to go to work or whatever, or got to do something else.

4:01And then you get back to your book and you pick it up with that joy. Oh, I can't wait to find out what's going to happen. I need to feel that every time I sit down to write. And what about that idea of Reacher as a kind of independent entity, you know, out there existing in the world in people's imaginations? Yeah, that's the whole point of it. You know, when it comes to film or TV, people say, are you worried about giving it away? But the whole point is to give it away. And especially you want it as a mark of success. You want it to become outside of just the book world. And that happened with Reacher.

4:39You know, he is quoted in or mentioned in all kinds of contexts. In the New Zealand Parliament, one of the ministers stood up with a policy and he said, like Jack Reacher said, we have to hope for the best but plan for the worst. And I thought, yeah, that is the mark of success, that it has migrated outside of just the world of books. Now it is a cultural reference in all different kinds of contexts. Lee, it's time for your first choice today. What are we going to hear? I was eight going on nine. And I was depressed because I was trapped in this strict home, this gray post-war austerity. I felt no horizons.

5:24And we were on some dreadful family holiday in a caravan in Wales. And the rain was lashing down and my other family members were getting me down. So I went out to sit in the car. and I turned on the radio and it was an old valve radio. It sort of warmed up slowly, crackly. And the first thing I heard was Brian Matthews on the Saturday Club. He said, here it is, the new one from the Beatles. And it was She Loves You, which starts out with a little, tiny little drum fill from Ringo and then the first chorus. It's about 11 seconds, I think. And in those 11 seconds, my life changed totally. I felt the sun had come out.

6:09I felt there was joy, there was happiness, there was energy in the world. Most of all, I felt there was something for me. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah You'll think you've lost your love Well, I saw her yesterday It's you she's thinking of And she told me what to say She said she loves you And you know that can't be bad Still sounds like the sun coming out all these years later. The Beatles and She Loves You. So, Lee Child, you were very unhappy at just eight years old. I mean, that is so little to feel like that. What was going on in your life?

7:00I was this happy, energetic kid. But my parents were boring, repressed, very restrictive types. They grew up during the Depression. And then as teenagers, young adults, they grew up during the war. And our generation, I think, objectively speaking, we were the luckiest generation in all of human history. We had none of the problems that the other generations had before us. And parents at that time had a binary choice. You could either celebrate that fact that, yeah, we've managed to deliver better times for our children. But in my case, my parents were jealous. They were jealous of the freedoms and the prosperity and the cornucopia that we had.

7:49So you mentioned, you know, your parents' wartime experiences. And I know that your father, you know, he fought in the Second World War. Did he tell you, you know, what he experienced? Only very late in his life, it was that classic thing where he hardly ever mentioned it at all when we were young, other than the occasional sort of wince of disgust. You know, we'd be playing cowboys and Indians or something, shooting each other. And I remember just randomly one thing he said. He said, if you'd ever smelled a dead body, you wouldn't be doing this. But, you know, very, very few clues other than if there was ever any documentary footage of the concentration camps on, he would leave the room because he'd been in the armored column that had arrived at Belson before anybody else.

8:41and there was a kind of bleak greyness at the centre of his soul because whatever else happened in his life, you know, his kids did well, this, that, the other, whatever it was, it was as if an invisible voice was saying to him, yeah, but there was Belson. I think it really, really stunted him in a way. And what about your mother? You know, your father worked as a tax inspector at the Inland Revenue. Audrey, your mother, she was a housewife. How do you remember her? How would you describe her? Well, she was a talented artist and designer. She could have been an architect. She could have been anything like that, really.

9:16But there was zero thought given to she would ever go to college or anything. I mean, partly my grandfather, her father, was in dire straits because of the Depression, and it was just a question of living hand-to-mouth. And she got a job when she was about 19 or 20, also working for the Inland Revenue in a completely separate office, no relation to what my father was doing. But when they did meet and got married, she had to leave because back then... In those days, you had to, didn't you? You did. Civil service in particular, many jobs, married women were not allowed to work in them. So she was frustrated in that sense and bored, frankly.

9:56It was just awful. But she ended up a martyr and very bitter woman. And I didn't enjoy the result, but I totally understand where it came from. You talked about running into emotional brick walls with your parents and have said that as a writer, actually, you are receiving the love and approval that they weren't able to give you. What was your relationship with them like? They wanted the boys to grow up to become something notable. Not so much for our own sake, but for their sake, as if they were merit badges on a Boy Scout uniform or something. There were three of us in the beginning and then a fourth one much, much later.

10:37And so it was really the three of us as the classic nuclear family. And the other two were, especially my elder brother, really smart guy. And he really was a success. He was a scientist, wasn't he? Yeah, he became a nuclear engineer. And he did a PhD at Cambridge that for a time was, you know, groundbreaking work about the fluid mechanics of turbine blades and so on. They must have been pleased with that, surely. Well, not really. You know, it wasn't quite identifiable enough. They wanted him to be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And so that whatever we did, we would have been disappointments. And what about the status that they craved?

11:16Did they ever feel like they achieved it, do you think? No, it was really sad because my dad was from Northern Ireland. He was a Northern Irish Protestant from Belfast, a Unionist. He was more British than the British and it was his absolute dream to be an English professional gentleman, you know, on nodding terms with the local solicitor or this or that. But of course, because he was Irish, he was always regarded as an outsider, just a paddy. He never got anywhere near it. Lee I think we better have some more music Your second choice today What's it going to be? Well having said how And I really mean it The Beatles saved my life But I was awfully disloyal Because within a year and a half or so I'd moved on to the Stones Because they were more me I think they were sort of more rough And more street And so my second choice is The classic Stones satisfaction

12:19No satisfaction. I can't get no satisfaction. Yes, I tried. I tried. And I tried. And I tried. I can't get no. I can't get no. When I'm driving in my car. I don't miss. I Can't Get No Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones. Lee Child, you learned to read when you were only three. How did that happen? It was my elder brother started at primary school, obviously before I did, because he was elder. And my mother, she would sit him down at the end of every day when he got home from primary school and go through his lessons. And I would sort of eavesdrop from a yard away. And I, sort of over a couple of months of doing that, I've taught myself to read and to write.

13:19I mean, that's incredible. Nowadays, obviously, parents would be putting that up on Instagram and telling the world, wouldn't they? Did you get a sense of your parents being pleased that you were so bright? You know, I don't want to be too negative about this whole experience, but really not. And also, in their mind, things were to be done at a certain time. And I remember them saying to... So you were stepping out of line in a way. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I remember them saying to my elder brother that when he learned to tell the time, they would buy him a watch. And I said, if I learn to tell the time, will you buy me a watch?

13:57And they said, yeah. And so I immediately taught myself to tell the time, like three or four. And then they said, no, you can't have a watch because you're too young. I didn't fit the pattern. And that was their problem. They couldn't look at their children as individuals. They looked at them as pre-programmed accessories in a larger scheme. Were books an escape for you? Absolutely, totally, absolutely. What were you reading then and where were you getting your material? Got it from Elmwood Library, which was about half a mile from our house. And I started out with Enid Blyton, like everybody else.

14:36I mean, I'm not one of these writers who pretends in retrospect that I was reading Tolstoy at the age of six or something. I read Inid Blyton, The Famous Five. I loved The Famous Five. And looking back on it in retrospect, you see why. You know, fundamentally, it's an orphan fantasy. The parents are not involved ever. The kids are just running free. And that was a dream. You are six foot four now and you were tall as a kid. Were you tough at school? Did your physique kind of play a part in how you were received by the other kids? Oh, yeah, it was great. It really was. I was huge. And, you know, I wasn't like some psycho or anything, but it was an earlier era.

15:16And Birmingham was an emotionally inarticulate place. Nobody ever talked about a problem. Nobody ever negotiated anything. It was always a fight and a double whammy for us because, as I said, our parents were aspirational. They wanted us to do well at school. And in that weird way, if you're doing well at school, you have a target on your back. But I was great at it. I was huge. I was nasty. I was a good fighter. Nasty? What do you mean nasty? You had to negotiate certain circumstances. And I had a rule that if you pulled a knife on me, I would break your arm. And I had to do it twice before people got the message.

16:00So these are proper fights. This is not just a playground scrap. No, this was not – because there was also a strange kind of gang culture that was neighborhood-based. But I was very good at it and I had no problem. And the kids that weren't good at it, this was really one of my earliest Jack Reacher moments. You know, I had a kind of unofficial club. If they gave me one of their biscuits that their mother had sent them or something, they were in my club and I would look after them if they had a problem. So if they were getting bullied, they would come and say, this guy's hurting me or something.

16:36So I would follow him home or something to deal with him. And then, you know, sometimes then the mother of this other kid would be calling my mother and I'd have to say, I don't know anything about him. Well, no wonder that, you know, Jack Reacher came out of your imagination later. But he's an expert pugilist, isn't he? I mean, you've written many a kind of balletic fight sequence for him. And the ballet is just me remembering what it was like when I was nine. Time for some more music, Lee Child. What's next? During my teenage years, I was friendly with a guy called Andy, whose dad was a dentist living on the posh side of town.

17:14And in that sort of dentist cliche, he had a great hi-fi. And in the late 60s, early 70s, hi-fi was a thing. And we had all rubbish. I would buy mine from components from a porn shop or a secondhand shop or whatever and solder them together myself and try and make them work. This guy's dad had a beautiful hi-fi. And he had his favorite record at the time was Kind of Blue, the album by Miles Davis. And we would listen to that on his hi-fi. and it seemed like a different world, a sophisticated world, a world of taste. And it was the first fork in the road that I came to musically. Not that I gave up on what I was already into, but it was now another option.

18:06That was a transformative record for me.

18:20Thank you.

19:05Miles Davis and So What? Lee Child, you studied law at Sheffield University and after you graduated, you joined Granada Television as an assistant transmission controller. What did the job involve? Transmission controller was essentially an air traffic controller. You were bringing the programmes in from the outside. You were feeding programmes out to the rest of the network. You were doing your own local commercials and trailers and so on. And it all had to fit to the second. As well as becoming, you know, senior in such a kind of important and technical role, you put yourself forward to become shop steward.

19:41So that was representing the television and technical staff. What made you put yourself up for that? That was just my personality. And again, a sort of proto Jack Reacher moment where we were going through major, major industry upheaval. It was when there was BBC, BBC Two, Channel 4 and ITV. And then it was all getting broken up again because of satellite coming in and so on and so forth. And the first thing they had to do was bust the union, basically. And there was an old shop steward who'd been there for years, and he was going to retire anyway due to age. And they put the word out, the whisper, that nobody should stand for the vacancy because if you do, you'll be fired in a week and never work in the industry again.

20:30And something in me just thought, wait a minute, that's not right. So I put myself forward for election and I was elected unopposed. And sure enough, you know, a manager bumps into me the next day and says, you're crazy. You know, you'll be gone in a week. I said, we'll see about that. You've described that then as a reach a moment for you. Did you know you had it in you? Yeah, I did. it because it was a sort of amalgam of the physical from my childhood to the verbal, which I had become good at. And your legal background too. Yeah, absolutely. And that was key in finding where the bottom was for them because there was something going on and I read the case law and they were clearly in contravention of one particular precedent.

21:23so I thought if you want to get down in the gutter then I'll show you what the gutter's all about the fatal thing that management never realizes they're there from nine till five and we're working 24-7 so as soon as they were gone at five I had this SWAT team of cleaners who would search every waste bin they would look under every photocopier lid they would find anything that looked like a memo or a draft of something or anything torn up. And they would bring it to me, bushels of this stuff every night. I was the most informed shop steward in the history of labor relations. I just fought back and not so much for me because I don't worry about myself.

22:05I thought I'd be all right. But Granada was a magnificent cultural institution at that time that had been built up by two generations of really dedicated and talented people. and it was being laid to waste just simply for profit. And that really annoyed me. I wanted to defend that. And a lot of the people, especially, you know, the ones that were kind of more just past halfway through their careers, they were never going to get another job. And I wanted to protect them as best as I could. But what about you? How much thought had you given to what you would do next? Because you were eventually fired in 1995 and it wasn't a surprise to you.

22:42It wasn't. And about five years before, I'd accidentally stumbled across a series of books by an American writer called John D. MacDonald, the Travis McGee series, which were great entertainment. I mean, superb series. I mean, I've got to warn people, a little dated in terms of gender attitudes and so on, but just really great thrillers. And as well as loving them as entertainment, I could suddenly see what he was doing. A bit like the commentary track on a DVD. Remember that? Where you would be seeing the action and somebody would be explaining it. I could almost hear that voice. And I thought, wow, this is great.

23:24I could do this. But of course, I was real busy. So I put it just in the back of my mind. And then five years later, push came to shove. And I had to do something else. So I thought, this is the time. You've got to put up or shut up now. You've got to try it. And yeah, so that was my investment. £3.99, three pads of paper, a pencil, a pencil sharpener and an eraser. You know, that's a pretty good return on£3.99. Lee Child, it's time for some more music. Your fourth choice today. What are we going to hear? Well, this is a lovely, great, magnificent piece of music, but I have to say I came to it through the most ignoble motives.

24:05Ken Russell had just made a film called The Music Lovers that had Richard Chamberlain playing Tchaikovsky and Glenda Jackson as his wife. And I was a middle teenager, I think, at this time, and we knew that there was nudity in it. And so I went to be completely candid with you. I went to see the movie for the nudity and came out being absolutely in love with Tchaikovsky. So this is it, Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto.

24:40Thank you.

25:22The opening of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, performed by Stephen Hough with the Minnesota Orchestra, conducted by Osmo Vanska. Lead child, by 1995 then, you were married with a child, a daughter and a mortgage. You were 40 and you didn't have a job, but you had started writing what would become the first Jack Reacher book, Killing Floor. And you were determined that it would be a success. Where did your confidence come from? I do not know. I think it was a ludicrous position to take. But I conned myself, basically, in order to give myself the energy and the confidence to do it. I just said, yeah, of course, this is going to work.

26:02Like night follows day. It's going to be a success. And what about your parents? Did you tell them what you were planning? I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them I'd lost my job because I just knew that would be like back to the 1930s for them. So I didn't tell them. And then next time they were passing by, they dropped in. And I said, oh, by the way, I lost my job. And my father said, well, what are you going to do now? I said, I'm writing a novel. And he said, I'll bet you 10 ,000 to one it's a failure. And objectively, he was quite correct. But this is what I'm saying. There was so little feeling and emotion that he would say something that was actuarially correct without thinking how it would land on the person listening to it.

26:49But by then, of course, I was fireproof. I'd had that all my life. I was used to lack of encouragement, which actually turned out to be a pretty good preparation for being a writer because it's the stumbling blocks at every corner and difficulties every step along the way. So if you're not used to constant praise and encouragement, you're better equipped for it, I think. Yeah. So you've described the Reacher story of revenge stories. But this was personal, wasn't it? Not just for Jack Reacher, but for you. It was. And early on, I mean, it was very explicitly revenge about having been done down.

27:25I wanted to succeed to show them. But it was also petty revenge that I would name the bad guys after the management that fired me. I think that was eight bucks later. Say the early days. Yeah, it lasted about eight books, yeah, until I ran through them all. Eventually, everybody got their justice, yeah. And speaking of names, what about Reacher's name? Where did it come from? The weakest thing about my writing is coming up with character names. And I remember one Friday night, my wife said, we've got to go to the supermarket. You've got to help me carry stuff home because she's a tiny woman, my wife.