Jack Reacher with Lee and Andrew Child

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1:25Lee Child got fired from his job. His job became, as they say, redundant in his industry, the television industry. And he said to himself, what am I going to do with my life? And like many people, he said, well, I'll write a book. Many people do it, I'll do it. Of course, many people fail at it. Lee Child didn't fail at it. He wrote the first Jack Reacher novel. Jack Reacher is the hero of Killing Floor, that first novel, and then the next 28 novels after that, plus a movie starring Tom Cruise, plus a TV series that my entire family watches all the time. and hundreds of millions of copies of the Jack Reacher books have been sold.

2:06Now there's a new Jack Reacher novel, The Secret just came out and Lee Child wrote it with his younger brother, Andrew Child, who henceforth is going to be the writer of the Jack Reacher series. It's a great honor to have them on the podcast and these podcasts are always self-help for me. I want to learn how to write a thriller novel. Now I get the best thriller writers on the planet to come on and here's Lee Child and Andrew Child.

2:38This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:53Thank you guys for coming on the podcast. And I'm a huge fan of Jack Reacher and the work both of you do. And I guess I would love an origin story. And I know that's like the cliche question. I almost hate asking that because I'm sure you've answered that a gazillion times. But, you know, everybody out there would love to know how Jack Reacher started, how you got into writing, Lee. And then, of course, Andrew as well. You've been a thriller writer and now you're on the Jack Reacher series. So how'd you guys start writing? I mean, for me personally, it was, you get asked the question, how long have you known you wanted to be a writer?

3:32When did you first want to be a writer? And some writers answer, you know, they were seven years old and they were writing four-page novels in composition books and they're still in the bottom drawer and all that kind of thing. And my friend Harlan Coben has a riff about how he wanted to be a writer ever since he was a fetus and all of this kind of thing. But the truth for me is I never wanted to be a writer. All I wanted to be was an entertainer. For me, at my age, plan A was to join the Beatles. And I thought that was a really sound plan, except for two things. Number one, they had no vacancies.

4:11Number two, I had no musical talent. Number three, I guess, I was only nine years old. But I loved, I loved, loved that proposition of doing something that made people intensely happy. I just saw the look in the audience's eye. They loved it. And I wanted to do something that people would love. So entertainment was the thing for me. And I started in the theater briefly and then television. And then I lost my job in television. Not due to any felony or misdemeanor on my part, but just that kind of corporate restructuring that everybody ran through in the 1990s. I was 39 years old. I was an expensive veteran with a big salary and a great deal and benefits and pension and all that kind of thing.

5:02And they just got rid of us all. Did you resent that? Oh, boy, yes, I did. I mean, absolutely. Not just for me, but for everybody. You know, it was a magnificent organization I was working for that had taken two generations to build up and it was just being trashed in that stupid way that things were in the 90s. So yeah, I was intensely resentful and that shows up later I think because the main problem was I'd also been the shop steward for our union for the last couple of years which I was blacklisted, I was never going to get another job in the business. So the question was what next? What can I do?

5:44And basically, it came down to nothing. I was incredibly hyper-trained for the one job that I'd just been kicked out of. And so what next? So I took a step back and I said, fundamentally, what is it that you can do? And fundamentally, I know what people want. I know what they enjoy. I know what they like. I know what they respond to. And so it was a question of, all right, what else can I do that will utilize those perceptions? And I thought, you know what? I'll write a book. I've read some. How hard can it be? Well, it doesn't seem, well, it's, first off, I love the idea of viewing a writer as an entertainer because it really is.

6:31It's the same thing as, I don't want to say it's the same thing as The Beatles because obviously it's very different and it's not the same thing as, I don't know, being a comedian, for instance, where you're directly performing in front of an audience, but you are in some sense. Like you have to basically gauge an audience's reaction to something that you make up out of your mind and make sure it occupies their time long enough that they don't get distracted. Exactly right, yeah. I mean, it's not the same as The Beatles, but it kind of is in a way. We swim in this current of all kinds of different media, television movies books music podcasts comedians as you say um and we're all kind of different but the same the proposition is give people a good time even if it's a few hours or a couple of days just give them a good time yeah and so and so but at the same time the hero jack reacher this this this hero that has captivated tens of millions of people is very different from Brideshead Revisited, for instance.

7:36So why did you decide, okay, this is going to be the character I placed my bet on, I placed my career on? Part of it was instinctive and part of it was a tiny bit calculated that I looked around at what everybody else was doing with strong character-driven series. and they were all doing what you might call a soap opera. And I got, you know, that's not a term of denigration to me at all. Soap opera is incredibly powerful narrative medium and it put food on my table for a long, long time. Soap opera is great, but everybody was doing it. So my idea was to do something different. Don't do what everybody else is doing.

8:21So I wanted an anti-soap opera where there are no continuing characters, there is no community, it is not set in a workplace or a neighborhood, nobody has a dog, nobody has a favorite restaurant, all that kind of thing. I didn't want that. I wanted a lone character thoroughly alienated from society, just wandering on his own to exploit a gigantic geography. So it really came down to what would be a plausible background for a character like that. I mean, most kind of rambling, wandering people are, to some extent, mentally ill, and I didn't want to do that. So who else does that kind of thing? And I found, anecdotally, the biggest source of alienation, really, is people that were in the military, man and boy, and are now no longer in the military.

9:14They're in the civilian universe, and they don't understand it. They don't appreciate it. They're a fish out of water. So that's the route that I took. But, you know, it seems like it's stumbled upon this fantasy that everyone has. Like, can I just stand up and walk away from, you know, these hard responsibilities, the mortgage payments, the nine to five job, the whatever, and just live on my own terms? to kind of, you know, whether accidentally or intentionally, you slipped into like the, probably the biggest escapist fantasy that people, I would say even particularly men, but perhaps men and women, that people have.

9:57Yeah, well, you know, Andrew should really answer this because it's never up to the writer. Because he did run away from everything. It's not up to the writer to dictate to the reader what they're going to enjoy. That never works. You've just got to put something down and hope the reader enjoys it. And Andrew was the first ever reader because I needed to know that I wasn't wasting my time. And so Andrew is the only person that I was close to who would A, give me an honest judgment and B, was experienced with this kind of genre. He knows about this. So I sent him the manuscript when he was still in pencil.

10:37And this is Killing Floor. Yep, this is Killing Floor, still in pencil. and I was really, really depending on his reaction to know, is it worth carrying on or not? So the first impressions of the character are really a reader's, not the writer's, and Andrew was the first reader, so he should say what it was he found appealing. Yeah, and I mean, I remember that so well, you know, when Lee sent me that first draft, because the tables were sort of turned at that point because I had a great job with a great salary and all the benefits that he was talking about before. And he was out of work. And I knew he had a mortgage, he had a family.

11:17And so I knew that writing these books was his plan to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. So when I set out to read the book, I was terrified because I was thinking, what if it's no good? What if I'm going to be the one who has to call him up and say, sorry, you know, get ready for, you know, being homeless and starving, you know? or am I going to have to let him live in my spare room? What's going to happen? So I remember picking up that manuscript and reading it. It was the most nerve-wracking thing. And of course, I needn't have worried because it was a fantastic book and it laid the foundations for everything that followed.

11:54But one thing I remember... I'm just curious, did you have any criticism or constructive criticism at all that you handed over to Lee? Well, I don't know if it was constructive criticism. There was one thing that popped up into my head, which was that he had his brother killed in the book. So I'm reading this manuscript and I get to the bit about the brother being brutally murdered. And I'm thinking, you know, is there any kind of Freudian aspect to this that I need to be aware of? Well, it's an older brother, so you can justify it that way. It's an older brother. He didn't want an older brother.

12:29He was happy with a younger brother. Exactly, that's true. That was the only consolation. But one thing that I remember also clearly was, you know, the way that that book is constructed, it's first person narrative. So you're seeing everything through Reacher's point of view. But he gets arrested in the diner, he gets dragged off to the police station, he gets questioned. And he has this thing where he refuses to respond. So it's a long, long time before you find out his name. And I remember very clearly that feeling of, I don't know this character's name, but I know this character. And I think that is something that really helps readers bond with Reacher, because there's something about Reacher's experience.

13:13You know, he's having a terrible day. We've all had terrible days. He's being picked on by the authorities, you know, whether that be your boss or the police or, you know, your landlord or somebody. everybody's had that experience of being unfairly picked on by an outsider and so here is Reacher sharing those experiences but what he can do that every all of us can't is he can do something about it he can fight back he can refuse to answer the police's questions he can escape he can beat up the bad guys he can figure out the puzzles so it's a perfect combination of everything that we all experience in our lives but are frustrated so we recognize it we bond with it but we can't do anything whereas reach a can so that's where you kind of bridge between recognizable everyday experiences and that kind of wish fulfillment escapism that is so powerful and so attractive and again the the lack of well the lack of attachment and the lack of rules those two things but with a strong ethical backbone.

14:20And so these aspects, again, is this almost, like you say, wish fulfillment where there's this idea of freedom. Jack Reacher is first and foremost free. He's free to pursue justice. He's free to move to the next town. He's free. He doesn't have to get social media followers. He's not a digital guy. So, you know, I think that's a big fantasy for many people, including myself. I think so. And I think the way that everyday life has developed, you know, life in the 20th century when Richard started, 21st century now, it's all about accumulating things, which in some ways make your life easier. You know, your car is easier to drive than walking to town.

15:04You know, a dishwasher is easier than washing dishes by hand. But at the same time, all of these things that are supposed to be extra convenient, they kind of accumulate and then end up weighing you down. because what are you going to do when the car needs new tires? What are you going to do when the dishwasher is broken down? It's just all of these extra things which occupy space in your head more than anything else. And I think a lot of people share that experience of almost feeling suffocated or feeling weighed down by just the accoutrement of everyday life, just all the stuff that we have and we have to think about and we have to maintain and we have to pay for.

15:39So I think the idea that you could just walk away from all of that, You know, different periods in different people's lives, it's going to feel more attractive at some points than others. But that idea that you could just walk away, you would be burden free. You'd feel like you could walk on air, I think, if you could really do that.

16:11look as a manager of people as an employer as an entrepreneur and as even an investor in startups i can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire the best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

16:54And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

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18:14strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Andrew, since you're now taking over the helm of the Jack Reacher series, do you see it ever moving in a slightly different direction where there might be something consistent from book to book, like a girlfriend or a home base or a dog? I mean, Jack Breacher loves animals, loves dogs. Well, I think the key to answering that question is something that Lee said earlier, which is about trying to understand what your audience wants.

18:57And so, you know, I've been part of that audience for more than 25 years. And I've been to all kinds of events. You know, before COVID, when books came out, you'd have the in-person events, you'd have the tours to all the bookstores and all the libraries and everything. I would go to as many of those as I could and a bit like I used to do in my theater days you know if you want to know whether a play is any good you don't read the reviews you stand in the foyer at the end and listen to people as they're leaving and that's what I would do I'd be in the audience and I would hear what people were saying so we've got a good sense of what people want and I think that people don't want Reacher to change you know our father was from Ireland so he could get away with this, he used to have this expression, the same, only different.

19:39And that's what we aim for. You know, we want Richard to have all of those consistent characteristics that people love. We don't want those to change. But of course, we do want the books to feel fresh and feel new. So we want him in different scenarios. We want him facing different kinds of villains. We want him solving new kinds of puzzles. But we don't want to take away any of those comfortable, satisfying welcoming aspects that people over the years have come to love and have come to look forward to you know if you think about like let's say in the decades before reacher uh you have like i'll just name some classic series that revolve around a single hero like the most classic being like james bond or then you get to like you know uh like jack ryan type of of heroes these are heroes that they're sort of anti-authority, but they work for authority and they can't really express as much as perhaps they would like their anti-authority aspects.

20:42Do you think that's what kind of breaks Reacher out compared to like these older heroes? I think that, yeah, you, you know, you say go back decades. I mean, really it goes by hundreds of years, if not millennia, the idea the knight errant. And somebody like James Bond is kind of half in and half out of the establishment. He's a commander in the Royal Navy. He's employed by the security services. He's part of a structure and yet he's somewhat disapproved of. He's somewhat, people are suspicious of him. You know, the boss is always chafing at the things he gets up to. So he's got one foot in and one foot out, which is part of the knight-errant thing.

21:31A knight-errant is a knight, you know, Sir Lancelot or whoever, who then for some reason gets banished. He's banished from the court and sentenced to wander the land and do good deeds. And the same myth occurs practically everywhere. You know, it's the ronin myth in Japan, the samurai that is disowned by his master and banished. And so there has to be two things. Number one, a sense of previous status. And Reacher has that because he was a West Point graduate and a major in the U.S. Army. So his status is there. And the banishment is not that he's been shoved out because of a transgression necessarily, but just that the army got smaller after the end of the Cold War, and he was one of the ones kicked out.

22:20So that he has been banished in a way. So he has this previous nobility, now he's banished, and that is, I think, the key aspect to this character that goes back literally hundreds of years. You know, it's a Western concept in the US, it's medieval in Europe, it's Scandinavian sagas, Greek tragedies. This character has always been around. And so you've got to ask yourself, why? Why has this character been reinvented over and over again over thousands of years? is, you know, Robin Hood, all of these characters are really the same guy. And the answer is because we want that guy. We would love to have a guy like that just show up and solve our problems.

23:03Because everybody has a problem. Might be trivial, might be super serious, but everybody's got a problem. And wouldn't it be great if there was a knock on the door and this big, huge, silent man showed up to fix your problem and then left afterward. That is, again, a super part of the key. He's got to leave afterward. He can't hang around and have all kinds of gratitude issues. He just shows up, solves the problem, and rides off into the sunset. It's a perpetual fantasy that we all want. Yeah, and I think there's another key difference with a character like James Bond because, you know, as Lee said, he's half in and half out, and the foot that he's got in the establishment.

23:45Bond, you've got to think about when he was written and what extra role he was playing. So, you know, Bond was conceived at the end of the 50s into the 60s in England. And England at that time was a grey, depressed, dour, bankrupt place where people out of, you know, they struggled, they had miserable lives. And on top of that, the country was trying to come to terms with the fact it was its place at the top table had been lost, bankrupt after the Second World War, no longer the key player it used to be. So people were struggling with these two issues. So along comes this character Bond, who has this extravagant lifestyle.

24:28He goes to casinos, he drives Bentleys in the books, he goes to Nassau, he gives people a different kind of escapism. He gives them a glimpse into another world. And on top of that, he kind of carries this extra baggage for the country because there's this enormous international problem. The CIA can't solve it. The KGB can't solve it. So what do they do? They come to Bond to take care of it, you know, which is obviously ridiculous. But people loved it because it, you know, he would, but so the point I'm trying to make is that Bond was carrying all of this additional baggage on a kind of national scale whereas reach appeals i think on an individual scale because it's not about someone coming and fixing the problems of your whole country it's about like lee said someone knocking on your door and fixing your specific individual problems well it's interesting how it goes from the national to the individual because i sort of feel like music also made that transition during those period during those decades as well like like Like, you know, Lee, you sort of grew up in, you know, this period where not only the Beatles, but then punk was rising in England.

25:40And there's like this punk aspect to not obeying the rules and not, you know, living by other people's boundaries, you know, not respecting authority, living on your own terms. Do you think, you know, given your ambitions initially as a musician, how much of an effect do you think that had on the character? I think a lot. Yeah, I mean, as a whole in general, from those 60s onwards, the whole world became much more connected. And that's something that I remember. One specific memory I had, I mean, I loved the Beatles and I followed all the news and all the stories and gossip and everything. And I remember the story from January 1964.

26:24This was just a little bit before the Ed Sullivan Show, a few weeks. They were doing a residency in Paris at the Olympia, staying at the Georges Cinq. And meanwhile, the PR campaign in America was cranking up. And one night after the show, they were back in the hotel room. And Brian Epstein gets a phone call from New York, which in 1964 was just impossibly exotic. Somebody's phoning you from New York. so Epstein answers the call and listens for a little while and puts down the phone and he says boys you're number one in America and to me that was such a pregnant phrase it first of all symbolized the way that the world was connecting that we were all becoming the same culture and secondly as a personal ambition I just wanted to hear that and all those years later when I did get my first number one in America, it went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

27:31My publisher was a smart enough guy to have remembered what I'd said about this. And I was in Chicago on tour and he called me and he said, Lee, you're number one in America. And I just thought that I could die and go to heaven right now. And talk about the links to music, You know, that first number one, that was bad luck and trouble, right? So that was a direct connection to music. And music plays a huge part in Reacher when he's wandering the land, when he's stuck somewhere. He can just play music in his head. You know, music is a huge support system for Reacher. Yeah. And, you know, Andrew, how about for you?

28:12Like now, you know, Lee had all of these things going on where you could see it in the books. Like Jack Reacher was redundant in the military. So, you know, just like Lee's experience with television, he's on his own. He has to figure it out. He goes from town. He does his thing. How do you feel you can bring yourself into the Jack Reacher character now that you're starting to write these novels? Well, it's a great question. And I think a lot of the factors that help Lee and a lot of the experiences have been similar. When I worked in the telecommunications industry, for example, We had a very similar path because I worked for an organization that in its heyday was magnificent.

28:57They invented so many of the technologies that we use today and that have moved the industry forward and that have enabled that connected world Lee was talking about. So I was very happy working for a company like that until the management, typical same story, management wanted to cut costs. They wanted to get rid of the experienced professional people and replace them with younger, cheaper ones. I never actually got pushed out of the door. I had to make the decision to leave on my own. But I certainly remember that experience of essentially being pushed aside because they didn't appreciate what you were doing.