Lee Child

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the show in which some of the world's leading creative people choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my first guest in a new series of This Cultural Life is one of the world's biggest selling authors, the crime novelist Lee Child. In 1997, after an 18-year career in British television, Child created his tough guy protagonist Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who roams America fighting crime. Writing a book a year since his debut, Killing Floor, Lee Child established himself as one of the most acclaimed and popular novelists in his genre and has now sold over 100 million copies worldwide.

0:56The Reacher books have been adapted for a film starring Tom Cruise and, more recently, an Amazon Prime television series. Lee Child's latest publication, Safe Enough, is a collection of short stories. Lee Child, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. It's great to be here. Fascinating format, I must say. Oh, well, great. I'm glad you like it. You were born in Coventry in 1954, Lee, and moved to Birmingham as a young child. but then you were known as James Grant. What was home life like for young Jim? It was the 1950s, early 60s, you know, very post-war. You know, that famous line from that the war ended somewhere between Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles' first LP.

1:44In Birmingham, it was actually a little later than that. You know, there was a good 20 years of post-war life up until 1965-ish, probably. and our particular home life was doer, repressed. My parents were very desperately aspirational, both of them fundamentally products of the skilled working class but desperate to become middle class. What did they do? My dad became a tax inspector with the Inland Revenue. My mother was a housewife. And us boys, there were three of us at first, and we got the feeling that we were really accessories in this aspirational dynamic that we needed to do well and be polite, well-dressed children in order to enhance our parents' status.

2:28Was there pressure on you then? Tremendous pressure, yeah, to behave in a certain way and to achieve at school and to go to university and so on as a reflection on them rather than purely for our benefit. So it was a strange life. They had a sort of terribly Calvinist attitude that anything that was liable to be enjoyable should be avoided. Fortunately, the only thing that they respected was books. That was the only thing that was provided without question. Obviously, not really bought because we were not poor. Don't get me wrong on that. We always had three meals a day and we always had shoes.

3:06But there was never any money left for anything else. So we didn't often buy books, but we were taken to the library constantly and jumble sales where you just bought books and nothing else. so that we grew up with a respect for books, which was the main value in my upbringing, is that books were OK.

3:32Well, on This Cultural Life, my guests choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And your first choice is a book, it's a ladybird book that you read as a child, The Story of David and Goliath. Why have you chosen this one? Well, what I found fascinating about having to think about these influences is, of course, they had a certain weight and impact at the time. But then later, as you grow and become more sophisticated as an analyst, you can work out why they were so influential. And yeah, a Lady Bird book, I don't know if people remember those very slim little volumes.

4:09And there was a period when they had fabulous, realistic illustrations in them. David and Goliath was no doubt bought at a jumble sale. And I read it. I loved the pictures, read the story. But I loved Goliath. Goliath was my favorite. And I'd be about four at this time, I think, and I would go over the book over and over again daily, hoping that one day Goliath would win. And afterward, I realized, OK, I like the big guy rather than the small guy. I don't like the underdog paradigm. but even deeper than that I think it gave me an insight into fiction that it was made up in the first place so you can make up your own version if you want in my head Goliath would win he never did on the page the page never changed unfortunately but I realized many many years later you know as an adult that I was in a way defining what fiction is that you can have your own version of it you You don't have to stick with what the author provided in the first place.

5:16You are also defining your future protagonist in a way. Jack Reacher, what is he, 6 '4", 6 '5", 250 pounds, 50-inch chest, a giant. He is Goliath. He is Goliath, absolutely. My whole premise for the Reacher books was, can Goliath be the good guy? And then further than that, how do you put him into peril? Because the underdog thing is such an easy way of putting your hero in peril because he's a small, scrappy guy against massive forces. And so much fiction depends on that. You know, even popular thriller fiction is all David and Goliath. John Grisham, for instance, who I love as an author, always some neophyte lawyer in his second year taking on a massive insurance company.

5:58He's David versus Goliath. It's a permanent paradigm. But I wanted to switch it. Could Goliath be the good guy? And can we find a way of making readers worried about him? And many years later, in fact, I was on a plane going on holiday and found a lost book in the seat pocket in front of me, which was pretty good, actually. And I read it on the plane, except that the last chunk of pages had fallen out. And initially, I was frustrated. I thought, ah, you know, I'll never know how it finished. And then I thought, wait a minute. The author is just making this up. He's presented me with three quarters of it.

6:38Now, I can just imagine how it should finish, and that's just as valid as his version. So, yeah, all these things are about you don't have to accept what you're given. You can imagine a different version or a superior version, and then, of course, it's a fairly easy step to move on and say, right, well, I'll just imagine the whole thing from beginning to end. Were you a big reader as a kid? Huge, huge reader. From a young age? From the age of three. My eldest brother was, he started at primary school, obviously, before I did. And I was insane with jealousy that he was doing stuff that I didn't know how to do.

7:14My elder brother was a very smart guy. He ended up a nuclear scientist. Even so, my mother was concerned that he was understanding his lessons. And so every afternoon, she would sit him down and go over the day's lessons with him. And I would eavesdrop and try and pick up as much as I could. And over a period of a couple of months, I suppose, I taught myself to read from sort of secondhand eavesdropping what she was going through with him. You know, as a three-year-old, I think it was all picture books with very little words in it. But then from about the age of four, I started on books that had no pictures.

7:49The public library has been such a recurring subject on this program. It's been so important to so many of my guests. Who was your guide to the bookshelves or were you just given sort of free reign? We were just let loose in there. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You talk to any writer, the public library created their life, you know, not just enabled it. And that's certainly true of me. And our problem was that the Birmingham library system, you could only take out two books per week. And so we operated a kind of Chicago voting system in our house. Any visitor was forced to sign up for a library ticket.

8:25Our dog had a library ticket. and so I would be able to get six or eight books a week. I remember the smell of it. It was a dusty, you know, Birmingham back then, this was, as I say, post-war and there were still ruins everywhere and we played football on a crushed brick field from demolitions, from bomb damage and the library was sitting on one of those, a kind of wooden hut that had a very distinctive dusty smell and not many books in it But we would just go in there and it was paradise. You could get any book you wanted, which seemed like such a gift. And I raced through one thing after another, series, standalone books, geography books, history books.

9:10And then the one great thing my mother did for me, which was pretty soon I'd read every book in that library. And then she took us to the next municipality, which was a dramatic place. There was a very high footbridge over a canal and to the next library, Tower Hill, which was a multi-story library. It had more than one floor. It was not just a wooden hut. It was a proper building full of books. It's a paradise. You mentioned another specific book in an email that you sent in to us, another childhood book from a library, I presume. And this is something called My Home in America. That's a picture book, was it?

9:48It was. It was, I imagine, part of a series. There's probably My Home in France, My Home in India or whatever is a long multi-part series. But the only one our library had was My Home in America. And that was super influential, too, because it was a picture book showing typical houses, beautifully drawn in that particular 1950s style. You know, first page would be a California bungalow. And then you turn the page. It was a New England salt box and then a prairie farmhouse. It worked its way through the States. Yeah. And then you turned it again. And the only picture drawn from the inside was this apple-cheeked little boy sitting on a low windowsill in a high-floor apartment in New York looking out over the city at night.

10:32And that hit me in a way that I can't really explain. It was almost, I am that boy. Why am I in Birmingham and not in New York? How did this go wrong? I just knew that I was trapped in the wrong place. which was a feeling a lot of people had in Birmingham because Birmingham is a lovely city as a matter of fact and I had a great time and it was very productive and it really powered the national economy for a long time, the workshop of the world. But it was derided. It was looked down upon. If you were from Birmingham, you were never quite allowed to feel fully English. You were held at arm's length.

11:13And so I think that plus this appeal of this other destination made me feel I shouldn't be here. I should be there. But specifically America. It wasn't the interior of the apartment. In fact, let me ask you, because you live in New York or one of your homes is in New York. Is it a high rise? Is it a flat on a high floor? We just sold that and bought an actual house, a brownstone, they called them in New York. But you did achieve that vision. Absolutely, I did. I did, and it really, just a great day. When I moved into that first high-floor apartment that looked out over the glittering city with these fabulous buildings in view, I'm finally where I should be, is what I thought.

11:59But you felt, even as a child, America is the place. Did you ever imagine you would end up there? I didn't, no. I mean, that was the other thing. It was so narrow. It was so constrained back then. that you couldn't possibly imagine being anywhere else, actually. You know, you were going to get a job similar to what your dad was doing or your friend's dad was doing. And that was your whole life right there. And if you did really, really, really well, you might have a semi-detached house instead of a terraced house. You might have a two-year-old car instead of a five-year-old car. But the horizons were so closed in.

12:37Ambition was so limited. which again culturally if you look back to those early 60s like the James Bond movies the whole appeal of those was not so much the action of James Bond but the locations you know Jamaica, Switzerland all these places he would go these fantastically exotic destinations people were just amazed by them and simultaneously feeling they would never get there themselves but at least they could see them on the movie screen. I think it's really interesting that you that this book, My Home in America, takes you on almost a tour of the states and the different kind of homes and environments.

13:14Is it significant then that Reacher himself is a rootless wanderer? He is a man without a home and he can head from state to state in the way that you did in that book. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, part of that was that I did not want to do what everybody else was doing, which was fundamentally either a location-based or an employment-based soap opera, where it's always a repeating cast of characters doing the same thing in the same place. Other people did that so well, I wanted to do something different to be distinctive. So I thought whatever everybody else is doing, I'll do the exact opposite.

13:49So that Reacher has no home, no job, no possessions, no permanent cast of characters, no repeating friends, colleagues, and all that sort of stuff, especially no home so that he wanders, which I felt was authentic in terms of ex-military people. who do come out of the military universe into the civilian universe and are totally not at home, can't deal with it, don't know it, don't understand it. So Rich's deal with himself was that he would spend a year wandering to see what he hadn't seen during his very constrained service, but he was unable to give it up. He just couldn't stop it. He couldn't settle down.

14:30Dramatically, it gives me the chance to put him anywhere and do anything. And I am fascinated by, I love the cities in America. I love Chicago, New York. I love LA. But really, the fascinating parts are the forgotten bypass bits in the middle. The 1950s in America, they built the interstate system. That basically replaced the old roads that would take you laboriously from coast to coast or whatever. Like Route 66, which is so famous culturally, was basically replaced by interstates that could be 50 or 100 miles away but parallel. And so all those little towns basically turned either into ghost towns or shrunk into little no-account places, often miles from anywhere.

15:17You can be in towns and the nearest police department could be 50 miles away. so that you did have that opportunity for secrecy and strange goings-on that would be not apparent to anybody else. That becomes Reacher's World then in your imagination. When did you first go to America, and did it live up to those expectations? Oh, more than. I first went in 1974, which is now 50 years ago. I was at university and was going out with an American student who was studying in England. She was my girlfriend then and she's my wife now. We've been together 50 years. This was University of Sheffield. It was.

15:57Sheffield where you studied law, I think. Yeah. I was fascinated by the law, not because I wanted to be a lawyer, but I loved a lot of different subjects. History, I liked economics, I liked politics. And the law is a snapshot of all of those things combined at any one time in history. Jack Reacher relies on rough justice rather than the judicial system when he's dealing with the bad guys. So did the legal studies feed into the stories later? In a way, in a funny way, it helped with writing too because a lot of legal writing is dull, but the good legal writers have to be both appealing and extremely precise, and that really influenced me.

16:39Lord Denning in particular, I don't know if you remember him, master of the roles for a long time. His mind legally was razor sharp, and his writing was accessible, pleasant, and that became a kind of ambition of mine. Can I be that precise and that accessible? The violence, especially in the early Reacher novels, is often quite extreme. So based on personal experience as a young man, I mean, in Birmingham, or is that a general oversimplification of 1970s Birmingham? It's sort of rooted more in the 60s, Birmingham. It was an emotionally inarticulate place that any kind of problem or dispute or frustration would be answered with violence of a sort of playground type.

17:30I mean, relatively serious, but, you know, not lethal necessarily. But yeah, it was always fighting. And there was that peculiar thing whereby if you were doing well at school, you had a target on your back. And then, of course, when I went to King Edwards, at the time, probably the most academically successful school in the country. Then I had to get out of my neighborhood wearing that fancy uniform and then get back in again in the afternoon. So that was permanently two fights a day. So that a lot of the physical ballet of Reacher's fighting is basically me age nine or ten. That's really interesting you call it ballet because it is almost choreographed.

18:40bone-to-bone contact. You do seem to enjoy the physical description of the fight process very often. I do very much but I was also very aware that it's a difficult moral balance because of you know a book like the Reacher books they're not textbooks on how we should live they're sort of exactly the opposite of that they are consolations that we can't live like that because readers as a whole are the more civilized part of society, the more thoughtful and so on. And they know perfectly well that if you track down the bad guy, then of course the accused has rights. There should be a fair trial. There should be humane imprisonment thereafter.

19:27Civilized people understand that completely, but they find it terribly frustrating. And so what I'm offering them is a kind of consolation, a kind of fantasy alternative. And I'm totally convinced the audience understands it's a fantasy. They understand that this should not be happening, but gosh, isn't it delightful that it is.

19:58your next choice Lee Child is the 1981 ITV drama series Brideshead Revisited which was adapted from the Evelyn War novel and was made at Granada Television at a time when you were working there what was your job at Granada first of all I went there as what they call an assistant transmission controller, junior to the transmission controller himself. We worked in pairs. And the transmission controller was a kind of air traffic controller of the network. There'd be news flashes, there would be equipment breakdowns and so on. And we were the people that dealt with everything. We were the last fingers on the dials before people at home saw it on their screen.

20:39We were responsible for everything legally. So we were responsible for making sure anything that left the station was kosher and we were in trouble if it wasn't. Incredibly busy, frantic job and Granada back then was a huge cultural thing, not only in drama but in documentary as well. There was a strand called World in Action which was a really brave documentary venture. Why have you chosen Brideshead? What was your involvement with Brideshead? Well first of all it was like very exciting, you know, this was a major, major departure for the station. They were investing a staggering sum of money, a million pounds, you know, back in 79 when the budget was set.

21:20A lot of money. And they did it in a way that was patient. It took its time. Nothing was rushed or compressed. It was done on the feeling that entertainment could be popular without seeking the lowest common denominator. You didn't have to just concentrate on the big scenes and the high points. You could do the slow bits. You could do the quiet bits. And I thought it was magnificent. And I still watch it once in a while. I remember the feeling as it was being made. I was brand new, a young kid. And Mike Scott, who was the director of programming at the time, I remember bumping into him in the corridor.

22:02And the atmosphere was such that I could say to him, how's it going? And he said, every frame a Rembrandt. I remember that so well. On Sundays, a neighbouring priest called to say Mass. Sebastian's faith was an enigma to me at the time, but not one that I felt particularly concerned to solve. I took it as a foible like his teddy bear. Such an old bore, Father Phipps. Kept me back half an hour after Mass talking about cricket. Does it make much difference to you? Of course. All the time. I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don't seem to be much more virtuous than me.

22:45My dear Charles, I'm much, much wickeder. Well, then. Who was it you used to pray, Oh, God, make me good, but not yet? I don't know, you, I should think. Yes, I do. All the time. On one level, though, Bride's Head, with its foppish young men clutching teddy bears, couldn't be further from Reacher, but did it teach you something about the storytelling process? Totally, yeah. It taught me that you don't have to just do relentless pace. You don't have to just do all fighting or huge concept plots. You know, there doesn't always have to be a bomb about to go off. You can take your time, be patient, do the quiet bits as well, do the funny bits as well.

23:26Also, you did not have to be afraid of quality in seeking a large audience. It's really interesting because you had this high-level prestigious job in presentation, but you also later took on a role as shop steward representing many of the television workers at Granada in the mid-90s. And this was a time when new management came in and took over and everything changed, a lot of redundancies. So what do you remember of that time? It was awful. The old Granada was suddenly, I suppose, vulnerable to this new 1990s concept of shareholder value. Profits were allowed to be limitless and greed set in.

24:08And they, generally speaking, every company brought in new management to maximize profit. And the easiest way of doing that was to fire all the old expensive people. And key to that was busting the union. And the old-time shop steward had been there for a long time and was due to retire. And the management put around the whisper that if anybody stood to replace him, they would be fired within a week and never work again in the industry. This was my real-life reach-a-moment. I thought, that ain't right. And so I stood for election. And a semi-sympathetic manager saw me in the corridor and said, you idiot, you'll be fired in a week.

24:48And I thought, well, we'll see about that. And that week turned into two years and three months of fighting battles on behalf of the workforce. But they got you in the end. Yeah. I mean, we were destined to lose, but I had a lot of fun. We won a lot of battles along the way, even though we lost the war. Strikes or was it more? No, we didn't strike. A lot more covert than that. It was very covert. Their fundamental mistake was management works from nine to five and we work 24-7. And so as soon as management went home in the evening, I had a SWAT team of cleaners who would check every wastebasket, who would look under every photocopier lid, bring me anything that looked like a memo or a draft.

25:30So I was the best informed shop steward ever. And that was why we were able to win a lot of battles. So you could see plans being drawn up for redundancy, cost cutting, everything. Including all kinds of weird catch 22s. Like I found a draft memo that was going to make me redundant. But the rule was you had to inform the shop steward of any redundancies, and they hadn't informed me. So in a Coach 22 way, they couldn't do it. But they did get you in the end. You were sacked. And this is a defining moment in your life. It is part of the Reacher myth that you went home and you sat down and you started writing novels as revenge.

26:08Is that right? It is. The chronology is simplified in the myth in that, you know, it was a bit fudged in as much as I knew it was coming. and therefore I prepared a little ahead of time. But yeah, absolutely. I'd been there 18 years by that point and I was hyper-skilled in a universe that was disappearing. And so it was what to do next. You know, I had no marketable skills other than for the job I was being thrown out of. And because I was a shop steward, I would never get another job in the industry. So I had no skills at all, which was a bit of a panic, except that I thought, wait a minute, step back and look at the larger picture.

26:47What is it that you know? And what I knew after 18 years was what the audience wanted, what they would respond to, why some things worked and other things didn't work. I thought, that's what you actually know. Now, how can you use that? I had been reading since I was three. I had read tens of thousands of long-form narrative works, be it fiction or nonfiction. Use that instinct that you've developed to write a book. It seemed like my last chance. I often get asked to go to schools or universities and talk to intending writers or students interested in writing. And there's no message you can give them other than don't do it now.