REACHING FOR THE STARS
96 | May• 2019
L
ee Child is truly loved. Every nine seconds someone
buys one of his 23 novels featuring hero Jack
Reacher. Each year, millions of his fans clamour to
get hold of the latest Jack Reacher thriller, released
annually sinceKilling Floorwas published in 1997.
Music great Paul McCartney, writer Malcolm Gladwell, actor
Gene Hackman and former US president Bill Clinton are
among his fans. Clinton even writes Child handwritten notes
about his latest Reacher novels and has been known to bug the
author for novel-writing advice late at night.
of friends,” Child says. “When I got
back I thought I should go to univer-
sity. I picked one at random, called
and they had a vacancy in the law
department so I thought,Yeah, I can
do that.”
Despite completing the degree
at the University of Sheffield, Child
has never practised as a law yer and
deliberately stayed away from writ-
ing legal thrillers, deciding early on
that the market was already cornered
with the likes of John Grisham.
Yet Child says he doesn’t regret
studying law. “It’s a great thing to
carry with you through life,” he says.
“If you have a dispute with anyone
you can sense if it’s worth fighting
or not.”
It’s his innate sense of justice, while
having the knack to stay in touch with
the average person, which makes
Child so likeable and appears to be
one of the reasons behind his enor-
mous success as an author.
“I’m very happy in life because I’m
At 64, Lee Child is engaging.
Amenable. His sandy blond hair,
piercing blue eyes and height of
almost two metres is eerily similar
to his famous fictional character Jack
Reacher. But while former Ameri-
can military policeman Reacher is
muscular and weighs over 105 kilo-
grams, Child is thin.
Clad in his standard black leather
jacket and blue jeans, Child seems
just the right amount of humble.
Good looking but ‘normal’. Charm-
ing without being over-the-top. Not
at all what you’d expect from a man
who has a reported net worth of
US$50 million, 24 best-selling nov-
els published in 49 languages and a
billion-dollar brand that’s sold more
than 100 million books.
Born James D. Grant in Coventry,
England, in 1954, the writer’s forma-
tive years were spent in Birmingham.
“I finished high school and imme-
diately went on a long hitch-hiking
trip around Europe with a bunch
