Lee
Andrew was a late addition. There was me and my
two younger brothers, but then my mother became
pregnant at 41. These days that’s nothing, but in 1960s
Birmingham it was seen as almost grotesque. How
dare you get pregnant in your forties?
A lot happened to me in the first year of his life.
I turned 15, I became a serious smoker, I lost my
virginity, I tried weed for the first time ... basically
I wanted to be out there! After finishing school I went
to uni, got married and didn’t see much of Andrew
until he was seven or eight years old, but as soon as
I started talking to this strange little kid, I knew we
had some kind of connection. He reminded me of me.
That was a huge relief because I’d always felt as if there
had been a mix-up at the hospital and I’d been left with
the wrong family. My dad was a top-drawer Northern
Irish Protestant. The world was meant to be dour and
repressed; life was all about duty and anything that felt
like fun was useless. Unfortunately for Dad, me and
Andrew wanted to have fun.
After I was made redundant from Granada TV in
the mid-Nineties [where Lee worked as a presentation
director, writing trailers and TV links], I told my
parents I was going to write a book. The first thing my
father said was, “I bet you 10,000 to 1 that it’s a failure.”
He wasn’t trying to hurt me. That was simply his take
on the situation. Maybe he was right. So I sent the first
draft of Killing Floor [the first Jack Reacher novel,
published in 1997] to Andrew, the only person I could
really trust with something like that.
There were times when I was writing the 24th
Reacher book, Blue Moon, when I didn’t want to do it.
It happens to all writers. I’d always promised myself that
it was never going to happen to me, so I figured it was
time to kill Reacher. I found myself sitting there one
day, wishing that I still had the enthusiasm of 15 or 20
years ago. Then it dawned on me ... I know someone
who is me, but 15 years younger. Andrew had started out
in telecoms, but by this time he was a full-time thriller
writer. Plus, he knew Reacher inside out. Handing
Reacher to him makes sense. I was getting tired.
The 25th Reacher, The Sentinel, was written in
collaboration, but I wasn’t peering over his shoulder
every two minutes. We talked, he wrote, we talked
some more, a few tweaks and so on. We still worked
together on the most recent one [Better Off Dead],
but Andrew was beginning to take the lead. He wrote
the whole first chapter without telling me. I read it
and thought, “F***, that’s good.”
The Reacher books have always been about the
character, not the author. My readers don’t go into
RELATIVE VALUES
Lee Child and Andrew Grant
The author and his brother on keeping Jack Reacher in the family
the bookstore and ask for the new Lee Child, they ask
for the new Reacher. I think Reacher’s strong enough
to handle a change like this. Having said that, there is
one detail I’m concerned about. Reacher’s never been
scared of a fight and I guess that goes back to me
having to look after myself as a teenager. I enjoyed the
instinctive nature of a fight. A lot had changed by the
time Andrew was in his teens. We were living in nice,
polite Harpenden and violence was no longer part of
everyday life. Andrew can look after himself, but I might
need to give him a few pointers. Although, God, I’m 67,
maybe it’s time to back off a little bit. I am trying my best
to chill out. I haven’t had a fight for five or six years now.Andrew
I have one definite early memory of Jim [Lee’s real name
is James Grant]. Dad was yelling at me for something
and Jim suddenly appeared. He stood up for me and
started arguing with Dad. I was only four or five, but he
took me to one side and said, “This is how it’s gonna be.
I look after you and you look after me. We’re a team.”
As I got older I realised that Jim felt it was his duty to
stand up for people. If that meant having a scrap with
some older kid in the neighbourhood, so be it. I got the
distinct impression he enjoyed it. That put him at oddsMain: Lee, 67, left,
and Andrew, 53,
near their homes
in Wyoming. Right:
together in 1973“I was only four when he took me
aside and said, ‘I look after you and
you look after me. We’re a team’”
8 • The Sunday Times Magazine