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Fired from his job at British television company Granada at the age of 40, Lee Child was suddenly on the scrapheap with a family to support. Refusing to panic, he spent a few dollars on paper and pencils with the ambition of writing the biggest-selling book in the
world's biggest market: America.
Thirteen years later, Child has reached the summit with his 12th novel, Nothing to Lose, starring his anti-hero Jack Reacher, going straight to number one in the New York Times hardback fiction list, 10 places ahead of Sebastian Faulks' James Bond rework Devil May Care. It is the culmin-ation of a breakthrough year in which he has also had the number one paperback in America and topped both charts in Britain - a quadruple thought to be unique for a crime writer.
Child, 53, raised in Birmingham, central England, is beating American thriller writers at their own game, just as Londoner Jackie Collins did with the "bonkbuster". He is now the multimillionaire owner of two apartments in a Manhattan apartment block and two houses in St Tropez - one for living, one for writing in each location.
"London is next on the shopping list," he says matter-of-factly. He is not yet a household name, but a planned Hollywood film adaptation (Tom Cruise's production company has bought the rights) could turn his creation into the next Bond.
His character, Reacher, is something of a blokeish fantasy. Faced with six heavies in a bar, he slugs his way out of trouble. When his clothes need washing, he throws them out and buys new ones. He is irresistible to women, both those in the books and, seemingly, those who read them. An elite military policeman turned rootless drifter, Reacher has sleuthed his way through a dozen novels sprawling across America, righting wrongs and getting the girl, but riding off into the sunset alone - usually by bus. Or, as Cambridge academic Andy Martin put it: "Reacher is a moody, modern outsider figure, one of the great anti-heroes. He is anti-capitalism, anti-materialism, anti-religion, with a fondness for anarchy and revolution: a liberal intellectual with machismo, and arms the size of Popeye's."
Reacher also has no interest in self-grooming or self-doubt. Says Child: "He's whatever the opposite of meterosexual is. He's post-everything. He's post-politically correct, post-feminist, post-macho. He wouldn't recognise a gym if you showed him one, but he just is what he is, a big strong man who will do to you whatever you deserve. It doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, he'll help you, but he's just as likely to kill you if you deserve it."
Child was born Jim Grant, but chose his pen name because it was more memorable and came earlier in the alphabet. He won a scholarship to J.R.R. Tolkien's old school, King Edward's in Birmingham, studied law at Sheffield University and worked part-time in theatre. He then joined Granada TV in Manchester and spent 18 years as a director during the company's heyday when it produced blue-chip dramas such as Brideshead Revisited, Prime Suspect and Cracker.
In 1995 Child lost his job as a result of "corporate restructuring". He started writing "with a fury that was a perfect balance of creativity and financial necessity". The result, Killing Floor, unleashed Jack Reacher.
Since then he has steadily built sales, now 15 million copies worldwide, and a loyal army of fans.
The author follows in a tradition of literary emigres telling a nation new stories about itself. Many Americans read his short, punchy sentences without suspecting his foreign roots. His novels explore the country's geography and curiosities with a tourist's relish. He is married to an American, Jane, and has lived in New York for 10 years.
"America suited the book I wanted to write much more than Britain," he says. "British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography. If you think about Ian Rankin, it's a small area of Edinburgh. I wanted to do something that was more wide-ranging in terms of geography, empty spaces, distant horizons."
But his protagonist is a universal character type, he believes. "Almost retrospectively, what I realised with Reacher is that he's the same character who's always existed in fiction. People say he's from American westerns, meaning he's a mysterious drifter who shows up unexplained in the nick of time, and I say yes, but that was merely a version itself of the old medieval figure, the knight errant."
Despite the violent content of the high-testosterone adventures, they have proved popular among women. Says Child: "Women are very offended by injustice and the story of each book is something very unjust. By the end of the book Reacher has made it just, and women cheer that on."
Child dismisses literary snobbery towards the thriller genre. "Thrillers are the direct survivor of what must have been the first type of stories told way back whenever it was, the Stone Age or before. We must have told stories about danger and peril and then survival and order to console or encourage ourselves. I think the thriller form is 100,000 years old and the reason people learned to tell stories. Other genres are welcome to ride along."
His success was assured from the moment he submitted his first manuscript in March 1995, according to his agent, Darley Anderson. "My reader and I knew we just had hit gold dust. I told everybody at the time I had a number one bestselling author. "
Veteran writer Frederick Forsyth said: "Reacher is clearly going to be another Bond-type character. Maybe the American Bond. They've always longed for one of their own. How funny if it's created by a Brit."
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