`WEINSTEIN BOUGHT ME A RENOIR'
Author Lee Child isn't interested in being the richest man in the graveyard
After 25 years, more than 200 million books sold, thriller writer Lee Child is retiring. The new Jack Reacher novel he is writing, which he began on Sept. 1, just like he has every year since 1995, will be his last. His younger brother Andrew, who is a co-author on the current novel and has shared the credits on a total of three Reacher books so far, will take over the saga from now on.
“It's a strange thing,” he says, over video from his house in Colorado. “I've been doing it so long and now I won't be doing it anymore. But I'm British, I value retirement. I'm old enough to remember when people had those phases in their life. I remember my grandfather retiring when I started primary school. I said to my mother, what is that, `retiring'? And she said `well, he's not going to do anything any more.' There I was, struggling with reading, writing and arithmetic, and I thought, `that sounds pretty good.' I'm looking forward to getting there.”
Child recently celebrated his 68th birthday and seems set on this course of inaction.
“There's a lot of bulls--t in writing about how you're compelled to do it, which is simply not true,” he says. “Everything I do as a writer is based on how I felt as a reader. I got so annoyed about getting into series or authors that I loved and then they fall off a cliff. They keep on supplying the product but it is substandard. I promised myself I would never do that ... I did not want to give someone a lousy book just because of a contract.”
He hoped retirement would mean more time with his wife, Jane, an American, and his grownup daughter Ruth, a dog trainer who lives in New York. The family could travel, listen to music. Lee could smoke some joints.
Legal marijuana was one of the reasons he bought a place in Colorado. “What a revelation (legal cannabis) has been to an old stoner like me.”
In America, most of his anxieties centre on 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “American politics on one level is so superficial that if gas prices get up ... we'll abandon Ukraine overnight. And the insanity of the Republican Party is a severe worry. They are going to use (2026) in ways that are predictable and I think will be very upsetting.”
While Child has played around with the details, the core Reacher premise is the same as always. Reacher arrives, investigates, clears house, gets the girl. But as sales have grown, so has his literary reputation, which is not always true of thriller writers.
The Reacher novels flow with an inimitable staccato cadence. Hardly a word is wasted. His work has drawn comparisons with Tolstoy and Samuel Beckett. “That's the true connection between me and Beckett, he says, very pretentiously.” Child laughs. “He was Irish writing in French. I'm English writing in American.”
The figure commonly given for Reacher's worldwide sales is “more than 100 million copies,” but Child says that figure is out of date. “It's been many years since we tabulated it, but it's got to be 200 million by now. It's too difficult to calculate, because it's a moving target. But we know consumer receipts for Reacher are over $3 billion. I've probably earned somewhere close to an average of a dollar a book in terms of royalties, so it's north of, or getting on for, $200 million.”
How does he spend it? “I'm not a saint, I spend a fortune on myself and my family and having fun. But inevitably there's some left over and I give it away. Just this morning I gave 20 grand to an excon I know who is having health problems. Random things like that. There are more structured charitable things, as well. But I'm not interested in being the richest man in the graveyard.”
As well as book sales, there have been TV and film adaptations. In 2012 and 2016, there were two feature films, Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, in which Tom Cruise starred, much to fans' disappointment. More happily there's now Amazon Prime Video's Reacher, currently shooting its second series, which stars Alan Ritchson, a behemoth of a man. Child has been asked to write scripts for others, too, most memorably in 2006.
“A particular Hollywood producer had bid for the Reacher script and not got it, but ego-wise was driven to have some part of me. He wanted me to rewrite a movie. I didn't want to do it, so I did what you do in Hollywood, which is ask for a ridiculous amount of money. But he paid it! It was 11 days of work and I got a million bucks. I bought a Renoir as a kind of marker of that.” The producer, he reveals, with a kind of inevitability, was Harvey Weinstein. “That can be your subhead,” Child adds, with the grin of a man who used to work in commercial TV. “Harvey Weinstein bought me a Renoir.”
“Maybe it was an omission on my part, but I never thought about him from a woman's point of view. I probably should have. But from a man's point of view he was a bully and combative. During our meeting he would say `you'd better believe I'm a tough guy.' After 20 minutes I was just bored. I said `Harvey, f--- you. I'm from Birmingham. You have no idea what a tough guy is.' He told this story about losing his eye in a fight when he was 12. I said `I have both eyes. I won all my fights when I was 12.'”
About the fractious nature of publishing today, he is scrupulously even-handed. But he admits to relief that he made his name before the Reacher books, or their author, had to worry about cancellation.
“On the occasions pile-ons have happened to me I remember feeling happy that I'm basically immune to that sort of thing because I'm already rich and famous,” he says.
“I didn't have a huge amount of sympathy for J.K. Rowling because she can take it. I've never avoided controversy where it has occurred. I don't have the cultural position that Rowling has, or Salman Rushdie. I'm not in the firing line. At the end of the day, the Reacher books are just entertainments.”