A fight’s never out of reach for Child
Thriller writer Lee Child isn’t necessarily prepared to leave the rough stuff to the mythic hero of his books.
He may not go to the extremes of his fictional creation Jack Reacher, a hulking 250-pound, six-footfive ex-marine who travels around the country administering rough and often ultraviolent justice to the bad guys.
But in real life, Child would be prepared to duke it out if physically threatened by an angry reader.
And some readers, including fans, can get very angry with him indeed.
Child has developed a huge following since the publication of his first novel, Killing Floor, in 1997. But he can also confound the expectations of those fans — and sometimes make them hopping mad.
For example, his new novel, A Wanted Man, just out from Delacorte, where Child’s trademark action and violence go on the back burner in favour of taking Reacher and the reader on a 120-page road trip that emphasizes psychological suspense at the expense of blood.
For him, it was the right creative decision in spite of objections from readers and critics.
Similarly, he’s unmoved by the controversy over the casting of Tom Cruise in the new Reacher movie hitting screens in late December.
In the case of A Wanted Man, he wanted to go in a new direction.
“I was conscious of trying to do it a little differently,” Child acknowledges by phone from New York. Indeed, this soft-spoken 57-year-old Englishman, who has astonishingly breached the cultural barriers with his creation of a quintessentially American protagonist in Reacher, sounds totally laid back about his decision.
“It was a risky book actually, but it’s the 17th book in the series, and I’m not writing the same book every year. I think that’s fatal. Sometimes there are going to be things that people don’t like.”
He does ensure a high body count by the novel’s end. And anyway, Child has weathered bigger storms in the past — thanks to the decision to make his loner hero a left-wing liberal.
Child took aim at a conservative icon clearly modelled on former U.S. vicepresident Dick Cheney in his 2004 thriller The Enemy — and survived that uproar. But a later novel, Nothing To Lose, really set off a firestorm because of a few lines critical of the war in Iraq.
“That was a catastrophe PR-wise amongst that section of the electorate,” Child chuckles. “But it then it just shows how complex politics is. … Those 19 lines or whatever were taken verbatim from emails I received from serving military in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Reaction to that novel manifested itself in “various unpleasant ways … including many examples of the offending pages being used as toilet paper and sent to me.”
Delta Force members dispatched angry emails from Afghanistan: “We could kick Reacher’s ass.” To which Child replied: “No, he’d kick your ass.”
Child retains the streetfighter instincts he developed growing up in the English midlands in the bruising inner-city environment of Birmingham where he discovered the usefulness of a bicycle chain as weaponry.
“I’m not scared of criticism … but if it’s the sort of insult that would get you beaten up in a bar, then you shouldn’t do it.” He was getting that kind of insult by email, and Child actually welcomed the threat of physical confrontation in his replies: “If you have a problem, come to one of my book signings … and we’ll talk about it on the sidewalk outside.”
That never happened, but Child was ready. He says he’s a big guy physically — just like Reacher who stands sixfoot-five. “And I’m certainly as aggressive as him.”
Still, he isn’t feeling aggressive towards all those fans protesting the casting of Tom Cruise — who’s a diminutive five-foot-seven and has no chance of matching Reacher’s 50-inch chest — in the movie, Jack Reacher, which arrives Dec. 21. Child just wishes people would reserve judgment until they see it.
One Facebook page accuses Child of selling out to Hollywood: “Reacher would pick Cruise up, dangle him in front of him and then slam him up against the wall with his feet scrabbling away about two feet off the ground.”
Other complainers are more forgiving but still unhappy: “I guess it could have been worse — Justin Bieber … Andy Dick …”
Child admits the Cruise furor is the biggest he has faced. “But my first instinct is just to be extremely grateful that anyone has an opinion. That they are invested in this character so deeply that they are actively obsessed by the casting is a wonderful thing.
“The problem is that the books exist purely in the imaginative realm. It’s my imagination and the reader’s imagination working in tandem to produce something that actually has no reality.”
So, it’s inevitable that Reacher on screen won’t necessarily meet the expectations of the Reacher who has taken shape in a reader’s imagination. “There’s always some trade-off.”
Child has seen the movie “and it’s actually very good. There will always be a rump that refuses to accept it — and fair enough. But I believe that most people who have an open mind will come out and think — yeah, that was a really good version of the book.”
A WANTED MAN
By Lee Child Delacorte Press $29.95 (Cdn), 416 Pp