JACK REACHER AUTHOR’S REDUNDA
When James Grant was made redundant from his job in TV at Manchester’s Granada studios aged 40 he felt as if his world was collapsing around him.
And as despair and uncertainty looked like turning into a mid-life crisis, he faced a fork in the road.
One way led to the grind of applying for job after job, work that he didn’t really want. The other path demanded a huge gamble.
James took the second option – he bought a notebook and sat down to pen a novel. Most astonishing of all, he’d never written before.
Yet practically overnight, James became his pen name, Lee Child, and that novel, Killing Floor, was the first in a thriller series starring former US military cop hero Jack Reacher, which would become a hit the world over and a billion-dollar brand.
Fast forward two decades and 22 novels later, and the Coventry-born dad finds himself selling a book every nine seconds somewhere in the world, with an estimated £40million fortune.
He and wife Jane, who have a grownup daughter, Ruth, live in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York.
Lee owns 11 cars – most of which he never gets round to driving – and counts Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise among his good pals.
Tom, of course, played 6ft 5in loner Reacher in the 2012 and 2016 movie blockbusters based on Lee’s books, despite being closer to 5ft 6in.
“He sends me a cake every Christmas which is nice,” Lee explains, giggling at the incongruity of tough guy Reacher ordering baked goods.
But his next anecdote sounds far more Reacher – and Cruise. “I was in London promoting a book and Tom was shooting at Warner Brothers and he called me,” Lee recalls.
“He said ‘David Beckham said we should go to the Manchester derby’. It was the next day, and I was like, ‘Manchester is 200 miles from here, how will we get there?’ And he said ‘We’ll go in my helicopter’. That’s how it is.
“He’s fun to hang out with,” he laughs. “He does exciting things.”
And the movie star isn’t Lee’s only famous superfan.
For one, former US President Bill Clinton can’t get enough of Reacher’s exploits.
“He sends me a note after each book, he still does,” Lee explains.
And Barack Obama? “Obama I met several times because I was a political supporter, we had lunch and dinner,” explains Lee, 63.
“Funnily enough, he did not read the books, but what I admired is he admitted it. He just said ‘I’m really sorry I haven’t had time to read them’, and I thought ‘Yeah, you’re the President, you probably haven’t!’”
He’s yet to entice a UK Prime Minister to enjoy his pages that he knows of, although Samantha Cameron and Cherie Blair have complimented him.
And dare I ask, does Donald Trump ever reach for a Reacher?
“I have not heard from Trump and that’s fine by me, I hope he’s not a fan,”
You only have one life... have fun and don’t worry about the end result
says Lee, who is not one to mince his words when it comes to the current White House occupant.
Today Lee launches the 22nd thriller in the Reacher series, The Midnight Line, in paperback in the UK. And he’s already writing the final few scenes of instalment 23, titled Past Tense, which is due out in November.
He’s a writing machine who keeps to a strict timetable, beginning a new book every year on September 1, the anniversary of the date he began his very first.
But despite all his success, he admits the fear of failure never leaves him.
“I get nervous always, I feel this emotional bond with the reader, I want to give them the best possible story I can,” he says. “I always feel ‘this new one is awful...’”
He’s now known as Lee to everyone bar very close family, which can be useful when his books are reviewed.
He explains: “If a bad review happens it’s not really me, and equally if something really good happens it’s the same thing. I can’t really get too big-headed, it’s like it’s happening to someone else.
“I’ve found that really useful in smoothing out the emotional ups and downs of it.
“It’s almost like a double invention, Reacher is a fictional character and maybe the writer is too.”
No one is more staggered at the success Reacher brought than Lee Picture: DAN CALLISTER
himself. After studying law at the University of Sheffield he became a presentation director on Granada, working on shows like Prime Suspect, Cracker, and Brideshead Revisited.
Thinking he was in a job for life, being made redundant in 1995 sent him into
a “downward spiral”. It was an urg continue entertaining people that m him pick up a pen. He recalls his fa wasn’t very encouraging. “My dad said ‘I’ll lay you 10,000 won’t work’”, he says. “He was n supportive father in that sense, bu was very honest.” His dad, a civil servant, was wron 1997, Killing Floor was published the success story began. Lee explains he was n close to his parents. Growin with three brothers in Cove then Birmingham, he reca home lacking in affect “Mine was v distant and a v formal, kind of fashioned fam atmosphere, he s