‘I told Harvey Weinstein, screw you. I’m from Birmingham’

After selling £2.6billion worth of books, the Jack Reacher creator tells Ed Cumming about writing his last novel, legal weed and how Hollywood bought him a Renoir

After 25 years, more than 200 million books sold, countless corpses and hundreds of thousands of clipped sentences, thriller writer Lee Child is retiring. The new Jack Reacher novel he is writing, which he began on September 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 with Lee on a total of three Reacher books so far, will take over the saga from now on. Lee is holstering his typing fingers.

“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 any more. 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.”

He certainly seems relaxed about it. His transatlantic accent, an inscrutable mix of Birmingham, London and American, has grown subtly more laconic over the years. His lean, 6ft 4in frame folds comfortably into his chair. Behind him, arranged along the walls, is a bank of guitars. Gibson Les Pauls, a Fender Stratocaster, and a Fender Jazz from 1954, the year of his birth.

It is unusual to hear a novelist speak so warmly of retirement. Writers tend to treat their work as a vocation. Those who have announced they are stopping, such as Philip Roth, are so rare as to be notable. Child has just celebrated his 68th birthday and seems set on this course of inaction.

“There’s a lot of bulls--- 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’ve probably been a bit assiduous about it, erring on the side of caution, but I did not want to give

‘There’s a lot of bulls--in writing about how you’re compelled to do it; it’s simply not true’

‘I didn’t have a huge amount of sympathy for JK Rowling because she can take it’

someone a lousy book just because of a contract.”

Lee is not quite done yet. This year’s Reacher, No Plan B, was published last week. He has also just released a series of online writing masterclasses as part of the BBC’S Maestro series. But as for his creative input, the end is in sight. When he first announced the Reacher succession plan – he and Andrew would co-author four Reacher books, before Lee bowed out – he hoped retirement would mean more time with his wife, Jane, an American, and his grown-up 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, which is only an hour’s drive south from his home in Wyoming. “What a revelation [legal cannabis] has been to an old stoner like me,” he says. “All my life I was used to getting any old stuff from anybody. Now there’s 50 boutiques, menus, sommeliers.”

The pandemic dampened some of those plans. So too has the political situation, in Britain and America. “It’s not what I bargained for,” he says. “The Truss thing was obviously a mistaken cul-de-sac. Rishi should have been chosen from the beginning.” Child grew up a Labour supporter, but says his politics were shaped by union experience. “I went to Sheffield University in the 1970s, which is the most radical political education you can get. But I was a shop steward in television. You learn that you don’t need ideology, you need something that works. I’m very pragmatic about politics.”

In America, most of his anxieties centre around 2026, which will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “American politics on one level is so superficial that if gas prices get up to 7, 8, 9 dollars a gallon, 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.” Despite living in America, on and off, since the 1990s, he is not a US citizen. “I’m one of those people Theresa May decried,” he says. “I’m a citizen of the world.”

Not that he has cut his ties with the old land altogether. He is not much of a royalist, although he consented to receive a CBE from Prince Charles in 2020, but he says he found the death of Queen Elizabeth II “more moving than I thought I would”. Like Child’s mother, the late Queen was a mother of four. “It felt like a hinge in history,” he says. “I’m a big fan of the post-war consensus, the stoicism, the putting up with it, the endless deferral of gratification into the future. That generation were the participants and they’ve disappeared, replaced by generations that are far more entitled. The establishment knew the Queen’s death was a point of maximum vulnerability, so they rolled out all that magnificent pageantry to steamroller their way through the transition.”

While his transatlantic existence – he also has homes in New York, East Sussex and the south of France – might have increased his anxiety about politics, it has been germane to his work. Over the years, the Lee Child mythology has been worn smooth in the telling. He was born James Grant, the second of four sons to Rex, a civil servant, and Audrey, a housewife.

The family moved from Coventry to Birmingham when James was four to improve the children’s educational prospects. He had an unhappy relationship with his mother: he has called her “mean” and “malicious” and didn’t attend her funeral in 2017, while his father was merely distant. Despite tearaway tendencies James was a bright child, and went to King Edward’s, a grammar school in Birmingham, before studying law at Sheffield. After graduating, he went straight into television, where he spent 20 years as a producer at Granada during the broadcaster’s golden age, working on Brideshead Revisited, Cracker and Prime Suspect.

In 1995, at the age of 39, Child was made redundant. It was a “very bad time”. He had a mortgage, car payments and a 15-year-old daughter. With enough savings to last him seven months, he bought paper and pencils. On the first of September he started writing what would become Killing Floor, the first Reacher novel. He had first visited New York with Jane in 1974, a year before they got married, and knew only America provided a large enough canvas for what he had in mind.

His hero was a 6ft 5in former military policeman, who turns up in a small town in Georgia with only a toothbrush, some money and the clothes on his back. He uncovers nefarious activity, which he brings to a close with a mixture of insight and extreme violence. The story drew on the mythology of the knight errant – the wandering, landless warrior – as well as the westerns. The name Lee Child came from a family nickname based on the mispronunciation of the French “le” – his daughter, Ruth, was “Le Child”. Reacher came from his wife’s observation that his height would make him a good “reacher” in a supermarket.

While Child has played around with the details, the core Reacher premise is the same as it was then. Reacher arrives, investigates, clears house, gets the girl. But as Child’s sales have grown, so has his literary reputation, which is not always the case with 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.”

In the Maestro series, Child distils his accumulated learning into six hours’ worth of videos. It is surprising, he concedes, because “deep down, I believe writing really can’t be taught”. But he wanted to help the Beeb out. “When I used to work for ITV the BBC was our deadly rival, but, from outside the UK, the BBC is of paramount importance in terms of soft power and credibility,” he says.

The classes are a reminder that for all his intuitive skill as a novelist, he is a sure-footed critic, too, a regular contributor to the pages of The New York Times. His advice is no-nonsense. “My number one message was that you cannot be a writer unless you have been a reader. But if you have been a reader, if you have lived with books all your life, then you can be a writer.”

In 2014, the Cambridge academic Andy Martin sat in Child’s office while Child wrote the novel that would become Make Me. In the resulting piece of meta-criticism Reacher Said Nothing, Martin was able to confirm that Child really does not plan his books beforehand, writes somewhere between 500 and 2,000 words a day, and only writes one draft, fuelled by two packs of Camels and gallons of weak black coffee. (On our call, he waits 45 minutes to light up. “I’ve always been thin but I’m super healthy,” he says, waving the fag at the screen, “other than self-inflicted.”)

In 2020, Child was one of the judges on the Booker Prize, who gave the award to Douglas Stuart’s coming-ofage novel, Shuggie Bain. One of his fellow judges, Sameer Rahim, an editor at Prospect magazine (and formerly of The Telegraph), says Child was a valuable addition to the panel. “You felt there was a proper technician in the room,” he says. “He understood why some novels worked and why some didn’t and always had excellent reasons for his choices. And his range of acquaintances could be useful: in judging one novel about Hillary Clinton, he could compare it with the real HRC.”

Eventually any investigation of Lee Child has to leave words behind and embrace the astonishing numbers. The figure commonly given for Reacher’s worldwide sales is “more than 100million copies”, but Child says that figure is out of date. “It has been many years since we tabulated it, but it’s got to be 200million by now,” he says. “It’s too difficult to calculate, because it’s a moving target. But we know consumer receipts for Reacher are over $3billion [£2.6billion]. 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, $200million [£176million].”

How does he spend it, I wonder? “I’m not a saint, I spend a fortune on myself and my family and having fun,” he says. “But inevitably there’s some left over and I give it away. Just this morning I gave 20 grand to an ex-con 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, decidedly not 6ft 5in, took the title role, much to fans’ disappointment. More happily there is now Amazon Prime Video’s Reacher, currently shooting its second series, which stars Alan Ritchson, a granite-hewn 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 says. “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’.”

While Child may not have called out Weinstein’s abuses, the Reacher novels have acquired a reputation for being surprisingly feminist considering the amount of violent masculine retribution they involve. And there are no Bond floozies but confident and capable women who know exactly what they want from the hero.

Child’s success has come at a price beyond what must be extensive tax bills. He says relations with his brothers have been mostly harmonious. Writing together has not caused friction with Andrew, who lives a few miles away in the small Wyoming town of Tie Siding, partly because they have a 14-year age gap. “We were never brothers under the same roof,” he says. “I didn’t break his toys, he didn’t break mine. By the time he was walking and talking, I was long gone.” His other brothers do “normal jobs”, he says.

“Apart from Andrew, the rest of the family is buttoned-up and conventional. They probably don’t think writing is a respectable thing to do.” Former colleagues found it harder to deal with his success.

“The harder thing is that I was one of hundreds that were fired by Granada in the 1990s. We had a very close-knit department, so I had 10 or 12 good friends and we were all thrown out. The law of averages is that one of you will move onward and upward. It happened to be me. I think the others are a little jealous, or wish it was them.”

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 JK Rowling because she can take it. I’ve never avoided controversy where it has occurred. I don’t have the cultural position that JK Rowling has, or Salman Rushdie. I’m not in the firing line. At the end of the day, the Reacher books are just entertainments.”

“Entertainments” is the word Graham Greene used to describe what he thought of as his lesser books, like Our Man in Havana and The Third Man, but Child is proud of his work. “The new book came out yesterday,” he says. “Around the world, many millions of people are going to have two or three fun days out of that book. It’ll take their mind off their problems. If you’ve done that for millions of people, that is enough for me. There is nothing finer. There’s no lack in my life. I don’t need to be studied in a university a hundred years from now.

“What fascinates me is that when I started with pencil and paper, I was the only person in the world who knew Jack Reacher,” he adds, with a note of wonder in his voice. “Since then, over 25 years, it has migrated outwards to the point where other people regard him as more real than I do. Other people will write the final word. It’s completely outside of my control.”

He looks happy about it. The master of control is handing over his prize creation. He has earned the right to a bit of relaxation.