On October 29, 1996, James Grant was made redundant (British term) or laid off from his position as a film producer for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and he left his now-former office and walked to a nearby stationer's shop and purchased a yellow-paper tablet and a box of No. 2 pencils. He went home and began writing and a year later, his first novel, Killing Floor, was published under the pen-name Lee Child. Twenty-four years later, on October 29, 2019, Amazon Books delivered a Kindle-version of Blue Moon.to this blogger's Kindle through the magic of FTP (File Transfer Protocol). And serendipitously, the blogger — after taking note of the downloaded novel, discovered a report by a NY Fishwrap's book critic, Janet Maslin, and voilà today's post was established. The pen-name Lee Child is the product of a family joke when a daughter was nicknamed Le Child after a French automobile commercial and the name of Lee Child's protagonist, Jack Reacher, came early during the BBC-layoff. Lee Child's wife, Jane, said to her unemployed 6'4" husband in a supermarker that he could always find work among groceries as "a reacher" to assist short shoppers in getting an item off the very top shelf. All that aside, if this is a (fair balanced) appreciation of Lee Child and Jack Reacher, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Jack Reacher Is Still Restless, But His Creator Has Settled Down
By Janet Maslin
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
Two books ago, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher passed through the southeast corner of Wyoming in his efforts to track down the owner of a pawned West Point ring. The book was The Midnight Line (2017) and it was unusually transporting for a Reacher thriller. You could visualize the immense flat expanses of old railroad land stretching toward the foothills of the Rockies, the long miles of dirt road down which anyone could disappear under a vast open sky.
Reacher moved on. He always does. But Child and Jane, his wife of 44 years, decided to stay.
Now, with a Reacher TV project in the works and the 24th novel in the series on the way (titled Blue Moon (2019), it will arrive on Child’s 65th birthday, October 29), I am in Laramie to have coffee in a diner with Reacher’s creator. As any devotee knows, Reacher spends a lot of time in diners. He downs amounts of coffee that would put most people on life support. He sits with his back to the wall, eats like a trencherman and gets acquainted with the waitress. He wants her to remember him, because it might be handy.
But here in the real world, I’m meeting the reedy, 6-foot-4 Child — actual name, James Dover Grant — and not his brawnier, inch-taller hero. Laramie has no real diner. It’s got a place that serves cappuccino and arty beer that, Child confirms, Reacher would be “bemused by.” Sitting in a booth with his back to the wall, Child faces a rainbow flag; Laramie is where Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay 21 years ago, and this city of 32,000 continues to honor his memory. We’re directly across the street from two bookstores. Outside their doors, few people know that a best-selling author has started spending three months of the year nearby.
Child drinks a meager half cup of coffee, claiming to have had a whole pot at home. He insists on paying the check, either out of gallantry or for tax reasons. Then we climb into his distinctly un-Reacher-like electric blue SUV and begin a drive straight out of his novel. He lives 40 or 50 miles from town. The intersection closest to his roost is a 10-minute drive away. That’s also where the paved road ends.
The sky is as big as skies get. The high prairie is golden. Miles of dirt road lead upward to an immaculate, rustic house with decks on three sides. Unobstructed views stretch 20 miles into the distance. Child’s place is on 35 acres, protected by thousands of acres of forest, lakes and ranch land. It all cost less than he got for the 900-square-foot apartment on 22nd Street [in NYC] where he used to live. If you want to relocate to the middle of nowhere, this is how it’s done.
Child, an Englishman, has gone native. He’s dressed in boots, jeans, T-shirt and a leather barn coat. He owns two cowboy hats, but didn’t wear one for this interview “for fear of making you laugh.” He already lived here when he wrote The Midnight Line, and acknowledges that describing a familiar setting was more satisfying than making one up. Though Wyoming’s renown as a tax haven was a factor in his move, he says, the decision had “more to do with an immigrant’s sense that there’s always somewhere else to explore.” (Child and his wife have numerous homes, including one above St. Tropez and a spread in East Sussex, England, that he bought for bragging rights after growing up poor. He still spends time at an apartment he owns on Central Park West, but Jane has decided she’s through with New York.)
The Laramie area also happens to abut Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal. Child made waves when he talked about being a regular user; his habit goes back 50 years. He finds it especially handy for reading his work, claiming the high helps him judge his writing. And he likes doing actors’ voices: Tony Curtis, a pretty good Michael Caine.
As we approach the house for lunch, Child proudly points out a few landmarks. The address number is printed in a clean font and hangs from a sturdy post. He did that himself. The generator on the hillside got them through all of last winter. To the right of the driveway sits what Child calls his rockery. Since his hands, unlike Reacher’s, aren’t the size of small animals, he’s dexterous enough to treat this tiny garden lovingly. So does Jane, who has arranged some low, heathery sprigs in a small vase for lunchtime.
Their 39-year-old daughter, Ruth, who studied forensic linguistics and will move to Fort Collins, CO, later this year, has come by for the occasion. She and her mother have made lunch. “It was supposed to be tuna niçoise, but we all like different things,” Jane says; these three are strong willed as well as close-knit. So lunch means a different kind of tuna salad for each of them, and a highly entertaining debate about apostrophe usage. Ruth was only about 7 when she went to a market with her father and asked, “Dad, shouldn’t that sign say ‘10 items or fewer?’”
Jim and Jane, as they’re known here, have made local friends. But they’re both voracious readers (she is a dedicated environmentalist) and they’re mostly home alone. The place is set up for that. Their work areas are far apart, and he has lucked into the best room in the house as his office: double height and mostly glass with a fireplace. It should be the master bedroom. But the noisy furnace room below ruled that out, so here are two desks face to face, one for Reacher projects and the other for correspondence; plus high piles of books for Child’s recreational reading; the longest available leather sofa, which still isn’t long enough; and a golden trophy shaped like a pen nib, the 2019 British Book Award for author of the year, on the otherwise bare shelves.
(Child will receive another award, the Commander of the British Empire [CBE], in February, though his fierce objections to the British class system make him reluctant to bow to the royal family member presenting it. What if that turns out to be the queen? “She is tiny,” Child says, “so there’ll be a certain amount of craning, which might pass for a bow.”)
The study is also where Child is taking on a major new job: the Reacher TV reboot, for Amazon. Earlier this decade, when Paramount made a couple of Reacher movies starring Tom Cruise, Child knew better than to cede full control of his popular character. He sold the rights to two films, with the condition that he’d have to sign off on any others. After Reacher fans complained that Cruise was too small to play the big bruiser, and Cruise coaxed the first film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, to his “Mission: Impossible” franchise, Paramount decided two Reacher films were enough. And along came streaming.
Child settled on Amazon rather than Netflix or any other streaming service in part because of the synergy it allowed. Every time he publishes a book, Amazon delivers a lot of copies. The company is willing to advertise the show on its book packaging, and email a link to Child’s readers. So he’s begun work on what could be an eight-year project.
The TV Reacher will be large, very large, and in his 30s or 40s. (The lead hasn’t been cast yet; an Army boot is waiting for the right Mr. Cinderella.) The series will start where the books did. Killing Floor (1997, 2006), the first Reacher novel, will anchor Season 1, with other books picked over for subplots. Child will supervise the screenplays but not write them, and will help reinvent Reacher from the ground up. Or Reachers, plural. The one in Blue Moon is older, hipper, richer and hotter than previous incarnations. He doesn’t wear Army surplus. He likes black. He knows about performance art. And he gets into a sustained sexual relationship as well as a vicious gang war between Ukrainians and Albanians.
“I wanted him completely out of his comfort zone,” Child says. “He’s capable of getting comfortable pretty quick.”
From the looks of it, so is his maker. ###
[Janet R. Maslin is a journalist, best known as a film and literary critic, for The New York Times. She served as The Times' film critic from 1977–1999. She began her career as a rock music critic for The Boston Phoenix and Rolling Stone. She left film criticism behind in 1999 and now reviews books for The Times. Maslin received a BA (mathematics) from The University of Rochester (NY). When an interviewer asked her about the incongruity of a math major becoming a film/book critic, Maslin replied, "Go figure."]
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