Writing Lee Child’s Biography

By Heather Martin

For Lee Child, character is king. It was what he told his agent the first time they met, back in March 1995. ‘Everybody remembers the Lone Ranger, but nobody remembers the Lone Ranger story.’ And with the Jack Reacher of Killing Floor, first published in March 1997, Lee created a character so memorable that even twenty-four books later he would still be going strong. The author might set aside his pen, but Reacher would still live on, now in the care of Lee’s younger brother, Andrew Grant. 

Even as a boy, Jim Grant of Birmingham, England, had loved series. And when in his late thirties he reinvented himself as Lee Child, compelled by redundancy to find a new profession and directly inspired by the twenty-one Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald, he knew a series was what he wanted to write. But at the back of his mind was a niggling worry: could he pull it off? Could he write about the same character year after year without getting bored? 

He resolved not to tie himself down. His hero would have no fixed abode and no fixed profession, so as to leave every door to the imagination open. Reacher would be based in America, for its frontier landscape, but with one foot in Europe through his French mother, so he would retain some Old World sensibility too.

He was born into the US military, but could trace his literary antecedents back to Beowulf and beyond. He was a mythological character operating in a contemporary, broadly realist environment. I could never understand how some critics came to describe Reacher as one-dimensional. Lee covered all the bases in his bid to maximise creative freedom — and as a side benefit, his potential readership too.

Unsurprisingly, he had a similar attitude to minor characters. When complimented on the strong women he created for Reacher to hang out with, he would retort first that women were just as strong as men, so why should this surprise anyone, and second, that he had to live with that woman for six months of his life, which was roughly the time it took him to write each book, so of course he was going to make her as interesting as possible. He was a loner by nature, and his tolerance for the sustained company of any one human being, however beloved, was limited. 

Lee’s argument came back to me as I began work on his biography. I would have to “live” with my character for far longer than six months — the idea for the book first popped into my mind back in 2016, and the research that ensued was painstaking. But I was lucky.

It was never going to be any kind of hardship. This was the guy who created Jack Reacher, remember? My subject contained all the complexities and contradictions of his fictional character, and then some. For a start, he was himself a fiction, the inspired invention of one James Dover Grant. I was writing the story of three people in one: an unholy trinity.

It was Reacher I met first. I can’t now remember which book. One Shot, maybe. But whichever one it was, it led — as has been the case for so many others before and after me — to another, and then another, until soon I had caught up with the series and was waiting impatiently on the next. I knew little about Lee Child and gave almost no thought to him. “Lee Child” was just a name on the cover, the guarantee of a good read. But then one day I met him, and for the first time took account of the person behind the books.

It was at a dinner party in New York. We were sitting next to each other. We started talking about books and reading and writing, and especially his books, and his writing, and afterwards we carried on our conversation through correspondence. From the beginning, he told me stories about his life, brief, tantalising, the length of a text or a short email, always leaving me wanting more. So I would ask questions, then more questions in response to his answers, taking us further back in time, digging deeper and adding detail. Eventually I started taking notes. Which is how the biography crept up on me, by surprise, but also with seeming inevitability — once the idea took hold I simply couldn’t shake it free. 

But it was by talking to other people that I gradually got to know Jim Grant, tracking down friends from his school days going back to when he was four years old, and colleagues from his eighteen years as transmission controller at Granada Television. Bringing different voices into the conversation was a way of triangulating his memories and interpretations, and getting past years of superstar mythification, both willed and imposed. I visited the places where he’d lived and worked, and spent months sifting patiently through manuscripts and correspondence in his official archive.

I’d chosen my subject well: there was plenty of hard work, but not a moment of boredom. I wrote The Reacher Guy for Lee, as a celebration of his extraordinary life and a tribute to friendship. I wrote it for his millions of readers, too. But first and foremost, I wrote it for myself: it was the book I had to write. 

—

Heather Martin’s authorised biography of Lee Child, The Reacher Guy, is published by Little, Brown in the UK, and in the US by Pegasus Books.

Heather Martin was born in West Australia. She grew up in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, and Perth, where she would fall asleep to the sound of the Indian Ocean. She left Australia for England to become a classical guitarist but found herself singing with a Venezuelan folk group and learning to speak Spanish instead. She read Languages at Cambridge, where she also did a PhD in comparative literature, and has held teaching and research positions at Cambridge, Hull, King’s College London, and most recently, the Graduate Center, City University New York. The Reacher Guy is her first biography.

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THE REACHER GUY, Heather Martin

‘A biography as gripping as one of Lee Child’s own bestsellers’ Ian Rankin
‘Very enjoyable’ The Times
‘Vivid and entertaining’ Telegraph

Jack Reacher is only the second of Jim Grant’s great fictional characters: the first is Lee Child himself. Heather Martin’s biography tells the story of all three.

Lee Child is the enigmatic powerhouse behind the bestselling Jack Reacher novels. With millions of devoted fans across the globe, and over a hundred million copies of his books sold in more than forty languages, he is that rarity, a writer who is lauded by critics and revered by readers. And yet curiously little has been written about the man himself.

The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. Through parallels drawn between Child and his literary creation, it tells the story of how a boy from Birmingham with a ferocious appetite for reading grew up to become a high-flying TV executive, before coming full circle and establishing himself as the strongest brand in publishing.

Heather Martin explores Child’s lifelong fascination with America, and shows how the Reacher novels fed and fuelled this obsession, shedding light on the opaque process of publishing a novel along the way. Drawing on her conversations and correspondence with Child over a number of years, as well as interviews with his friends, teachers and colleagues, she forensically pieces together his life, traversing back through the generations to Northern Ireland and County Durham, and following the trajectory of his extraordinary career via New York and Hollywood until the climactic moment when, in 2020, having written a continuous series of twenty-four books, he finally breaks free of his fictional creation.

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Category: On Writing