BY LEE CHILD BANTAM, 432pp, £17.99
LEE CHILD WAS BORN IN COVEN-try in 1954. He always wanted to work in entertainment. He loved school plays and took holiday jobs anywhere with a stage and an audience. Though he took a law de
gree at Sheffield, he never intended to practise, and on graduation he joined Granada Television in Manchester. He stayed there for 18 years, through the heyday of British television drama – Brideshead Revisited, Jewel in the Crown, Cracker, Prime Suspect, all that. He had a behind-the-scenes job as presentation director, "a blend of editing, operating, supervising, linking, writing commercials". In total, he was involved in producing "40,000 hours of mass-market entertainment".
In 1995, aged 40, he was sacked as part of Granada's corporate restructuring. He decided he'd try writing a novel. His approach, however, was more purposeful than most. He was clear that he wanted to write commercial fiction and to reach a mass audience. He has said that if his first book hadn't sold, he'd have given up.
Child – not his real name – targeted a mass audience with a determination rivalled recently only by Dan Brown. Although English, he set his books in America. He's offered various reasons for this, including a lifelong love affair with the US; the "bigger, rangier, more expansive plots" that the sheer size of the States permits; and even the fascination of writing in a language that's not quite your own. But the real reason is commercial: "One thing I learned over the years in television is you go where the audience is. The US is the world's largest market, so why not start there?"
He published his first novel, Killing Floor, in 1997, by which time he was already working on his third, Tripwire. The latest, Nothing to Lose, is the 12th featuring Jack Reacher, the hero of a series that has sold 15 million copies in 43 countries.
The key to this ever-growing success is product continuity. "You have to put out a good, solid book every year because the public expect regularity," he says. The titles are designed to be read in any order and all are cut from the same cloth – they depend on the appeal of Jack Reacher, a peculiarly simple hero.
Most thriller protagonists are, to some extent, fantasy alter egos of their authors. There are elements of this to Reacher. When we first meet him, he has just been downsized from his job, as Child had been. Like Child, he's tall. Like Child, he's upbeat – not "dysfunctional, alcoholic, divorced, tired, gloomy, recovering from a previous trauma". Above all, Jack Reacher is simply extra-strong: superhero, cartoonishly strong. He is 6ft 5in tall, weighs 250lb, and has a 50in chest. He is extremely and very successfully violent. Having been in the military police, he has been highly trained in nasty combat and wins all his fights, however many enemies he faces. Child has said in one of his many interviews: "All my life I did the Walter Mitty thing – I daydreamed constantly." It's the Mitty quality that's the basis of the appeal to his readers.
Apart from this primary characteristic, Reacher has been stripped down to be the perfectly unattached male. An army brat, he was brought up everywhere and nowhere. Since he left the army, he has been a drifter. He owns nothing but a toothbrush. He has no family, no home, no address, no dependants. When the clothes he wears are dirty, he throws them away and buys some more.
In Nothing to Lose, Reacher walks into a small town in Colorado called Despair, buys a coffee and finds himself arrested for vagrancy and kicked out. The whole town turns out to have something to hide – a secret plant reprocessing radioactive wrecked tanks and other vehicles from the Iraq war. And the owner of the factory is a deranged cultist, planning on bringing Armageddon a little closer.
With a seductive female cop from the next town, Hope, Reacher foils their schemes, eventually detonating a nuclear weapon, a slightly worrying turn into grandiosity when previously he has generally managed with feet and fists. And then he hits the road again.
It's a version of a Western, of course: the drifter comes to town, sorts out the bad guys, moves on. Or a version of an even older story of the knight errant, "something that's been market-tested for 3,000 years", Child says, ever the audience man.
The full article contains 757 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
