David Remnick Interviews Lee Child, the Creator of Jack Reacher

Summary

Podcast Summary: "David Remnick Interviews Lee Child, the Creator of Jack Reacher"

Podcast: The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Host: David Remnick
Guest: Lee Child (James Grant)
Date: August 13, 2018
Episode Length: ~17 minutes
(Summary omits commercials, intro, and outro)

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Overview

In this episode, David Remnick sits down with Lee Child, creator of the massively popular Jack Reacher thrillers, to explore Child’s unconventional path to writing, his philosophy of storytelling, and the secrets behind Reacher’s lasting appeal. The conversation delves into Child’s background in British television, the business and art of writing, and why he rejects writing formulas and outlines.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Lee Child's Unexpected Path to Writing

• Career Loss and Pivot ([02:40]–[04:59])
  • Child (born James Grant) discusses his TV career, which ended due to industry shakeups driven largely by Rupert Murdoch’s entry into the UK market.
    • "I was a television director and very happy where I was... then broadcasting ... got shook up, particularly by Rupert Murdoch’s influence, and the whole thing started to fall apart." — Lee Child [02:40]
  • He lost his job at 39, partly due to cost-cutting:
    • "They discovered that they could get recent graduates to do the work for a quarter of the price." — Lee Child [03:53]
  • Rather than join another company, he chose “to make a big break” and try writing.

2. Inventing Jack Reacher: The Anti-Soap Opera Hero

• A Calculated Break from Genre Norms ([04:59]–[08:12])
  • Child deliberately avoided the familiar serial setting with a fixed cast and place:
    • "Everybody else...was writing essentially a soap opera with a fixed location... Let's do the anti soap opera." — Lee Child [05:34]
  • Reacher is a total loner, no recurring cast, no fixed location, no job, allowing for stories set anywhere.
  • The American landscape—with its frontier myth—was vital:
    • "You can't do that in Britain. Britain is too small... America has the frontier feel." — Lee Child [06:53]
  • Reacher reflects medieval knights, Japanese ronin, and American cowboys.
    • "It's really that tradition, and you can't do that in Britain." — Lee Child [07:57]

3. Writing Method: No Outlines, Total Uncertainty

• Organic Storytelling ([08:12]–[11:33])
  • Child’s process is to start fresh each September 1st—no plans, no research, trusting the story to emerge.
    • "Absolutely not. Nothing on the wall... I have zero idea." — Lee Child [08:44]
  • No second drafts, no heavy plotting, never gets 75 pages in and scraps it; he knows almost instantly if something’s not working.
    • "I can usually tell before about seven words. If I’m heading down a bad track, I can tell pretty early." — Lee Child [09:47]
  • Example: Referencing bird migration inspired him to make a book about Reacher's father, linking back to earlier books.
  • Writing occurs from September until around March, interrupted by family and life:
    • "I start on the 1st of September and work every available day until the book is finished, which is usually around March." — Lee Child [11:30]

4. Challenging the “Easy” Narrative about Genre Fiction

• What’s Actually Difficult ([11:33]–[14:59])
  • Academic Andy Martin once observed his writing process, countering the notion that genre writing is easy.
  • The challenge isn’t in writing fast but in capturing a massive, diverse global audience.
    • "Millions of people globally, around the world reach a book sells every nine seconds." — Lee Child [13:22]
  • Must satisfy both expert and casual readers:
    • "How do you do that? The real skill…is the rhythms of the book. The book has got to be a locomotive that drives people through without being noticeably such." — Lee Child [14:35]
  • He sees the delight in readers feeling proud simply for finishing his book.

5. The Future of Jack Reacher

• Leaving While Still Wanted ([14:59]–[15:43])
  • Remnick asks if Reacher will ever retire; Child cites “showbiz” wisdom:
    • "Don’t be the embarrassing guy that sticks around two seasons too long." — Lee Child [15:02]
  • Child would fully retire, rather than shift to another hero.
    • "Retirement is a phase of life that I’m keenly looking forward to." — Lee Child [15:30]

6. What Lee Child Wants Most: Time to Read

• Undone Literary Ambitions ([15:43]–[16:44])
  • Avid reader at heart, Child laments writing takes away from reading:
    • "That’s the only thing I resent about writing is the time it takes away from reading." — Lee Child [15:47]
  • Names classics he hasn’t tackled (e.g., Jane Austen, Russian 19th-century novels, Flaubert).
  • Finds joy in the unknown—unopened books might become new favorites:
    • "There’s something sitting there in my living room right now that could be the best read of my life, and I don’t know what it is yet because I haven’t tried it." — Lee Child [16:19]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "I was 39 years old, an expensive veteran with a big salary...They could get recent graduates to do the work for a quarter of the price." — Lee Child [03:53]
• "It was really a study in loneliness, alienation, in a way. And that had to be in America." — Lee Child [06:53]
• "I have zero idea...half my mind is impending doom. The gas tank is empty. Finally I've been found out." — Lee Child [08:44]
• "I can usually tell before about seven words if I'm heading down a bad track." — Lee Child [09:47]
• "Millions of people globally, around the world reach a book sells every nine seconds." — Lee Child [13:22]
• "Don’t be the embarrassing guy that sticks around two seasons too long." — Lee Child [15:02]
• "Retirement is a phase of life that I’m keenly looking forward to." — Lee Child [15:30]

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 02:40 | Lee Child describes losing his TV job | | 05:34 | Explains creating Jack Reacher as an “anti–soap opera” | | 08:44 | Child’s writing process—no outline, total improvisation| | 11:33 | Discusses Andy Martin observing his writing | | 13:22 | Scale and difficulty of satisfying a global audience | | 15:02 | Will Jack Reacher retire? “Leave them wanting more” | | 15:47 | Child’s yearning to have more time for reading | | 16:19 | The unknown joy of unread books |

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Tone and Language

Child is witty, self-deprecating, and candid, leavening insights about the business and craft of writing with humor and humility. Remnick is warm, curious, and slightly in awe, setting a conversational, engaging tone.

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Conclusion

This episode provides an intimate, entertaining exploration of how Lee Child became a global bestselling author—and why Jack Reacher remains so enduringly appealing. It’s equal parts origin story, writing craft discussion, and literary confession, inviting listeners beyond the myth of the effortless genre writer and into the heart of a man who just wanted to make stories that carried readers away.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. For years I've been devouring a series of books about an ex military cop named Jack Reacher. Huge, hard nosed, a quiet stranger who wanders into town and finds trouble inevitably. And it's been a lot to devour because there are now 23 Jack Reacher novels, including an advance copy I just scored of the next one. The Reacher books have sold more than 100 million copies in 40 plus languages and there's even a film franchise starring Tom Cruise. This all American tough guy is the creation of one Lee Child. Child never served in the army. He doesn't seem prone to beating up anyone. He's not even American. Lee Child was born in England. He was named James Grant. He graduated law school before embarking on a 20 year career in television. All before beginning his hugely successful career as a novelist. Lee Child is an absolute delight to have you here. You've made so many summers come alive for me reading you. So I'm full of questions and naturally I want to ask you about the way this all began. You were Working as an executive in 1995. And you got fired and decided, to hell with it, I'm going to work for myself and become a superstar writer of thrillers.

[C]

Well, it wasn't quite that linear. I was a television director and very happy where I was. It was in Britain during what, in retrospect looks like a golden age of drama is well remembered. I mean, my company did Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Prime Suspect, just some really terrific shows. But it was also a fabulous news station, documentary station. It was really the height of the height. And then broadcasting in Britain, like, I think everywhere in the world, got shook up, particularly by Rupert Murdoch's influence, and the whole thing started to fall apart.

[B]

You lost your job because of Rupert Murdoch?

[C]

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, Rupert Murdoch wanted to bring his satellite service to Britain, and in order to do that, he needed to attack and weaken the terrestrial services, the BBC and the independent broadcasters. And it was a pretty transparent deal with the Thatcher government. You know, you let me do this, help me out a little bit, and I will support you in my papers and on the air.

[B]

Why did you. And you were named Jim Grant still, then why did you get fired?

[C]

Because I was 39 years old, an expensive veteran with a big salary and benefits, a pension and all that kind of thing. And they discovered that they could get recent graduates to do the work for a quarter of the price.

[B]

So now, what made you believe that you could walk out the door, sit down, change your name and become a great writer of thrillers?

[C]

Well, I didn't necessarily believe it. I just thought that at that age, at that stage of your life, this is probably the last chance to try something new, to make a big break. I did not want to leave the world of entertainment. I'm just totally in love with that idea. I mean, you very kindly mentioned you read my book and enjoy it. And I just absolutely love that transaction, that I can do something that somebody else is going to enjoy. And television satisfied that for a long time. But when I left television, I wanted to stay in that world, basically. So the question was, how can I stay? What can I do that will supply me with the same feeling?

[B]

So you did a particular thing? Not just one, a series of particularities. First of all, you invented Jack Reacher and stuck with him. He's an American, you're not. He's a complete loner. Malcolm Gladwell and others have compared him to a kind of cowboy. It's like the form of a Western, a man who wanders into a town, in his case, hitchhikes in, no change of clothes. His only possession is a toothbrush. He senses trouble and complications begin. Yeah, former military policeman. So how did you invent him? Why is he an American?

[C]

Well, it was a whole batch of reasons that happily all pointed in the same direction. First of all, really, the hardest thing about being a writer, or I suppose, an artist of any kind, is that you have to believe several different things, some of which are contradictory, but you have to believe them all 100%, completely, wholeheartedly. And of course, I believe that this is an art, it's a craft, it's a joy, it's creative, all that good stuff. But it's also a job, it's a business. Had a vague eye on the business side of it, which was that so many other people, in fact, everybody else that was writing a series was writing essentially a soap opera with a fixed location. It would either be location based or employment based or both. And the hero would have probably colleagues and a superior he didn't like and subordinates that were difficult. He would have possibly a partner, an apartment, a favorite bar, a favorite restaurant, neighbors, the whole thing. Classic soap opera, which no way denigrating. I worked in television, I made my living on soap operas for nearly two decades. They're incredibly powerful and actually quite sophisticated form of narrative. But everybody was doing it. So I thought, well, let's not do that. Let's do the anti soap opera.

[B]

Strip it down.

[C]

Yeah, where there's only one character, there's no repertory cast surrounding him. There's one character, there's no location. He can be anywhere, he has no job, so he can do anything. So it was really a study in loneliness, alienation, in a way. And that had to be in America because Malcolm Gladwell talks about cowboys. Well, yeah, that's fine, but where did cowboys come from? The cowboy myth is essentially a development of a medieval myth from Europe, the knight era. The knight who has somehow transgressed against the court and has been banished. Same thing in Japan, Japanese culture, the ronin. Exactly the same thing as Sam, who's been disowned by his master and sentenced to wander the land doing good deeds. So it's really that tradition, and you can't do that in Britain. Britain is too small. It is too densely populated. There are no empty areas. There's no mystery about it. America has the frontier feel.

[B]

Wandering into the Cotswolds wouldn't work in the same way as Nebraska.

[C]

No, it really wouldn't, because everybody in the Cotswolds knows your business immediately. And everybody knows Everything. There's no possibility of hidden secrets. It has to be the wide open spaces.

[B]

Now, I can't believe you write the way you've described this. You sit down every year, it's September 1st. You don't sit down with an outline. You don't do research, even though some of your novels seem to indicate a knowledge of opioids or a knowledge of place. And then you just start and off you go. That's a very strange way to write any kind of novel, much less. It is what I would have thought. I would have thought a Jack Reacher novel would be pretty heavily plotted and you'd have charts on the wall.

[C]

Absolutely not. Nothing on the wall. And, you know, it's summertime now, and acutely aware that September 1st is approaching. And I'm thinking, I have zero idea.

[B]

How do you feel about that? Is it impending doom or.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, half my mind is impending doom. You know, the gas tank is empty. Finally I've been found out. Finally it's all going to fall apart. And then I think, well, wait a minute, you felt like that for the last 20 books, and so you've managed them before. You can manage this one. And for me, it's always about the story. And I want the story to be organic, naturally unfolding. And I feel that if I wrote an outline, it would be a rather artificial structure. I'd be forcing the story into an artificial route that it probably didn't want to take. So I just start in the beginning and I hope to get a good first sentence or a good first paragraph. And I think, all right, now what happens? What happens now?

[B]

Do you ever go 75 pages in and it's a bust and you have to start again?

[C]

No, never.

[B]

How is that possible?

[C]

Well, two reasons. First of all, that would be very inefficient. It would drive me mad to do that. And I can usually tell before about seven words. If I'm heading down a bad track, I can tell pretty early. And so I'll sometimes delete seven words. But that hurts quite, quite a lot, I'll tell you. But it's really about one thing leads from another in a very organic way. For instance, the new book, past tense. I wrote the first sentence or the first paragraph anyway, and there were two things in it. One, I had mentioned Maine. Reacher has to start from somewhere. So he's in Maine for the summer. Now he's planning to head south for the winter.

[B]

He gets to New Hampshire, right?

[C]

He only gets as far as New Hampshire, but he's planning to Go all the way south to Southern California, like the birds migrate. And I have a pretty mellifluous sentence there in the beginning about the migration of birds and typical species. And I just wrote that thinking, okay, this is a good place to start. And then immediately, first of all, the bird watching. Well, years ago in one of the books, it was mentioned that Reach's father was a bird watcher. Because I wanted the contrast between a pretty vicious marine soldier and his hobby, which was bird watching. I found that an interesting contrast. So in the back of my mind, okay, why have I started this with a reference to birds? Maybe this book ought to be about reaches father. You know, I start on September 1st because that's the anniversary of when I started the very first book. So it's a sentimental day to start. I start on the 1st of September and work every available day until the book is finished, which is usually around the next March because a lot of other things get in the way.

[B]

Oh, you do leave your desk. You'll leave town, you'll.

[C]

I have to. You know, I've got family stuff. They want to do Christmas and all those kind of things.

[B]

It's horrible, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah. You know, they drag you away.

[B]

Now, this is one of the most amazing things. At a certain point, I think you were writing make me an English academic named Andy Martin sat there with you in your study and watched you write a novel.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

He was 30 cups of coffee a day. Like Balzac.

[C]

Yeah. Possibly more. I think my record is mid-30s mugs of coffee, not just little cups. You know, let's get serious about this.

[B]

That's impressive. You have an impressive stomach.

[C]

Yeah. Andy was. It happened very short notice. He had. He was a freewheeling academic from Cambridge University. And literally days before I started that novel, he came up with that idea. And probably if I'd had longer to think about it, I would have said no. But because time was short, it was my 20th book, I just thought, let's do something different. And to a certain extent, I wanted to have it on record. Not for me personally, necessarily, but for all of us in this genre, because there is a lot of cheap talk about how it's somehow easy to write these books, that there are various terms used, crank them out and so on, which is actually very much the opposite of the truth.

[B]

But even the way you describe it, it sounds easy. You sit down on September 1st, you don't write a second or third or 50th draf. No outline. So what is the difficulty? Describe that.

[C]

Well, really, the difficulty is with a readership the size of a successful genre writer's readership is.

[B]

And what does this kill me? Go ahead and kill me. What is the scale of your readership?

[C]

Well, millions of people globally, around the world reach a book sells every nine seconds. So there's a lot of people reading them. And you cannot look at that as a monolithic mass because with an audience that size, they're very striated, they're very different. At the center, you've got the expert readers who just read all the time, like Malcolm Gladwell. You know, mine is not the only book that he reads that week. Obviously he reads constantly. So do a lot of people, and they have to be satisfied. But on the very far edges of the audience are the people that read one book a year on their vacation on the beach. That's all they will read. And you've got to satisfy both those readers and everybody in between.

[B]

You feel them out there. You feel that immense audience.

[C]

Yeah, because you meet them. You know, you meet extremely unlikely people that are fans, and then you meet people who are clearly the one book a year person. And touchingly, their biggest compliment that they can pay you is they will say, I loved your book. I finished it. Which is a. A huge achievement. They feel that it's their achievement.

[B]

It's an unusual act.

[C]

Yeah. They finished a book, they're very satisfied. They're happy with themselves and of course they're happy with the book because the book has aided them to do that. And how do you do that? The real skill, and I think the skill that Andy Martin observed day to day is the rhythms of the book. The book has got to be a locomotive that drives people through without being noticeably such.

[B]

Finally, will Jack Reacher ever leave us or leave you?

[C]

Yeah, I'm fascinated with the whole showbiz thing of leave them wanting more. Don't be the embarrassing guy that sticks around two seasons too long. We see that all the time in shows on television. We see it with athletes. You've got to pick your time to go. And I do not want Richa to become an embarrassing old character that's bought kind of out of habit or sentimentality.

[B]

So you might leave him behind and write about someone or something else?

[C]

No, I would leave him behind and retire completely. Do not forget, I'm from Europe. I have no work ethic. I want to. Retirement is a phase of life that I'm keenly looking forward to.

[B]

Are you?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

What would you do on September 1st read?

[C]

That's the only thing I resent about writing is the time it takes away from reading that I would. I mean, literally, I've got rooms full of books just stacking up, just waiting to be read.

[B]

What's the biggest masterpiece that's just sitting there staring at you and saying, you have not read me?

[C]

I've never read Jane Austen, you know, which is shocking for an English person, but the Russians of the 19th century, maybe Flaubert, stuff like that. And then, of course, the fabulous thing about books is you don't know what the classics are. There's something sitting there in my living room right now that could be the best read of my life, and I don't know what it is yet because I haven't tried it.

[B]

Well, Lee Child, I'm incredibly grateful to you, but don't leave Jack Reacher too soon, okay? I honestly, you can squeeze in Jane Austen somehow.

[C]

I could probably read her in the evenings after I finished writing Reacher, but that would be quite a contrast.

[B]

Lee Chow, thank you very much.

[C]

Much, thank you.

[B]

Lee Child's next book, Past Tense, is due out in November. And if that seems too far off, I'll remind you that there are 22 other Jack Reacher novels waiting for you right now.

[D]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director.

[B]

I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.

[C]

And I'm Lauren Good.

[A]

I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

[D]

At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.

[B]

Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.

[D]

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[C]

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