A short bet to capture the darkness inside

SIZE may or may not matter, but for author Lee Child, height certainly isn’t an issue. Particularly if it means that his famously tall hero, ex-US army MP Jack Reacher, will be played in the movies by the diminutive Tom Cruise.

“Making movies is incredibly complicated,” says Child. “Somebody once advanced the metaphor that you’ve got a hundred extension cords, and they’re all a foot too short. So there are a thousand things to worry about, but an exact physical facsimile of the printed character is not one of them, no.”

Child is fully appreciative of the fact that Jack Reacher’s fans have been up in arms about the casting of Cruise. “I’m very grateful for the way the character seems to have entered people’s consciousness,” he says. “The ownership of the character has migrated outwards, so that every reader now has a stake in Reacher.”

By the same token, he believes there’s something sinister in the aggressively negative reaction.

“I think a lot of this negative anger is a kind of concealed homophobia among certain people,” he says. “I mean, this persistent rumour that Cruise is gay, and the comments about his smallness and his prettiness, smacks to me of something that is not quite all revealed yet.”

Cruise will take the lead in One Shot, the ninth of the Jack Reacher series of thrillers, of which Child’s latest offering, The Affair, is the 16th. In total, Child has sold more than 40 million books since publishing his debut, The Killing Floor, in 1997, which isn’t bad going for a man forced to change career as his 40th birthday approached.

His role as a television presentation director was “an arcane, highly specialised kind of job that no longer exists”, and so Child was forced to rely on instinct.

“I had no skills that were directly transferable. But when I stepped back one pace, at the core of that job was understanding the audience, and I felt that I had at least a reasonable chance. At the time, I felt it would be psychologically debilitating to worry about whether it would work, so I just assumed it would work. I can remember getting weird looks from people because I was so sure it would work. But I think that if I’d started worrying about that, I’d have been paralysed by fear, because the stakes were so high. I was unemployable, and I had a mortgage and a family. So if I’d let reality intrude, I’d have been a trembling wreck.”

Born Jim Grant in the British city of Birmingham in 1954, now living in the US and married to New Yorker Jane, Lee Child today exudes the kind of assured self-confidence his readers might associate with Jack Reacher himself. Other comparisons with Reacher have been made — both are tall, blond, craggily handsome — but it’s the primitive aspect of Reacher, the “unacceptable barbarian” as Child describes him, that fascinates his creator.

“In the very first book,” he says, “Reacher shot two people in the back, from hiding. Which is the most unheroic, unacceptable thing in this genre.”

Child always intended that Reacher’s appeal would be to a reader’s primal instinct. “It’s a fact that we are genetically descended from the cavemen, but recent research has come out suggesting that cavemen and Neanderthals did inter-breed at some point. That’s very distant in history, of course, but what if you met a character who was absolutely 21st century, but the tunnel back to his origins was wide open? No filter between him and the cavemen. What would that be like?”

Set in rural Mississippi, The Affair is itself something of a time-machine, a prequel that takes Reacher all the way back to 1997, six months before the opening of The Killing Floor.

“For 15 years, everyone’s grown very fond of Reacher, and they feel like they’re entitled to want things. And what they’ve wanted for a long time is to know why he left the army. He has no ideological objection to the military, he was perfectly happy when he was there — so what was it that shook him loose? And I thought it was time to answer that question.”

While the novel looks back in time, Reacher as the narrator is fully aware of what is to come in the years ahead, and particularly 9/11. A recurring phrase in the banter between Reacher and local sheriff Devereaux is, “not a democracy”. Is there an element of political commentary on modern America to be read between the lines?

“Well, I do that a lot,” says Child. “I feel, as an outsider in America, I have a clarity of view that is possibly not there for people who are habituated to the situation. So in the book we’re looking forward at things about to change, but we’re also looking backward, at this part of Mississippi in particular. Mississippi was a pretty brutal place to live, especially if you were black, or if you were poor and white. This was not a democracy, it was not a fun place to live. I don’t want the book to be agit-prop or anything, but I think one owes it to honesty to say a couple of things.”

Never shy about offering an opinion, Child ruffled a few feathers last year when he announced that he could, if he chose to, write a literary novel in three weeks flat.

“A lot of that was just stirring it,” he grins. “It was a journalist thing, really, where I was published on the same day as Ian McEwan, therefore it was an instant story, genre versus literary, the clash of the worlds. But what do they expect?

“On the one hand, one book is a popular best-seller, and if you pay attention to the meanings of the words, which we’re supposed to, then the other book is an unpopular, worst-selling book. So is it a surprise that one sells more than the other? No, of course not.

“But with that comes the lazy assumption that it’s easier to write a book that appeals to a wide audience, which I think is an unexamined proposition.

“I don’t think it is easier. I think it’s quite the reverse. I think if you want to satisfy a thousand of your friends, that’s a lot easier than satisfying a million real people.”

Or, indeed, 40 million real people. Wealthy beyond his dreams, and with his reputation assured, Child could very easily write any kind of novel he chose to. He has no intention of doing so — “For me, the alternative to writing Reacher would be to retire” — largely because he simply enjoys writing about Jack.

“It’s a job and I respect the discipline and craft it requires, because you can’t really succeed without a professional approach — but it is fun. There is no better time in my year than when I sit down to write the next book.”

He also thrives on delivering to a very demanding audience.

“Yeah, the pressure is enormous,” he concedes. “But I’m lucky. Out of all the contemporary writers, I think the emotional relationship between the readers and Reacher is probably stronger than anyone else’s.

“Nobody ever goes in to a bookstore and asks for the title of the book, or asks is the new Lee Child book out. They always ask for the new Reacher book.” He shrugs. “But that’s kind of how it’s supposed to be.”