Lee Shall Overcome - Lee Child Interview

You wouldn’t know it from reading his bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers – there are a whopping 70 million of them on people’s bookshelves/eBook devices – but Lee Child was privy in August 1976 to one of punk rock’s defining moments.

“I was in the studio when the Sex Pistols made their television debut on So It Goes playing ‘Anarchy In The UK’,” reveals Child, who at the time was a Granada TV transmission controller based in Manchester. “Contrary to what was being written about them, they were perfectly decent lads. In fact, it was me who was a bit hostile because of their contempt for what had come before – Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the like – which constituted pretty much my entire record collection at the time. As soon as Never Mind The Bollocks came out, though, I recognised how good and important the Pistols were. England at the time was shit: they had the guts to say it.”
So It Goes was the brainchild of a pre-Factory Records and Hacienda Tony Wilson whose day-job was working alongside Richard and Judy on the regional news.
“Tony was brilliant,” enthuses Child, who’s Coventry-born but now splits his time between homes in New York and St. Tropez. “He’d show you something that was yellow, tell you it was blue and you’d believe him. I was shop steward for the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians while Tony was Father of the Chapel at Granada, so we were involved in a lot of stuff together, including trying to stand up to this complete idiot Granada management brought in, Charles Allen, who went on to become the ITV CEO but in my opinion made suicidal decisions that completely screwed the industry.”
Did Tony sort-out cut price admission to the Hacienda for him?
“I think I got charged double,” Child laughs. “I was too old to be popping pills and raving until six in the morning but, yeah, I had a couple of suitably riotous nights there. Tony was the first really revolutionary person of our generation – he was in it for the music rather than the money, which he was very good at both making and losing.”
The star turn while Lee was at Granada was Stuart Hall, a predatory paedophile who like Jimmy Savile abused his victims right under his colleagues’ noses.
“I had no idea about Stuart Hall, but everybody was aware of Jimmy Saville,” he rues. “Well, everybody was aware of the rumours. You could get away with a huge amount of stuff then, which you wouldn’t get away with now, by dint of being a celebrity and wielding extraordinary power in the workplace.”
Fired from Granada in 1995 as part of the aforementioned Charles Allen’s ‘corporate restructuring’, Lee decided to have a go at this novel-writing lark with the first Jack Reacher book, Killing Floor, coming out two years later and shooting straight to the top of the New York Times Fiction List. Reacher, a former Major in the US Army Police Corps, became a truly global phenomenon in 2012, when he was turned into big screen flesh and bone by Tom Cruise – who’s a foot shorter than his fictional counterpart but, hey, that’s Hollywood!
“I was cautious about Cruise being so radically different to Reacher physically, but we all just figured, ‘Let’s get past that and see how he does vibe and personality-wise’. Which was ‘really well!’ Within five minutes I’d totally bought into Tom as Jack.”
Authors are traditionally frozen out of the movie-making process, but in this instance Child was a regular visitor to the studio.
“Contractually, you’ve no involvement, no veto, no say, no nothing, but because they were all Reacher fans they wanted me on board and to be supportive of it,” the 59-year-old explains. “I had an open invitation to the set anytime I wanted. They talked to me constantly and even gave me a little scene in the movie.
“As for Tom, he’d read all the books. He’s an incredibly skilled story person. It was amazing how deeply he was into it. He’d already anticipated everything I was going to say. He totally knew it, he really did.”
A straight talker, Child ran the risk of upsetting US Homeland Security and having his resident rights revoked when he told The Daily Mail he smokes marijuana on a daily basis.
“Surprisingly, I didn’t get any flak. I was asked stuff like, ‘Can you function, is your memory okay?’ – which are what you might call ‘procedural questions’. There was no moral dimension to it at all. I felt it was worth saying because there are millions of people like me who are functioning perfectly well on marijuana.”
Asked whether he considers smoking to be part of the creative process, Child says, “In an unravelling kind of way, yes, I think so. When you’re writing a book you can become overloaded with all the strands you’re dealing with. What you need is some sort of relaxing agent that helps unwind all of that and makes the key issues stand out.”
Revealing himself to be a habitual pot-smoker has done nothing to dampen the ardour of his celebrity fan club.
“David Cameron’s wife is a reader and so is Cherie Blair,” he smiles. “Stephen King’s a fan, as is Bill Clinton. Every book that comes out, Bill sends me a handwritten note telling me what he thinks of it. It’s actually quite surreal!”
When not wowing ex-Presidents with his storytelling, Child can be found challenging the power that Amazon wields over the book industry.
“It’s a misconception on a lot of people’s part that the price of a book is mainly down to what it physically costs to print and distribute,” he proffers. “They don’t see the two or three years of research and writing that goes into it – in other words, the human cost. Amazon’s line that eBooks should be radically cheaper than physical books just doesn’t fly economically. I’m in the fortunate position of being a successful published author, but what about the guys who are just starting out? Authors are having their work devalued by Amazon, and I’ll do everything in my power to fight it.”

Lee Child’s latest novel Personal – his 19th in the Jack Reacher series – is out now via Bantam Press.