![]() These are universal paradigms of human myths. But I’m talking about stuff from the Middle Ages and way back farther than that. When people say old-fashioned, they tend to think it means from the ’50s or the ’30s eras. I’m a contrarian and a skeptic, and as soon as I saw everybody doing that, I thought that I wanted to do something much more pure and old-fashioned. Heroes were becoming more and more miserable-flawed, dysfunctional, dragging themselves miserably from page to page. At the time that I was starting out, we were going through a long period where, maybe fifteen years before, people had started experimenting with “the flawed hero.” It had just gotten totally out of hand. I have a particular impatience with bandwagon-jumping. But I’m curious.Ĭhild: I think it’s a universal truth that, for all writers, it grows out of what they’ve read. TNI: Does that grow out of something in you? People would not want to hear that it grows out of any kind of marketplace calculation. And Jack Reacher will never lose, and he will never be gray in any way. My books are straightforward, old-fashioned adventures where there is a clear-cut, binary choice: You are either with the hero or against him, and that determines your fate. Crime fiction is about the effect of a crime on a family or a community. Typically, hard-boiled fiction is about bad things happening to bad people. Is it a mystery, is it suspense, is it crime fiction, is it hard-boiled, is it noir? Most of those genres involve a certain amount of grayness. The retail trade is always keen on specifying exactly what kind of book it is. Lee Child: Well, that quotation was referring partly to the genre descriptions that we’re all saddled with. TNI: I love a quotation from one of your previous interviews about how in your books, the good guys always win. There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys win- count on it.” “For a so-called noir or hard-boiled writer, my books aren’t really very gray. And, of course, to Lee Child for generously taking an afternoon from his hectic writing and book-tour schedule to accommodate us. The editor wishes to thank Maggie Griffin, proprietor of Partners & Crime and “Webmaven” for, for making the interview arrangements and for hosting our photo shoot in her bookstore. On in New York City, Child sat down with TNI editor Robert Bidinotto and photographer Brian Killigrew at Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers, and later at Da Umberto Restaurant, for a wide-ranging, captivating, and inspiring interview. Tall, slim, with sky-blue eyes and a keen intellect, he clearly has exported much of himself into the Reacher character. Between novels, he reads, listens to music, and watches the Yankees-all addictively. The result was a gripping thriller, Killing Floor, that won awards, rave reviews, and the first of millions of avid fans who now call themselves “Reacher Creatures.” Ten novels have followed, all with terse, edgy titles: Die Trying, Tripwire, Running Blind, Echo Burning, Without Fail, Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and, this past May, Bad Luck and Trouble - another instant bestseller.Ĭhild now lives the good life with his wife in Manhattan and in the south of France. Rather than seek a new job, he sat down to write a novel in longhand. But when industry downsizing led to a major layoff, his career came to an abrupt halt in 1995.Īt age 40-jobless, broke, with a family to feed, yet supremely confident-Child did the unthinkable. He took his childhood love of fiction into a 20-year career as a presentation director for Granada Television. Born in England in 1954, Lee Child grew up on the tough streets of Birmingham. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |