Jack Reacher author Lee Child
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2018
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephen Sackur speaks to the author Lee Child. Storytelling is one of the most basic human impulses. But few are the storytellers who can draw in millions of readers all over the world, fewer still those who can do it repeatedly. Lee Child’s first thriller featuring former military policeman Jack Reacher was published 21 years ago. His latest is his twenty third and his book sales have topped a hundred million. Fans speculate endlessly about what drives Jack Reacher, but what drives Lee Child?
Image: Lee Child (Credit: WireImage/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:06.8 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:11.5 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is one of the most successful fiction writers in the world. |
| 0:23.4 | Lee Child is a master of the action thriller. He created his hero, the former US military policeman Jack Reacher, who goes through |
| 0:29.6 | life as a lone writer of wrongs more than two decades ago. 100 million book sales later, |
| 0:40.7 | he's still at it. The 23rd Jack Reacher novel has just been published. Not bad for an Englishman born Jim Grant in Coventry in the English |
| 0:47.6 | Midlands who found himself laid off from his job in television at 40 and decided to buy paper and pencils and write a story. |
| 0:57.3 | Literary snobs often express disdain for commercially successful thrillers, but Lee Child novels |
| 1:03.5 | get praised for their spare prose and taught plotting. There's also something timeless |
| 1:08.9 | about the hero, Jack Reacher, rootless, without literal or |
| 1:13.1 | metaphorical baggage, but with an unswerving and brutal commitment to fighting for right against wrong. |
| 1:20.6 | Fans speculate endlessly about what drives Jack Reacher, but what drives Lee Child? Well, |
| 1:27.2 | he joins me now. |
| 1:28.9 | Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:30.6 | You have lived with this fictional character, Jack Reacher, for the last, what, 20 odd years of your life. |
| 1:38.2 | Where did he come from? |
| 1:39.7 | Because he certainly didn't come from your own life experiences. |
| 1:43.1 | Not my own experiences, but my life experiences |
| 1:46.7 | were all in entertainment. And I learned very early that you can never plan and you should never |
| 1:52.8 | overanalyze something that might or might not work in entertainment. Everything is an accident. |
| 1:58.4 | And so I wrote Jack Reacher. I never wanted to know where he came from. I didn't want to burst the bubble. I didn't want to overthink anything. So for years, I just wrote him. And then when I became secure about it, obviously, then I started to think, all right, where does he come from? And part of it is wish fulfillment for me. I would like to be this guy. |
| 2:18.0 | Would you really? |
... |
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