Welcome to Dedicated with Doug Brunt. You have just gained access to an exclusive insider's look at the lives and works of some of your favorite authors and hear conversations with the world's greatest writers as they discuss their writing lifestyle, creative process, latest work, and behind the scenes revelations.

Welcome to Dedicated. i'm your host doug brunt today we have the great lee child a writer who needs no introduction not only has lee sold over one hundred

million books in his career a figure he reached years ago but in 2020 for, for services to literature, the royal crown made him

a commander of the order of the British Empire in a ceremony that was conducted by then-Prince-Charles,

now King Charles III. So for a guy born in England to fairly modest beginnings, that is pretty

cool. Lee, welcome to the show.

Hi, Doug. Thanks for having me on. It's good to see you again after all these months of

disruption. And what people may not know, Doug and I are in the same book club. So we have sat around

discussing all kinds of topics, many evenings. It is great to see us. We actually have our bottle of champagne here, which was your cocktail of choice, but lots of things to celebrate, including our first time in the same room in three, four years, something like that. Unbelievable, isn't it? How we just had a gap, you know, a gap in life. Yeah. Well, you haven't missed a beat, notwithstanding all that. I remember seeing this article on you getting your honor from the Crown and Charles,

and the photos in the Daily Mail had you eye to eye and knowing you,

I was thinking, how is that possible?

Then you looked to the bottom of the photo, and he's standing on a giant step in front of you.

Yeah, it was a very sweet, a very sweet occasion.

I mean, I was thrilled to get the award.

Everything in Britain is royal in terms of the name of it

and something to do with history of the empire and all that stuff.

But what it really is, that CBE level is, it's like the National Medal for the

Arts or something like that. It was just a really nice recognition that, not just for me,

but for all of us, all thriller writers and thriller readers, you know, we matter now. It's not just

a guilty pleasure or something that needs to be sort of hidden away from the real literature. It's accepted as for what it is. Well, you've touched so many lives. I mean, I don't know. What is the number up to? A hundred million, I think you hit like five years ago. Yeah, that's, you know, it sounds absolutely terrible to say it, but we don't count anymore. You know, it's just, it's virtually not possible. Well, speaking of CBE, the other thing I noticed on that, the funny thing is, as I was reading this article, is that you might be the least pretentious person I know. So the ribbons and the medals and the crown, I was kind of like, this is kind of not really Lee's thing, but I did notice that Elvis Costello was there and I am a fan of Elvis Costello but I was proud to see that you were the

commission. kind of not really Lee's thing, but I did notice that Elvis Costello was there, and I am a fan of

Elvis Costello, but I was proud to see that you were the commander of the British Order while

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