This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to be joined straight from the States by Lee Child,

the author of the

Jack Reacher thrillers, of which the latest one is called Past Tense. Lee, welcome. Start by telling

me a little bit about this new one, because it does something that Richard doesn't all that often

do, which is start to investigate his own past. Exactly, yeah, he is usually a guy who's not interested in the past at all.

It's all about today for him and possibly a little bit of tomorrow. And he never goes back, really,

and looks at anything, but he's presented with it. He's wandering as usual, and he sees a road sign to a town

that he recognizes the name from dusty old documents he's seen as a kid,

including his dad's birth certificate. This is where his father was born, allegedly.

Riecher has never been there. His dad never really talked about it much, but he's right in the area,

so he takes a detour. He thinks I'll take a look at where

the old guy grew up. Maybe I'll even find his old house. So he heads into town, logically starts

at the city records office and says, have you got anything about a family called Reacher?

And they investigate and come back and say, no, no family called Reacher ever lived here.

So, yeah, we're often running with one mystery right there.

And then you sort of wind through another one as well.

I mean, it's kind of twin track, isn't it?

Yeah, and that was just one of those random instinctive things that I do

because I don't have a plan, I don't have an outline, I have no consciousness of the shape of the book or what's going to happen. But in the very first line, I mentioned that Richard has spent the late summer in Maine. And just then I think, oh, Maine, why did it? Oh, Stephen King lives in Maine. Maybe I should do a Stephen King sort of creepy suspense strand here.

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