“Subject is a white male, mid-sixties. Tall, thin, sharp dresser. Born Coventry, England. Last known residence is a ranch in Wyoming, but he’s got places all over the world.”
“Um, yeah. I was aware.”
“Subject is also hard to get to. Out of the game now and likes it that way.”
“Yeah, again—you do know this guy is famous, right?”
“This needs to happen fast. We’re looking at a narrow window here. So, can you do it? Can you get to him?”
“When you say, ‘get to him’… you’re clear on what it is I do, right?”
“And you have the right equipment?”
“I mean, I have a Zoom account.”
“Whatever, just get it done. Make him talk, then get out clean. You have six days.”
All right, you see what I’m doing here. And no, my interview with Lee Child didn’t happen exactly this way, but some of the details are accurate. I did have six days, and the logistics were kind of challenging. But while the subject did indeed seem happy to be out of the game, he was also sublimely relaxed and unfailingly interesting on a dizzying range of topics. Making him talk was definitely not the hard part.
(In addition to Lee Child himself, I wish to thank his official biographer, Dr Heather Martin (The Reacher Guy, Pegasus and Little, Brown UK), who provided invaluable guidance during the preparation of this interview.)
PARAIC O’DONNELL: Lee, good morning. it’s a great pleasure to be speaking with you. You look well, and supremely relaxed, if I may say so. I think I’ve just quoted Peter Mandelson, which you’ll have to forgive.
Before we start, I did want to thank you also for overlooking the most calamitous typo of my entire career. In an email I sent before this interview, I referred to Reacher’s moral code as “worth nothing”. I meant “worth noting”, of course, but you can imagine my reaction when I discovered the mistake. It was touch and go for a while. They could have found my clothes folded up on a beach somewhere.
LEE CHILD: It’s funny, that. I read it as “noting” because I felt the context was so clear. So, it was just one of those self-harming typos.
POD: So, I could have got away with it. Also kind of upsetting, but okay.
I want to start by setting out a theme. I think crime and mystery novels aren’t necessarily or fundamentally about solving the case or getting the bad guys. In some way, deep down, they’re all about uncertainty of one kind or another. Reacher clearly has a moral code, and in the books it drives much of the action, but I’m also interested in his moral uncertainty or neutrality. What I mean is that if you’re not hurting somebody weaker than you, he’s likely not judging you.
And to me, he’s not ambivalent in a lazy or passive way. It makes him restless. It’s why he keeps travelling. He wants to see more, to know more. That’s very much a part of why I stayed with him, as a reader. Did you feel that way, as the writer?
LC: Well, it’s very hard to pin down the fundamental aspect of any crime novel. It seems to me that in novel writing as a whole—and certainly trade writing, commercial writing, you’re aiming to have some kind of currency in the culture.
[Therefore] you’re immediately hung up on dozens of competing things. And some of those things are contradictions in themselves, inasmuch as this is an art and a craft and a two-hundred-year tradition that is precious and valuable and creative and all of those good, ethereal things.
But simultaneously, it’s a job upon which you depend, upon which your family depends, your children’s education depends, all of this. There’s immediately a clash there.
And when you get down to characters, we sort of exist in a fantasy where we are allegedly constructing worlds and inventing characters, depicting them both in the instant and chronologically as people with convincing and plausible human reactions.
Whereas the contradiction to that is that in any work of fiction, nobody is real. There are only two real people involved in any fiction—the writer and the reader. Everything is a collaboration between the two.
So, Reacher’s moral code: Anecdotally, yeah, that is what people say they like about him and why they trust him. But to me what’s more important is that the readers have one too.
And a thriller operates on the basis of reassuring the reader, consoling the reader, empowering or gratifying him or her. By saying, yes, I know that you live in the real world and are therefore constantly frustrated. You are having to witness all kinds of immorality. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that, because in the real world you’re constrained or inhibited or incapable.
And therefore, people with a moral code want to see it exercised by proxy, which is why they like Reacher. If Reacher is walking down that street, he’s going to intervene in some way. That’s tremendously consoling and reassuring, I think.
They’re living through him, which is again a fundamental contradiction. And the way readers respond to that is always more sophisticated and aspirational than they admit, or possibly even realise.
___________________________________
Paraic O’Donnell’s latest book is The House on Vesper Sands.
Lee Child’s latest book, co-authored with Andrew Child, is The Sentinel.
___________________________________
POD: That’s all really interesting. And I think what you’ve identified is a tendency that I would obviously avoid in other settings, which is to present a reductive understanding of the mechanics of fiction to provoke discussion. I do get that it’s much more nuanced and organic than that, and that nobody sits down consciously to exemplify morality. And I’m hoping you’ll continue to correct me in interesting and expansive ways.
However, I’m also going to pursue this doggedly.
[Laughs]
I wanted to focus a little bit on the military as an institution and on guns as totems or signifiers. The culture of service has shaped him in important ways, but on the whole he’s ambivalent about the institution.
And when it comes to guns, he doesn’t carry one except when the circumstances clearly require it. He doesn’t fetishize them in any way.
I’m not asking you to get into the politics of all this. I just think it’s a really interesting tension to maintain, that neither of those things is defining for him.
LC: Absolutely not. He’s explicit a couple of times in the books, where he says, “Never tell a soldier that guns are fun.” He makes the point that a gun is a tool. If you have a particular job to do, you select the correct tool. Beyond that, a gun has no value to Reacher whatsoever.
And I do deliberately emphasise that a bit in order to poke what must be a considerable percentage of my readers. It’s partly mischief, but it’s also as a sort of moral duty of my own. I feel an obligation to at least subtly ask questions or push alternatives.
I don’t mind going into the politics of it at all. The problem with any American politics is that this is such a vast population, and so geographically disparate. And all the divisions in American society are between areas of high population density and areas of low population density. That explains almost everything.
That mosaic is such that there are people who are absolutely fine with me. For instance, Wyoming, where I have a place, is one of those huge, empty states in the west, virtually uninhabited.
POD: And magnificent.
LC: And I know a lot of people who are poor. Their horizons are such that nobody is very rich, so they don’t feel bad about it. But they have to cope with it. And probably they’ve got an old deer rifle that they inherited from their grandfather. Around this time of year they’ll go out and shoot a couple of deer. And that will feed their family until May or June. It’s useful, it has a value. It’s a lot more humane for the animal than going to the abattoir. That’s fine with me.
The stuff that’s semi-fine with me is people who find handguns to be interesting little mechanical devices, which I can sympathize with. I grew up in Birmingham, and manufacturing industry is in my DNA. Precision metalworking is something that I react to at an almost spiritual level.
But then you’ve got the people who get an erection by buying a military-style rifle, and those are the sinister types that you have to regard as somehow unacceptable. I try to make Reacher needle those people a little bit by saying, “I’ve done the real thing. What you’re doing is cosplay.”
Anything that becomes a fetish is stupid. And if it’s something lethal, like a firearm, that’s doubly stupid.
POD: There’s so much to talk about there. Like you, I’ve travelled a bit in those parts of the US, and something that’s been remarked on recently is that it’s not the people in big urban areas who are living a bubble. They’re in proximity with people of all backgrounds and cultures all day every day.
This isn’t to denigrate anyone, but clearly people in those sparsely populated states are relatively unexposed to anything other than what’s familiar to them.
I’m going to move on to the subject of evil and villainy. Reacher comes up against bad guys of all stripes. Many are just small-time hoods, but a few—and I’m thinking of MAKE ME, for example—are truly evil.
They often don’t get much time on the page. They don’t get to monologue, generally, and Reacher, quite pointedly, doesn’t waste much time reflecting on their nature.
That’s interesting, because he is otherwise so relentlessly and omnivorously curious. It seems like a possibly conscious exception. And I was thinking about the philosophy around this, like Augustine’s take, that evil is just the absence of good. I don’t think he’d buy that. Same with the various flavours of theodicy, because he’s not religious. And then you’re left with maybe Leibniz, who was clearly high all the time.
[Laughs]
None of that is of any use to him. So, maybe the only option left for him is to *be* the just god, which means whacking a bunch of guys in elaborate ways. I’m wondering how far out on a limb you think I’m going with all this.
LC: You know, I think in twenty-plus years, that is one of the best questions I’ve ever had. Because it’s something that I think there’s a real point behind, and I had not thought of it.
You’re absolutely right—Reacher does not ever analyse the nature of evil, and he never overtly justifies what he does.
It’s an excellent question, and part of the answer, I think, is an instinctive simplicity in his approach. It’s a sort of checklist approach where, if you’ve failed Question A, well then you’ve failed.
There’s also a certain impatience, I think, with the constant reexamination of society’s navel. Last year or the year before, I was passing through London and I did some BBC TV programme—one of those edgy or semi-hostile interviews.
POD: It wasn’t [Jeremy] Paxman, was it?
[Laughs]
LC: No, I like Paxman, actually. We get on all right. No, it was one of those shows where they aren’t bending over to be polite. Which I found [arches eyebrow] quite interesting. And not long before, there had been some couple who’d posted pictures of themselves on Facebook dressed up in Nazi gear, and they’d named their baby Adolf.
I was asked about this on the programme and I said, “Yeah, somebody like that, you just walk up and punch them in the face.”
And the guy said, “Really? Shouldn’t we think about this?”
And I said, “Do we not already know that answer?” Do we have to have a new discussion every twelve months about whether being a Nazi is a good idea? Don’t we already know that?
It is, I suppose, intellectually dutiful to keep re-examining one’s beliefs, but certain beliefs are settled. So, I try to bring that into Reacher as well. To him, it’s a simplistic decision—is this right or is it wrong?
And you’ve got to remember his West Point background, which is a very particular thing. It’s a difficult school. It’s demanding in its academic pursuits, and it is obsessed with this idea of honour. With doing the honourable thing even though no one is watching. And there’s a lot of that in Reacher.
One of my hobbies is keeping up with the long seven-million-year history of human evolution. The research that’s been done in the last few decades is amazing. For every one year that we’ve been modern, we’ve been ancient for two hundred years. We are carrying around stuff that we evolved millions of years ago and depended on.
One of the things we learned in that long evolution is that immediate rejection of the other. I was in New York a while ago, and even though I’ve got a very fancy apartment, I still get the occasional cockroach. I was standing there brushing my teeth, and this cockroach popped out from behind something and ran across the bathroom countertop. And in a fraction of a second, without any conscious thought, I just whacked it. It astonished me, actually. There was no cognitive function involved, just an instantaneous reaction.
Reacher is like that about good or evil. He will recognise it. He’s fairly relaxed the grey areas. If people aren’t bothering him or anybody else, he’ll leave them alone. But if something egregious happens, he will hunt them down. He will remove them from the gene pool.
POD: Yeah, so much in there. You mentioned the notion of intellectual duty. Hannah Arendt did all that intellectual duty decades ago, right? And now we have this whole debate again about whether it’s okay to punch a fascist. Someone who avowedly wants to exterminate or excise large sections of society. And yeah, of course it is.
I’m glad you’re lighting up, by the way, because it means I can vape.
And on the West Point thing, I was just thinking as you were speaking. All that is true of West Point culture, and yet these days we have West Point graduates like Mike Pompeo disgracing and abasing themselves in what would once have been unimaginable ways. These are very contemporary themes, I think.
Again on the theme of uncertainty, which I’m obviously working pretty hard.
[Laughs]
After Reacher, I think I’m most to drawn to Neagley. She’s the only woman who’s a continuous presence in his life. And what interests me is that she’s deeply private and self-contained, more so even than Reacher himself. And there’s a real economy in her characterisation that seems respectful of that. It emerges almost entirely from her interactions with him, which are kind of eloquent in their terseness.
And I love that running theme about her not liking to be touched, and the fact that Reacher never once asks why. The idea that there may not be a reason, that she may just choose to live that way. Do you feel I have that right? And that a core of unknowability can be really valuable in characterisation?
LC: Absolutely, and I think she’s the perfect example. Because you’re right, she’s the only character that ever repeats, apart from his old CO, General Garber. And I guess his brother is referenced often.
It was something that I intended to absolutely avoid, that soap opera aspect. Having worked in television, I understand that soap opera is the most powerful narrative engine, and by eschewing it you give up a lot.
But I wanted [the Reacher books] to be a distinct experience, not the usual thing with a bunch of pals, a dog, a landlord, and a favourite bar. In the beginning I thought we would have no repeating characters whatsoever, just Reacher drifting from place to place.
Then Neagley came into the sixth book, WITHOUT FAIL, and she just worked so well. Emotionally, Reacher needed some kind of grounding. He needed a friend, but I didn’t want it to be conventional.
As you say, she has this haptophobia, she can’t be touched. No one knows why, even I don’t know why. The conventional thing would be to say that she was raped in basic training or whatever, which I would avoid anyway because it’s such a cliché.
And to me, it’s a perfect example of how you can create a really compelling character by very light sketching. But then you cannot take her any further. A lot of people like her, and they say we should have a book with her as the main character. But it seems to me that’s completely impossible, because if you did that you would have to explain her.
POD: And reveal her.
LC: And reveal her. Her fascination comes from being unrevealed, unexplained. I think that’s how we live our lives. You have these glancing encounters with fascinating people, in some bar or restaurant. You know something but by no means everything, even with our spouses and our children.
That’s one of the things that fascinates me most about having a kid. On day one, I knew every single thing about her, but then she reached milestones like school, where she’s having a separate experience than I’m observing. So, from a very early age, you’re constantly diverging. I will never know her a hundred percent.
And I find that lovely, to be honest. I really like that. Fundamentally, my mantra is, I was born alone, I have lived alone, and I will die alone. True connection between people is actually impossible.
POD: Yeah, I share those instincts, I think. You only have to look at the opposite extreme, which is the kind of obsessively controlling behaviour you see in abusive relationships. It stems from the opposite, which is a lack of respect for that individuality and autonomy.
Okay, next I have a shameful confession. I forget where, but I once wrote that Reacher emerges “fully formed” in the opening chapter of KILLING FLOOR. I obviously did a lot of rereading for our talk, and when I went back and checked, he’s not.
He’s absolutely recognisable, but it’s almost entirely implied, with no conspicuous exposition. It’s first person, so we’re just noticing what he’s noticing, inferring what we can about why he’s noticing, say, a rosewood desk or the quality of the road surfaces.
At the sentence level, it all looks very pared down. But when you step back, it’s all there in composite. It’s like pointillism, like a painting by Seurat. And maybe I’m reaching a conclusion that’s too neat here, but he doesn’t speak through that entire chapter, not even to say his name. He’s been Mirandized, and he’s exercising those rights kind of pointedly. But it’s also extremely meta, as the kids say.
LC: Yeah, you know, first book. To a certain extent, I was learning how to do it. I would love to say that everything was designed. But first of all, I don’t design anything. I rely on instinct completely.
I just feel that in writing classes and books [on writing], you’re warned against info-dumps and all that sort of thing. But surely that’s instinctive for any writer.
POD: And for any reader.
LC: Yeah. Everything is based on having been a reader first. I think that’s what people forget about writing—you’re always reading more than you’re writing.
So, you just bake in certain preferences and impressions from the reading that you’ve done. You use what works and ignore what doesn’t. For me, it was always about launching into the middle of the action, crossing your fingers and hoping that the main character will be revealed as sufficiently interesting.
So yeah, that opening was all about the silent man, analysing and thinking ahead, predicting what’s going to happen and how to deal with it. I thought it worked great. It was a short first chapter with a little sting at the end where he says he hadn’t killed anybody…for a while.
So, the reader is immediately on edge. Wait a minute, is this guy a good guy or a bad guy? They read on to find out the context.
There have been books where the main character doesn’t speak for the entire book. There’s a guy called T. Jefferson Parker who wrote a book called SILENT JOE. The main character has no dialogue whatsoever. And a guy called Steve Hamilton did a book called THE LOCK ARTIST, where the character is psychologically inhibited from talking, but he can pick any lock.
I thought that was magnificently brave. You can’t have a multi-book series where the main character never speaks, because that would be kind of stupid. Typically, with first novels, you have a lot of throat-clearing, and the opening chapter is all about “This is who I am”, and I just hate that. Just let the story reveal the character.
POD: It’s funny you should mention it, because I wrote one of those novels myself, THE MAKER OF SWANS, in which one of the main characters, a young girl named Clara, doesn’t speak. She does have certain compensating abilities, like altering reality, but still. It presents you with some interesting challenges. But those are so often the source of something new and fruitful and fiction.
LC: Having said all that, one is tempted to look back. And there has been a progression towards muteness. In the early books, Reacher is surprisingly loquacious and talks in lengthy paragraphs sometimes. Whereas in the later books, it’s as if I’ve been trying to migrate towards absolute silence, where a two-line speech is long.
And I became, not obsessed, but increasingly satisfied if I could get something across in four words instead of five. And I did ask myself, why am I doing this? I’m not sure of the answer to that, really.
And to me, [dialogue] is one of the fundamental differences between a novel that works and a novel that fails. And it’s so difficult to quantify. It either works or it doesn’t. And it’s the single most artificial thing that you will ever do.
Bizarrely, I won an award some years ago from some Texas newspaper for natural dialogue. Which I was very gratified to get, of course, but it’s absurd. Dialogue in a book is the furthest thing from natural. It’s coherent and complete, with sentences and clauses, and real-life conversation never does that. Dialogue is the ultimate bellwether and the ultimate art. It either works or it doesn’t and nobody knows how or why.
POD: For what it’s worth, I think you deserved the award. But you’re right, and I think it’s part of a wider contract between writer and reader, where the reader accepts that a degree of artifice is necessary, not just in dialogue but in all formal aspects of fiction. What you end up achieving is not naturalism. You could say that there are writers like Elmore Leonard whose dialogue is highly naturalistic, but it’s not naturalistic in the way that a transcript is. It’s naturalistic within certain implicit parameters.
LC: Yeah, it’s both things at once. It’s highly artificial, but looks extremely natural and correct.
POD: Exactly. So, I’ve talked about what Reacher notices for a reason, but I want to explore what he notices for no apparent reason. For me, that’s where a lot of the treasure is buried. One of the underappreciated pleasures of the novels, I think, is their evocation of place, the way [Reacher’s] gaze lingers on small details of exurban landscapes—on the lube shops and strip malls, and also the details of lighting or signage that mark out particular kinds of motel or gas station. If I can put on my black turtleneck for a minute—
He seems to be interested in the semiotics of the built environment. And those passages, they’re unobtrusive and woven in with great skill, but that accretion of low-key detail is used to amazingly charged effect. And it’s very unlike the way cityscapes are used in more noirish fiction, where very often the dark, rain-drenched streets are really just metaphorical set dressing. You do avoid that, whether consciously or not, and there’s an interest in the particularity of place that I find really compelling.
What I’m leading up to here is kind of an oddball question. Might we see you try your hand at other forms, now that you have time, like maybe travel writing? Or have you secretly been doing travel writing all along?
LC: [Laughs] Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question, because in a way I have been doing travel writing all along, inasmuch as I find it very fascinating in America, especially. The British Isles have really got nothing similar. There are whole routes and areas that are just bypassed or abandoned. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the interstate system was being built, there’d been this century-old network of roads, and the interstates rationalised all that to such an extent that—like famously with Route 66, which along with other byways became superfluous.
And that created literal ghost towns in some areas that are just freaky to look at. Then there were declining towns, or towns that found a new equilibrium under the new system. And that stuff, for a person from the British Isles, is inherently fascinating. So yes, it is a kind of travel writing.
But there are a couple of other factors. One of which, as you say, is that in noir the city tends to be extremely monolithic, with the grey backdrop and the shimmering rain, and significantly with no welcoming locations at all, except if it’s the hero’s hometown and he has a favourite bar.
Whereas in these more isolated places, you come into town and you’ve got the gas station, the lube shop, a small mall and then whatever downtown area. And there are going to be welcoming places. Reacher repeatedly shows us the diner. He’ll go into a diner, and the waitress will be somebody he can relate to. It’ll be a welcoming face that is not hostile, even though other things might be going on that are very hostile. It’s a mixture.
And it’s easier to do the story that way, because you have a network of supporting characters. And it’s a belief that I have that the reader does not want to be constantly beaten over the head with misery. The reader likes it if occasionally a character pops up that is helpful or kind.
I’ve always done that. Reacher investigates something, and he very often goes back to a military source. And the standard cliché there would be to have it all bureaucratic and tight-lipped. But because he is who is, he can look at another officer and say, “Come on, what’s the story here?” And the other guy is helpful. And I think that light and shade is super important. And geographically, it is easier to get in the rural environment. You can drop into any town at all, and you’re going to find nice, welcoming, fun people as well.
POD: Indeed. I’ve so often seen it myself, in Cracker Barrels or wherever.
LC: Cracker Barrels, there’s a great example. One of the greatest restaurants in America.
POD: I couldn’t agree more. I have this really distinct memory from, I think, 1997 or so, of this extraordinarily sweet lady. I had to leave the restaurant early for some meeting, and she was so solicitous. Because I hadn’t finished my tuna melt. And she was like, “Sweetie, what’s wrong? Can I at least bag this up for you?”
It was just a genuine kindness, in a way that wasn’t at all corporate or obligatory. And I love that.
LC: I love it too. And I’ll be on a long trip sometimes, and I’ll stop at a Cracker Barrel out of choice. And of course I’ll be on my own, so I’ll go in with a book. And one of the [waitresses], she was so worried. She thought I was alone in the world, just this lonely guy who’s reading a book.
And that’s fascinating, non-readers’ reactions to people who read.
POD: Yeah, Bill Hicks had a routine about that. He sets up this scene where he goes into a waffle place, and it gets into some nasty stereotypes because he has this gum-chewing waitress who’s made to sound dumb. Anyway, she doesn’t ask him what he’s reading. She says, “Whatcha reading *for*?”
[Laughs]
POD: So, I’m going to try to unify some of these strands. Feel free to set me straight here. In my own forthcoming novel, THE HOUSE ON VESPER SANDS, one of the things I’m trying to do is to substantiate what moral duty looks like in certain dark and weird circumstances. Now, I have ghosts and aristocrats devouring souls in there, so the parallels maybe aren’t perfect.
[Laughs]
But I think—and this is kind of audacious of me—that my Inspector Cutter resembles Reacher in at least one important respect, which is that he’s somewhat compatible with the institutions of law and order. But when those institutions fail to demonstrate what I’ll call moral urgency, that’s when he starts to have a problem. Reacher gets explicit about this at least once—I think it’s in ECHO BURNING—where he’s quoting Marcuse on how law and order protect existing hierarchies. I think that approaches what may be my unified theory of Reacher. I’m wondering how well you think that holds up.
LC: Well, I think that it brings us right back to my first point about the inherent contradictions between so many different things. In that particular example, law and order is a composite word. It sounds like a person, “Laura Norder”. And as a matter of fact, the two things are diametrically opposite. If you want order, you’ll probably end up ignoring the law. If you respect the law, you invite chaos rather than order. So to me, the two things are fundamentally in opposition.
Reacher is cognisant of the law, inasmuch as he knows what’s illegal and what isn’t. But he’s much more interested in order, and specifically moral order. He feels no compunction about breaking the law to impose order of the kind he approves of. And vice versa, he understands that to achieve an orderly, pleasant society, the law has to take second place in a sense. They are not equivalent.
I think we see that all the time, especially in America where the First Amendment guarantees your right to free assembly. That is explicitly legal, and yet it is disorderly. And when the police try to impose order, they inevitably break the law.
And again, we’re talking about these characters as if they were real, with moral agency and so on. And of course, they’re not, they don’t exist. The only two real people in the transaction are the author and the reader. And readers will generally respond to the right thing being done.
POD: I want to give you a break now from all this grad school exegesis.
[Laughs]
You’re clearly not short of fans, but I’m often struck by how many you have among writers. Margaret Drabble, for example, is on the record with high praise. And when I did a piece on your retirement, they were lining up—people like Eleanor Catton and Max Porter, all with really interesting things to say about the work. And it’s a given that writers aren’t special, that they’re just readers with longer opinions. But still, what do you make of that, if anything?
LC: Well, my first reaction is that it’s entirely typical of the kindness and generosity of writers as a whole. That’s been one of the enduring delights of the last 25 years, is just how damn nice everybody in this business is.
And amongst the other authors, toiling away, facing problems of their own, so many are still prepared to react generously to someone else’s efforts. I think it’s just delightful. It’s been an enduring pleasure.
And shedding modesty, as I suppose one has to in this type of discussion, writers understand how you produce this stuff. It is not easy. My personal argument for many years has been that producing popular stuff that will be consumed by millions is a lot harder than writing stuff that will be consumed by thousands. It’s a whole different league.
It requires intense attention to the most granular elements. I put an awful lot of effort into propelling people through the book, while at the same time giving meat to the people that don’t need that help. And if another writer recognises that, obviously I’m delighted, but I also think that they ought to. We’re all in the same game.
And without being big-headed about it, I think they should recognise the quality because I recognise theirs. Like Margaret Drabble, who I’ve been reading all my life—I’d be able to give a pretty good analysis of her talents and achievements.
POD: I don’t think it is big-headed, and you’ve couched in exactly those terms of mutual respect. And like you I’ve had so many experiences of that instinctive kindness and generosity from writers of all kinds. It’s such a persistent phenomenon in the industry. I think it’s a wonderful thing.
LC: I do too, and I feel the view from inside that world is very different. From the outside, it can appear like a vertically arranged ladder, where the bestsellers are at the top and midlisters are halfway down and the debuts are at the very foot of the ladder. But it’s not vertical at all; it’s completely horizontal. It’s as if we’re on a chessboard. We’re on our own squares, for sure, but you’re looking at people at eye level.
I’ve got dozens of writer friends, and there is literally no correlation at all between that and sales. It’s just about interesting writers.
POD: Yeah, precisely.
LC: And the idea that they can learn from me, I accept that obviously. But I can learn from them, and I absolutely do. That is why I go to conventions, because I’m genuinely excited about discovering and learning from new talent. I completely reject the idea that some people are in lofty positions and some people aren’t.
POD: Yeah, that I think is the basis on which we all proceed, which seems healthy to me. And you’ve reminded me of something else I was going to say about genre. You’re right to say that a lot of that snootiness is disappearing, and readers don’t get hung up much on genre, which ought to be instructive. My personal definition is that any book possessing more qualities than it needs is literary.
I have a closing question for you, you’ll be glad to hear. This where interviewers usually say something like, “So, what’s next for Lee Child?”
That stuff makes me want to chew through my own wrists, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. So, let’s do something different, since as we’ve said we’re both readers first and foremost. What are you going to read next? Is there anything you’ve been saving up?
I was going to say here, the more unlikely the better, but in your case probably nothing seems terribly unlikely.
LC: Well, I was a Booker prize judge just this year. That’s finished now, but so far this year about two thirds of my reading has been Booker submissions.
But I will read literally anything. I just read a book about the history of air-conditioning.
POD: That’s wonderful, and very on-brand.
LC: And a book about geometric patterns in medieval English brickwork.
POD: Okay, that’s even better.
LC: And right now I’m reading something about the history of the justice system in the US, the extent to which it’s still a continuation of Jim Crow. And we have a system where probably most people in the prison system didn’t do what they’re accused of. It’s not that they’re all wrongly convicted, but for almost everyone it’s a plea bargain situation because if you go to trial it’s such a huge risk and you could easily and up in a worse situation than the one you’re being offered.
I’m reading a lot of that. And to be honest, at the age of 66 and having lived here for a third of my life, I’m still trying to understand the extent of racial disharmony in America. You know, you come from Europe with a certain amount of fascination and optimism, but you have to confront that it’s just a nakedly racist society, or nakedly white supremacist. And that’s a huge realisation to have to internalise.
There was a book a couple of years ago called Strangers in Their Own Land [by Arlie Russell Hochschild] that asked people for their impression of things. In Louisiana, for instance, they were asked what percentage of workers they thought worked for the federal government. And the median answer was something like 30%, as if the state is this massive thing. And the truth is, it’s about 1.9%. How is that disparity possible? When in fact that state is subsidised to the tune of $2,000 per inhabitant. The entire state is on welfare, and yet you have this horror of socialism.
I may never understand it.
POD: Right. Again, where are the real bubbles? Lee, you’ve been wonderfully gracious. This has been fascinating and a lot of fun. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say one last thing, on behalf of myself and many others: Thanks for the ride, and for taking us all this way.
LC: It’s very nice of you to say so. And thanks for your interest. Like I say, we’re all equal. I’m just as flattered that you were interested in talking to me.
POD: It’s been such a pleasure. Take care of yourself.
