You know Jack Reacher. Now meet twenty more heroes and heavies from the brilliant mind of legendary crime author Lee Child, in this new collection published by The Mysterious Press. These twenty intriguing, thrilling, and rapid-fire fictions are intimate portraits of humanity at its best and worst, sure to please new and longtime fans of Child and to illuminate a side of the author’s work unknown to Reacher devotees. Featuring a colorful new introduction from the author, the collection stands as the first book written entirely by Child in four years.
Our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with Child to talk about deadlines, inspirations, and becoming a short story writer (or really, having been a short story writer all along.)
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Olivia Rutigliano: Mr. Child, it’s lovely to meet you. Congratulations on the release of your new book!
Lee Child: Thank you very much.
OR: Would you like to say a little bit about the process of releasing this? The book is a departure from what you normally do…
LC: Yeah, it’s a collection of short stories, and it is with Mysterious Press. I’ve known Otto for a long, long time, but we rarely had a professional association to this degree, and it was only because of Otto, really, that I’m doing it, that because I’m a novel writer, that’s how I conceive of my current phase of my career. And you get asked to do short stories, and that took me totally by surprise. I did not know that that was part of the landscape. You publish a novel, inevitably, somebody wants a short story, and then another person… and you end up doing, I mean, I don’t know… I’ve probably done 50 or 60, I’m really not sure, over the years, but I’ve never really considered it my main line of work, and that’s made me very not nervous about it, but just somehow they’re off to the side. They’re not my thing. I’ve been doing radio interviews about it, and I’ve been saying to the radio interviewers, ‘I’m sure it happens in your life. You know you’re a radio star, and I’m sure you get asked to open a supermarket, or do emceeing at a charity auction or something of that nature. And I’m sure you do it great, but you don’t think of that as your main job.’ And that’s sort of how I relate to short stories. So I had this strange mental thing going on where I thought, ‘well, they’re sort of secret there. Nobody knows about them. They’re off to the side.’ Do I really want to say, ‘Hey, I’ve written these short stories?’ But Otto said, and there’s one thing about Otto is that he’s honest, brutally… so if he thought they were crap, he’d say they were crap. If they were worth publishing, he would say so. And he did so. That really is what convinced me that it was a reliable third party opinion, that this was worth doing. So I did it.
OR: Now, were all of the stories in this collection newly written for the collection? Or were they assembled from the, you know, past few years that you’ve been doing this?
LC: Yeah, they were the detritus, you know, [from] 20 plus years really. I mean, some of them are literally 20 years old!
OR: That’s wonderful!
LC: Yeah, and they’ve been here and there. The title of the volume is Safe Enough which is one of the titles of one of the stories, and you know, that was actually published by an academic publisher in Denmark in a textbook about how to write English! So they show up in odd places around the world, in odd circumstances, but generally speaking, tomorrow, you know, you do them as a favor. One of them in Safe Enough was originally written for MWA when Harlan Coben was a guest editor of the MWA anthology that year. I think it was like 2004 or something. And so he says to me, ‘would you write a story?’ And I’m like, ‘what’s the theme?’ And he tells me. I do short stories always the same, which is, I always put it off until, literally the night before deadline, and do it in one sitting.
OR: Oh my gosh!
LC: Because they’re short, yeah. And so I remember doing that with that particular one… and many, many others. And… you know, sure, that’s kind of lazy and procrastinating, but it actually gives it an energy that I find doing them is the most attractive thing, as opposed to doing a novel, because you’re very aware with a novel that it’s a long slog, months and months, and you’re always aware that whatever you’re doing today there is masses ahead of you, and to a certain degree that affects what you do today, because you’re sort of subliminally planning. You know, I never actually say anything so specific for myself, but it’s a bit like saying, ‘oh well, I’ve got to save something for chapter 20 sort of thing, sure.’ Whereas with a short story in one sitting, you can just blast through it with absolutely no inhibition, no restraint, no sense that you’re going to be working on. Is for weeks or months, you just do it. And I felt that it gives it a real energy. About half of the stories are probably Reacher stories, but the ones that aren’t Reacher stories are liberations! You know, I can be a different character! I can be at a different time of history, a different nationality, be a weak person or a failure instead of, you know, Superman, right? And so it is attractive, it’s liberating! But I never really thought much of it, partly because I have, like I say in the introduction to the book, I have this strange old showbiz attitude that they’re not earning any money, therefore nobody is seeing them. That is an inevitable connection in my head, and so I’m doing these secret things that nobody’s going to see so I can do what I want to do. So have fun with it. Right?
OR: Is there a particular story in the collection that’s your favorite, or one that you hope, if anyone flips open to the you know, table of contents, they won’t read first?
LC: There’s one in particular that was written for IGW. They had an anthology that had something to do with romance. And so the title of that story is, “I Heard a Romantic Story,” and I think it is basically a 2500 word paragraph because I was high as a kite.
OR: Oh, my God, that’s hysterical.
LC: I’m kind of hoping that’s not the first one [in the collection].
OR: Yeah, sure. That’s very funny, though.
LC: Other ones were, were fine, a lot more sensible and Safe Enough was a good story. I remember I just really got into that through the characters. And there was one called “The Snake Eater by the Numbers.” I think that there was, it was for a very specific anthology where the conceit of the book was, it was more or less like a serial novel covering a couple of census actually. And the idea was, there was this charm bracelet that somehow got passed from story to story, and sometimes with charms added or subtracted. And I was a late substitute for that. I was to have nothing to do with that volume at all. And then somebody dropped out, so I got this panicked phone call from the person putting it together, who said, ‘Can you do this story?’ And it’s got to be about a charm bracelet, and it’s got to be found in a police station in north of London, and then it’s got to end up inside somebody’s stomach. Okay, what a set of parameters! It was super specific. Zero deadline, needed it within a day or two.
And I was listening on the phone or rehearsing how to say no, no, because I just couldn’t, I couldn’t think of anything. But then all of a sudden, I suddenly saw in my head how I could do that. And then I was really enthusiastic about it, because it was about London. Normally my entire output is a British person writing as if I was American, which is actually great for me, because it means every single word concept thought has to be, you know, thought about, considered, because it is a projection. And I always felt writing about England would be… I would be going between invention and familiarity all the time in a way that might not be so easy, but I was very happy to be writing about London. Never done that before, so I enjoyed doing that one. I mean, all of them, I enjoyed doing. But now I feel like, Oh, my God, you know this is you realize that your bathroom does not have any curtains, and suddenly people are watching you from across.
OR: That’s a wonderful analogy. Well, I’ll ask you one final question before sending you off. Are there any particular short stories or short story writers who you drew on for inspiration throughout this 20 year process of occasionally writing stories? OR just short stories? OR short story writers that you find yourself returning to or wishing you emulated more?
LC: What I figure is the really great ones that I’ve read have something that I can’t do. They have this short story thing within the short, short span of the story. They have this great reveal or great switch or pull the rug out from under you and I. Not sure that I can really ever do that to me. They feel like extremely, very, very, very short novels. And I think that I’m somehow not seeing what great short story writers do. I mean, some I’ve read, I read one short story once in a porn magazine back when I was a teenager, which was, you know how porn mags work… people are like, “I only buy it for the articles!” Well, that’s not true… I was buying it for the picture. But I found there was a short story on one of them, because they tried to be sort of literally or…
OR: Elevated, somehow?
LC: Exactly! Trying to be. And it was a great story. It had a supernatural conceit, which was that a guy has a jacket on and he puts his hand in his pocket and finds a shilling that he didn’t know was there, so he puts it on his desk, puts his hand back in his pocket, and there’s another shilling. Every time he puts his hand in his pocket. That’s the supernatural conceit. But from that point on, it becomes hyper-realistic. He needs massage therapy because he’s going like this all the time. [Here, Lee shoves his hand back and forth into his pocket.] and he’s carrying big bags of coins to the bank. And I thought that was a great story. There was a Ruth Rendell story I liked a lot about this guy who was going to go and see his girlfriend, so he sort of potted around in the morning and then got on a bus, and then he changed his mind, because he was a bit mad at her, and went back home. And meanwhile, she’d been murdered, and everything he’d done that morning, as a sort of mirror image, made him look totally guilty. And I thought that that was neatly done. So I’ve read lots of great ones, but I would never put myself in that category. And if people don’t like them, I can blame Otto! I’m always happy to do that.
OR: That’s a wonderful note to end on.
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Safe Enough: And Other Stories, by Lee Child, published by The Mysterious Press
