Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Giant buttons and esophageal passages (with Lee Child)

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Jane has a giant button going down her esophageal passage, and Fi is less than impressed. Once they get over that, they're talking your most recent pet photos, whether women from history drive, and they have a big political prediction for Suella Braverman's next career move... Lee Child is our big guest today. The Secret, written in collaboration with his brother Andrew, is out now. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Megan McElroy Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I've just got a giant button just going right down my esophageal passage. Lovely. It's the one with the orange flavour. I think they're good for you. Yeah, we can hear it, Jane. It's important to have vitamin C at this time of year, isn't it? Can I just present to you one of the great difficulties

in the radio world is describing a luscious picture. But Jane, here is Ruby, who is the 11-month-old Cocker Spaniel. And Ruby is wearing his flat cap. Hang on, is it he? Ruby is wearing this flat cap cap I can't see my glasses

Ruby's are usually girls but listen with 2023 love also isn't there a jockey a male jockey called Ruby anyway I don't know is that in your dreams uh although I think she looks gorgeous best wishes from Joanne and I'm going to photograph that and just put it up on the insta because uh Ruby does look delicious and for some reason, I think it's because Eve was running a bit of a temperature today and actually she had to leave the office and we hope you get better soon Eve. I think

she had for some reason decided to print all our emails out on A3 so this is like a poster of Ruby. Giant emails today. It's huge! Well all this is as boring as hell to Kay who writes to say I'm so delighted that my intolerant comments about pet owners have led to such frequent name checks in your podcast. Please do make sure you keep on talking about pets as the smug self-satisfaction I'm feeling

when I hear you apologising is very much outweighing the boredom. Kind regards from Kay. Right, okay. Thank you. Well, I'm just going to say thank you to Katerina in Germany, who sent a very nice picture of the much-loved toy poodle Chai,

who's got a 100% wool cable-knit turtleneck sweater on. I'd like to say hello to Linda, who sent us some very nice pictures of cats in coats, Jane. That's for you. Okay, yes, thank you. And Tilly is loving a box, and Tilly is a cat, and cats in coats, Jane. That's for you. OK, yes, thank you. And Tilly is loving a box. And Tilly is a cat.

And cats in boxes. Caroline would like to see more of those. So thank you for those two. So I'm sorry, Kay. We will continue for a while. Just because in these times of very, very, very dark news, pets in clothing just seems to be tickling people's fancy. I mean, who could not be cheered up by a picture of Twiggy so cosy in her dressing gown? Well, obviously just me.

You said it. I'm loving them. They seem to be quite popular on the Insta. Do you remember Lisa, who was, well, I mean, she was certainly facing a bit of a life crisis and she was thinking of buying a camper van. I remember, Linda. And we basically said... Lisa. Lisa. She said she remembered Linda, which you probably do. Lisa, because we gave her the advice of just getting the camper van and go, didn't we? Well, she says, I've been alerted to your request for an update on my camper van situation um this is a woman who has just got

divorced well she's in the process of getting divorced now um apologies for the delay i missed the relevant episode well we'll forgive you in the circumstances i'm afraid i haven't found the right camper van yet as divorce negotiations have taken a nasty turn. It's been difficult to focus on vehicular, I can't say that, vehicular, what do you say? Vehicular. Vehicular, yeah, vehicular choices. But the hunt will resume. To cover off a couple of recent topics, I did have a quick look at a dating app. Having not been on a date in this millennium, I was shocked to discover that I was only being presented with old men. And she's written old men in capital letters. There must be some mistake with the algorithm. So I've deleted the app and have taken the decision to only date significantly younger

men. Did you know that Agatha Christie's second husband was 14 years her junior? If it's good enough for Agatha, it's good enough for me. Yeah, but did Agatha Christie go missing during one of her marriages or when she wasn't married? I don't know. I know she did. Yeah, but I don't know where she was in her marital status, but she just took some time out, didn't she? And she went to live in a...

Was it a hotel somewhere near Guildford? I thought it was Ramsgate. Maybe it was. Well, I mean, she was missing, so you don't really know. She just wanted some time out, I think. I mean, if the camper van had been available, then she would have taken it. Yes, I think actually you're right. Agatha Christie, if she'd been able, we don't know whether she could drive, but back in the day, you didn't have to take a test, did you? So it wouldn't have held her back. No, and she just wanted a break, didn't she? It's funny, isn't it?

It's sort of women from history and whether or not they drove. I've never thought about this before. Did Boudicca have a car? She had a chariot. She had a chariot, didn't she? Yes. So I think you've picked the one figure from history who was vehicular. She really was vehicular.

Anyway, we must press on a little bit with lisa's other um um content in response to your request for weird reading juxtapositions please find attached a photo of the books on my bedside table i've got two collections of poetry plath oh blimey you're not in a good place lisa i mean i love sylvia but she's not to jiggle your fancy and cheer you up, is she? I'd swap that for a Roger McGough. And quick. And Yeats. Yeats? Yeats?

Yeats. Yeats? Yeats? Keats and Yeats. Yes. Ode to Autumn. Season of... No, let's not go there.

So she's got these two collections of poetry, Plath and Yeats, a field guide to butterflies and moths, and another Guide to Butterflies and Moths, and another book called Women Who Run With Wolves, Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. I want to be in Lisa's head. I haven't read the last on the list yet, but God help everybody when I do. Right, I think Suella Bravman's read that, judging by her resignation letter, which came out just in our time today.

So it was rather good, wasn't it, in news terms? Yeah. I tell you what, when her time as a politician ends, I think she could strike up quite a nice line in incredibly vicious, acidic leaving cards. If you wanted to dump somebody, I think you could contact Suella and she'd find the words for you. It's the put-down, isn't it, to Rishi Sunak. Your distinctive style of government, and it's not said in a complimentary way. You're weak and you're uncertain. Yeah.

But on the other hand, what she can't be, and also she owns what she believes to be her successes. Now, you can certainly disagree with her politics, but I think we probably can't carp about her bigging herself up because we're always encouraging women to do it. And I think there is a bit of a suggestion there was a bit of a boys' club there and that maybe she felt a bit ostracised.

Well, I didn't read that into the letter. Oh, no? Well, I'm just reading into it now. Well, I don't know. Sometimes I think that's a slightly, is that sometimes a slightly dangerous path to go down because it undermines the sheer political oomph of that non-meeting of minds. If you turn it into a gender thing,

it slightly takes away from the fact she's livid about policy isn't she she is absolutely livid that the policy she wanted to pursue that she genuinely believes represent the people in the party who like her and wanted her to be the Home Secretary if you reduce that to her she wasn't listened to because she was a woman it takes away something from I wonder whether it just might have been a factor I don't actually know much about her. I don't know much about her background, whether she's one of the private school brigade

or whether she comes from a different sort of, I don't know. Maybe there was an element of a class thing. Because that's certainly what Nadine Doris feels, isn't it, about some of those posh boys at the top. Yes. I think Nadine Doris thinks quite a few things. I wonder how her book launch went last night. We did talk to a guy who was on his way to the book launch

last night, didn't we? We did. And nobody's heard from him since. It'll be interesting to see how well that book does. This is the one, the plot, Nadine Doré's guide to the downfall, she believes the completely mistaken achievement. No, I shouldn't say that. The removal of Mr. B. Johnson from his position as Prime Minister, which Nadine still believes was a very wrong thing indeed. Yeah. Well, I mean, Christmas is coming, Jane. No, thank you. No.

I think it's the perfect gift for you. And if I can get a special signed copy, I will. Now, I noticed that you've got Clutched in Your Sweaty Hands there, a little piece from Today's Times about the book club, which took 28 years to finish, Finnegan's Wake.

James Joyce once described the perfect reader of his notoriously difficult novel, Finnegan's Wake. James Joyce once described the perfect reader of his notoriously difficult novel Finnegan's Wake as suffering from an ideal insomnia. Yes, it's a bloody awful book, Finnegan's Wake. Can you just read... I've never even attempted to read it. Can you read the description of it? How does this rubbish get published?

Written in a torrent of idiosyncratic language over more than 600 pages, it includes made-up words in several languages, puns, I'll be the judge of that, and arcane allusions to Greek mythology. And a book club, and not surprisingly it's taken this book club

28 years to read Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. The group, which holds its sessions over Zoom, began by reading two pages a month before slowing to a page per discussion. They finally got to the final page in October after 28 years.

I mean, the thing is, just don't bother with Finnegan's Wake. If you must read something by James Joyce, Struggle Through Ulysses. Oh, The Dubliners. Yeah. Read that. So I, yeah, I just, I find that so frustratingly alienating,

the reverence attached to books that then are openly described as making no sense at all. Forget it. Well, exactly. I'm with you, sister. Which does bring us on to this week's or this month's book club choice, which is Boy Swallows Universe, which I think we're discussing in a book club next week aren't we on the 24th of november so if you haven't completed that yet make sure you're on it like a bonnet over the

course of the weekend i mean it's raining solidly in the uk so you've got no other options you don't need to go out it's unwise there are slippery pavements stay inside and finish the book Can I just read out this email from a fan from Sydney? Recently, I was chatting with friends on a close-knit internet forum talking about AI and its appetite for information as it develops into this know-all monster when Saysalot49 said, everyone can relax. One of the books used to train AI is Finnegan's Wake. It'll probably F up the entire system. And I agree with you there. Right. We're going to try and do quite a short podcast this evening, aren't we? Because we do have a little bit of illness on the team. Yeah, not us. Don't worry. Some of the other people. Well, people will be worried. They'll be sending flowers.

Well, people will be worried they'll be sending flowers. Don't do that. You're laughing a bit too much. Everybody else is unhappiness. But this one comes in from Jane, who says, she's worried that she might be too late to contribute to the annoying tropes about actors with empty coffee cups and suitcases. This one can run forever, Jane. Just in case I'm not, I wanted to share that my pet peeve in dramas

is detectives or investigative journalists working by the light of an angle-poised lamp surrounded by darkness. The big light is seemingly not turned on. Anyone who's worked in a modern office during the last 20 years will be familiar with lights that after a certain time of day switch off when there's no movement detected. However, they still work directly above where people are sitting and as soon as anyone gets up and moves around, they all spark up to life. But seemingly not in television or

film if you're in a job that requires you to work feverishly into the night. Well spotted, Jane. And it's always feverishly. Have you ever worked all night? I have several times, yeah. I don't mean on like a media shift. Well, we used to put together a programme back in the really really first days of five life called the ad break which was all about the world of advertising yeah and me and my colleague Richard we used to we rented out a studio that was just really really cheap overnight and that's all we could

afford so we're making the program ourselves so we used to meet at Grafton House at 8 o'clock in the evening and we would work all the way through the night. Grafton House is a, I'm going to say, an unglamorous-looking building on the Euston Road. It certainly is. It used to be the home of Jeremy Thorpe's bank. You know that. Jeremy Thorpe's bank?

Yeah. It was also a noted centre for local radio training. It certainly was. That's why I did my training. That's why my studio is very cheap. So we used to put in an all-nighter every Friday night and then go and hand in shaking with fatigue this tape down the road to a broadcasting house yeah I used to love it and the idea of doing that now so sick we used

to get by about 3 in the morning what was was the floor of your mouth like? Gosh, that's an interesting question. I think it was... Foggy and disgusting. Yeah, and we both smoked as well. Oh, God. So we were pretty rancid creatures by eight o'clock every morning. Where's Richard now?

So he runs a successful little book startup, actually. Yep, called Bookomi. He's done very well for himself. He's done all right, has he? Okay. Have you worked all night? So he runs a successful little book startup, actually. Yep. Called Bookomi. He's done very well for himself. He's done all right, has he? Okay. Have you worked all night? Oh.

Okay. Right. No. I mean, the only time. No. I mean, no, I've just never done that. Even as a student, I never did. I just thought, I can't work all night.

It's ridiculous. So we used to get a little bit high on whatever it was, fatigue and, you know caffeine no no not other things but caffeine and fags and three o'clock in the morning was always the time at which neither of i would neither of us were lucid but we found everything very funny yes it was a bonding moment oh i bet it was and that's hope that's all it was don't say oh you have to turn everything into a slight kind of soured, vinegared whatever. It was really good fun, Jane. We were so young.

We loved it. Yes. Is it possible to have fun when you, yes, I suppose it is. Yeah. Yeah. And also because we just had that belief that we were just doing something, we were doing something so, not important, but it was just terrifically different, actually.

Yeah. We really enjoyed ourselves. And it was about the advertising industry. Don't even think about it. Is it still available? A supplementary question. No, you're right. I haven't got any.

Nope. I should say, actually, tomorrow's guest is Roxane Gay, who is the noted feminist thinker. I think that's a right way to describe her, isn't it? Yes, thinker and writer. And then on Thursday, we're talking to a man called Chris Atkins, who has written a couple of books. One is called A Bit of a Stretch, and the other is called Time After Time.

And Chris Atkins was a noted filmmaker. He'd won awards for his films. And he was sent to prison for tax fraud. And A Bit of a Stretch did very well. It was basically an outsider's view of life in the prison system. Was it like banged up in literary form? Well, and this is what I want to ask him about, because I've just watched one edition of Banged Up,

the Channel 4 so-called prison reality show. I don't want to watch any more. I finished Time, the Jimmy McGovern series, the second series, which is set in a women's prison, which I think ended on terrestrial telly on Sunday night. And I just found that it had actually a relatively uplifting ending, thank God, because the rest of it had been so, so depressing. I just want to ask him, amongst other things,

whether he thinks, well, what he thinks on television has been the most accurate representation of prison life. I sometimes think there's an element of, I don't like the expression, but sort of prole porn about the way we treat prison experiences. And Chris himself is a middle class man who ended up in, banged up in Wandsworth, in his case, for quite some time. What was the one with Sean Bean in well that was the first series of time oh okay yeah and so there's been a second one but this one was set in a women's prison and I think I think I couldn't be certain but I think this the women's prison it was based on was style in Cheshire because there aren't actually that many women's prisons in Britain because there aren't actually that many women in prison

I think it's a tenth of the male prison population so it's a very tiny number of people, number of women and I went to Stile just once to do a programme from there and it is beyond bleak, it really is, although I thought that the staff seemed incredibly supportive and decent actually and what was so shattering and I'll mention this to Chris because he mentions it in his book, is that several of the prisoners told me how much better life was for them in prison than outside. And that is when you think, God, we've got a massive problem here. So we do have the highest recidivism rates in Europe. Yeah. And part of that must be because there isn't a fear attached to going back into prison

because life on the outside makes you so fearful itself. So one of many, many things that need sorting out. But the banged up, so I haven't watched any of it, Jane. I find it, and this is just a personal thing, I find watching anything based in prisons so claustrophobic, I can't quite manage to do it, actually. but my worry about banged up was exactly that there's a kind of slight glorification of the camaraderie that you've you hope is found in prison but for an awful lot of people presumably not if I'm honest it

was just that kind of juxtaposition of the people who'd no doubt commissioned it you know Jocasta fits big and Biggs and Peregrine wiggle bag had decided that it would be such high jinkery to hire some ex-cons which is what they did and to bang them up in Oxford prison which had been decommissioned in their own for a month they're in from I just you know and they were allowed or told that and presumably they were paid as well to take part in this so-called reality show, they were told to behave as they had done when they were serving their sentence. So I don't know. I just found it all a bit distasteful. Anyway, I'll be interested to hear what he says.

I'm just mentioning that so people know what's coming up. OK, well, I mean, that's pretty much the interview done. We just need to insert his responses. I'll just pop out pretty much the interview done. We just need to insert his responses. Well, no, I'm also... I'll just pop out for a cup of tea on Thursday. I'm interested in whether anyone listening, perhaps elsewhere in the world, has just got... What's your prison system like?

Have you been inside a prison? Have you served a sentence in a prison? Have you worked in a prison? What's your view of the way people are treated and whether or not you think it works? That's just because, obviously, I mean, we don't know. We just don't know, do we? And Chris himself, I think, would admit that he is absolutely coming at it

from an educated, middle-class perspective, and that's why he was able to come out and write a book about being sent to prison. Most prisoners don't get that chance. Yeah. I think there are some other countries that definitely do it much better than us, and I'm pretty sure it's Norway, isn't it, that has the lowest recidivism rate. And some of that is because middle class crimes are rewarded is the wrong word.

What's the right word? What we would often consider to be a middle class crime, which doesn't carry the punishment of incarceration doesn't happen in norway so if you got done for too many speeding points or something like that you might get a prison term for that and it's had the effect of turning prison away from this kind of shady place where only a certain part of the population end up and that is so true in this country and so it has genuinely made prison a slightly more um i don't know i suppose it there's a more thoughtful attitude towards what prison should be for if lots of educated people end up there that's just a sad

and horrible truth yeah well it is there's a lot of rather yeah you're absolutely right but it'd be interesting to see what what um whether anybody does have any experience at all we would welcome it jane and fee at time stop radio we had a very very interesting guest today uh lee child who must be one of the world's most successful authors so he has sold a hundred million copies of his jack reacher books so if you've never come across Jack Reacher, he is your kind of archetypal ex-military police hero. He remains a tad tired by life in this latest book, which is called The Secret, but never so much so that he can't give the bad guys some welly. The plot in this book, and by the way, this is written now with Lee's brother Andrew Child it's a collaboration the plot is all about uncovering a dark secret from a science lab back in 1969

what a great year there are two spooky sisters hunting down the scientists the CIA is hunting them too and so is Jack Reacher there's a death by venomous toad extract and lots and lots of mentions of car and truck types they're in every jack richard are they okay see i hadn't read one before so so so they never just get into a truck they always get into a honda pickup they never get into a car they always get into you know gray mercedes sedan or something it's just one of those funny things and there's a little bit of love action for reach and we both noticed this didn't we with Ottaway. And they have a very brief, thankfully offstage shower scene. Anyway, it is classic Reacher. One Reacher book is sold every nine seconds on the planet. As I

just mentioned, he writes in collaboration with his brother, Andrew. This is their fourth book together. And Lee lives in Wyoming, his life seemingly every bit as evocative and mysteriously distant as his hero. We started by asking him about just that, if he was joining us live from his Wyoming ranch. Actually, no, I'm down the hill in Colorado. I have a house there because, whereas Andrew lives year-round in Wyoming,

it is too hardcore for me. Unbelievable winters. I have a picture taken from the inside of my house that shows the snow two-thirds of the way up the window on the outside. And people say, wow, that's brutal. And I say, yeah, that's the upstairs window. There are times when you can't even get out of the house for four or five days. So around this time of year, I chicken out, come down the mountain and hang out in Colorado. OK, you're talking to us from what can only be described as a guitar cave, Lee. And we'll put a little picture of this up on the social so people can see what we're talking about.

You are surrounded by guitars. Are you a consummate guitar professional yourself? Very far from it. I am a hopeless guitarist, but I'm a classic boomer in as much as the stuff that I loved and wanted so much when I was a teenager but couldn't afford it, now I can buy. And so I'm a much better collector than I am player. Right. They do look like extraordinary instruments. I won't ask you how much they're worth, because I would fear that someone will come round to your house in Berkeley right away. I'm sure you've got lots of alarm systems and all of that kind of stuff. Maybe at the end of the interview, you can give us a little cadence and a final couple of chords,

just to prove that you can play a little bit. Lee, tell us about the collaboration with your brother, because people are fascinated by how you can write a book in collaboration with somebody and also with a sibling. You know, usually that relationship can be filled with a rivalry that really wouldn't benefit from the outside scrutiny of success. Well, that's a really great point. And actually, we avoid it simply because of the gigantic age gap between us. Originally, there were three boys in that sort of classic family. We were all a couple of years apart. And then there was a late mistake, clearly a menopausal thing. They thought they could get away with it. Actually, they couldn't. And so back in 1968, at the age of 41,

my mother was going to have another baby, and that was regarded as, you know, grotesque, actually, in 1968, so elderly. But I loved the kid. He was born, he's 15 years younger than me. And so we never lived together as siblings. We never had that thing where he breaks my toys, I break his toys, we fight and squabble all through dinner time. We share DNA, we share an upbringing, we laugh at the same things, we're annoyed at the same things. And so it's pretty much an ideal partnership. But the idea of it was that it would be a transition. And The Secret is the fourth in four. The transitional

phase is kind of over now. And so from next year, Andrew will be doing them solo. And to be totally honest, he did most of the secret solo. And I loved what you said earlier that it's a classic Reacher, because it really is. And I think it proves in a way that the character is always stronger and always more important than the writer. The writer's identity is not that important. It's about the story and the people in it. So just take us all the way back to when you first created Jack Reacher. So he was kind of born out of necessity for you, wasn't he? You found yourself out of work and you really needed to do something that was going to earn you some money. I know that your dad didn't really have very much faith in it, did he? He said, was it, this book won't be a success,

you know, I'd bet 10,000 to one that it'll fail. Yeah, he did say that, and that sounds awful, but he was like that, I mean, rather socially awkward. He would say things out loud that he should really have kept quiet, and he was right, you know, if you sit down and say, I'm broke, I'm out of work, I need to make a living, I'm going to write a bestseller and live off that for the rest of my life. You're crazy. It's a lottery, essentially. You have no power over predicting whether it'll work or not. And that was really the hard thing about creating

Reacher because the job I'd lost was in television. And before that, I'd been in the theater. And so I was really super aware of how audiences react to things. And they react however they want to. There's nothing you can do about it. If you're going to do a series that hopefully will run for many, many years and make you living for you, you really need that strong central character. But there's no way of designing it. You can't sit down and say, okay, I need these 43 virtues to cover the entire audience. He's got to be this. He's got to be that. If you start down that road, you're lost. It just becomes a cardboard thing. It becomes a laundry list nobody is interested in. All you can do, even though the stakes are incredibly high, and they were for me. I had seven months worth

of living money in the bank. I was going to lose my house, essentially. It has to work, but there's nothing you can do to make it work. You've just got to write what you want, what you feel, what you think is an authentic character and story, and then you have to hope for the best, because it's always the reader that decides, is this character cool? It's not the author.

And if the author tries to make him cool it's just embarrassing yeah can you remember what the first notes were on that book though from your editor or even your publisher well i first sent it to an agent and his notes were uh send me more because you know you only send the first bit and so that was was kind of encouraging. But there were a lot of notes. I had this strange theory that because it was about this character, I should narrate a full 24 hours every day about what he was doing, what he was thinking. I thought that was a more honest connection.

But the book came out super long doing that. So really the first note was uh yeah this is a great book we love it but instead of 650 pages of manuscript we want 400 and so that was the really first boundary um cut it you know slash it cut it radically you know, slash it, cut it radically. And I remember doing that and it was initially very painful. I thought, you know, wow, I'm throwing away these great sentences and these great paragraphs. But then I really got into it and I was like a guy with a machete hacking his way through a jungle.

And they were right. It came out much better, shorter, faster, harder. And they were right. It came out much better, shorter, faster, harder. If you had to introduce Jack Reacher as a person to somebody else, how would you describe him? Well, the so-called real backstory for him, he was a military brat brought up on US bases all around the world, never really settling anywhere long, always on the move. Then he went to West Point himself. Then he joined the army and repeated all of that all around the world on these bases and so on, until, paralleling my experience and lots of people in the 1990s, he was downsized out of the army. The Soviet Union was gone.

There was the so-called peace dividend, where military expenditure shrank a little bit. And he was one of the ones that was eased out the door. And so he was in the same situation that I was and millions of other people at that time, thinking, what next? And I was worried about it. Real people were worried about it. But I wanted a character who just took it in his stride. He decided, I'm American, but I've never really seen America.

So he just set out wandering around the country, expecting it to last a year or two. And it lasted forever. He is permanently footloose. Do you think there's a difference in the way that Jack Reacher is read by men and the way that he's read by women? commitment-free life, responsibility-free life, and that women would want to know him as a friend or occasional lover or protector. But I really learned over the years that that footloose life, the absence of responsibility, the feeling I could just walk away tomorrow and be somewhere else, that turned out to be equally a woman's fantasy, just as strongly. So I think really they both react the same way. Yeah, I mean, certainly I've read every single one of your books.

I'm a huge, huge fan of your writing. And there's a vulnerability about Jack Reacher that will always keep me coming back to him, even though I think as a reader, as've got older some of the things he encounters you know I probably wouldn't put up with in other books actually I'm not a huge fan of reading about violence anymore but there's something about Jack where I don't know what is it he feels it too or he can see it for what it is or it's not so gratuitous what do you think that is? I think he's realistic about violence you know it's not movie violenceous? What do you think that is? I think he's realistic about violence. You know, it's not movie violence where you get hit in the head and you bounce back up and carry on fighting.

You know, if you do get hit in the head, you feel awful and sick for a week. And I think there's an honesty about the violence that comes across. But I think mostly it's that he is just warts and all an honest character that can uh fulfill what we really want to do ourselves which is i mean i'm a cynical old man now but i still believe that most people are full of goodwill, full of kindness, and actually want to do the right thing if possible. The problem is it's not possible. Most of the time we see something bad. There's nothing we can do. We're physically intimidated. We're inhibited in some way. Maybe it's a work problem that's going to cause too many ripples. So we just clench our teeth and we live with this kind of buzz of frustration.

Something is wrong and we can't change it. And so we need a proxy or an avatar like Reacher who will put it right. On the page, at least, we can have that satisfaction. Yeah, there was this bad thing. Now it's corrected. That is tremendously reassuring and consoling. You know, I don't want to get too heavy about it, but in my opinion, fiction exists solely to give us

what we don't get in real life, but what we really crave. You can get as heavy as you like. We can do all shades here, Lee. Can I just ask you, given all of that, and I think we are right to assume that what you write on the page reflects who you are as a person. And I wonder how you feel living in your adoptive country at the moment and whether there is a sense of frustration that you possibly might see things going on around you that you can't change,

but you would very much like to. Oh yeah, I mean I know that we all share news and that everything is minute by minute in terms of access to information but the feeling is I think not realized outside this country. This is an unbelievably toxic, horrible atmosphere at the moment and it's really hard to see how it can endure much longer. It's got to go one way or the other. Either we are going to get into, we're going to stumble essentially into a really bad situation, or hopefully we're going to vote correctly next year and start to patch up the trouble. But it is just unbelievably horrible here at the moment. calendar double tap to open breakfast with anna from 10 to 11 and get on with your day

accessibility there's more to iphone the author lee child is our big guest today now from the outside looking in jane everything in his life looks absolutely glorious uh you know, he had a career in television. That wasn't going so well. He decided to write a book and, hey, 100 million copies later, he's one of the world's best-selling authors. Everybody says he's an extremely nice guy. He's got a happy marriage, a daughter.

He collaborates with his sibling. So we decided to ask him, what's the downside of his life? There must be one. You know, the only honest answer to that is there is no downside. It is. That's good. It's a brilliant job. And to be, you know, the fundamental contract here is I'm being paid for making stuff up.

And that's just a glorious proposition. And I'm giving people a good time. You know, I'm not selling prescription medicine. I'm not doing anything that's kind of distressing. People don't buy a book because they have to. They buy it because they want to. And they have two or three days of pleasure. I've given that to them and so I feel great about it so honestly yeah there's no downside and I'm really fed up with people who try try try like mad to become famous and successful and then complain about it oh you've seen the Robbie Williams documentary then have you yeah that just doesn't cut it for me at all. And there's not that much stress on a writer because if you are an athlete, let's say, you know, a Premier League footballer or a great

actor or something like that, then it is your physical self that is in the marketplace, attracting all the scrutiny and attention. Whereas a writer is one step behind that. It is the book that's in the marketplace. And the writer is basically left alone. You know, we're not subject to the same stresses and paparazzi and constant intrusion. So there's really nothing to complain about. Your brother, Andrew, is a successful writer in his own right too, isn't he? And had written quite a few successful thrillers before you came to writing the books together. And I just wonder what it was in your childhood and your education

that turned out to astonishingly successful writers from the same family. Is there something that you can put your finger on? Yeah, there's a kind of a contradiction in our upbringing, which was that our family was super aspirational, you know, classic lower middle class parents coming out of the 30s and the 40s, having children in the 50s, and wanting them to do well under that old fashioned presumption that education was the key to everything. So there were always books in the house. And even though we were relatively, I won't say poor, because, you know, we weren't,

we always had shoes, and we had three meals a day. But there was zero money left over, except that books were always permitted. And we would go to the library once a week as a sort of lifeline. And so the combination of access to books and a rather gray, repressed, austere, prohibitive upbringing made us want to escape. It was as simple as that. And I can identify in my life. Books were absolutely the escape. I was very miserable as a kid feeling hemmed in, zero horizons. The biggest ambition for us was that we would live in a semi-detached rather than a terrace and that we would have a two-year-old car instead of a five-year-old car. That was the limit and I felt frustrated about that along with my whole generation it was a peculiar generation and as much as we were probably the luckiest in all of human history born

around the time that I was born everything was perfect post-war liberal democracy of welfare state that worked free education as long as you wanted it. It was just great. There was never anything like that before. No diseases really anymore, no war, no threat of civil unrest. It was just peaceful, prosperous to an extent, full of opportunity. And our generation really benefited from that. With some friction, I remember that we would be doing things either personally or as a generation. And the catchphrase from our parents' generation was, we didn't fight the war for the likes of this. And I remember thinking, well, yes, you did. You fought for freedom. And this is what freedom looks like. This is the first genuinely free generation. And so it was a question of trying to escape those narrow historic boundaries. You know, I've done things just, I've been to the Bahamas,

I've been here and there that would have been ludicrous to expect when I was eight or nine years old. If I'd said one day I'm going to live anywhere I want in the world and I'll go anywhere I want for my vacation, I'll be swimming in tropical seas, they would have come and taken me away. You know, that just was not possible. But it turned out in the end. Lee, unlike Fi, I was a Jack Reacher virgin until I read The Secret. And actually, I should emphasise, if you haven't read any before, they're all standalone, aren't they? So you can read them and you'll be absolutely fine.

You grew up in the Midlands. Is England just not big enough for Jack Reacher? In fact, I don't know. Does he ever leave the States at all? He does. Once or twice he comes to Europe. He's been to London. He's been to Paris on business or on cases. And, of course, there's reference made to his service. You know, he served in Germany, he served in the Far East and Japan and all kinds of places. But it's not so much that England is too small for Reacher. England is now too small for Reacher-type stories.

They depend on frontier feel. They depend on huge empty spaces where secret things can happen. And that used to be the case in Europe. You know, Reacher is regarded in America as a Western, like, you know, 19th century American invention. But that's not true. That character that showed up in the American Westerns was an import. It was medieval Europe. That was a character that had come from medieval Europe. And previously, it was a Scandinavian figure or an Anglo-Saxon poem or even a Greek myth, the noble loner, the mysterious stranger who shows up.

That's an ancient fictional trope. And so the question really was that England was physically too small and too densely populated. There were really no secrets. Everybody sees everybody else. Everybody knows everybody else's business. And the vast distances and the huge sky that you need for that kind of story just wasn't happening anymore. You know, the second book, he blunders into something in Chicago and gets

thrown into a van and driven 1,500 miles to a distant hideout in the Rocky Mountains. Well, you can't do that in Britain. If you were kidnapped in Birmingham and driven 1,500 miles, you're in Algeria. You know, it just doesn't work. There was one book, though, set on the kind of Essex borders, wasn't there? I remember the A12 or the A13. The A12.

Yes, no. I remember it well. I thought, oh, Lee's come home. And that was interesting to me because I said it. Yeah, he goes to London and he has to drive out of London to go to Norfolk. And why did I choose Norfolk? And I think possibly because that's the most like the plains of America. You know, Norfolk is big, flat and empty and takes ages to get anywhere. And that was the most American landscape I think I could find in Britain.

Yeah, but you're absolutely right that Jack Reacher getting caught in the traffic at Gants Hill is possibly... I'd like to see him out and about in Tipton or Kidderminster. Why not? Oh, we're almost out of time, Lee, but it's such a pleasure to talk to you. A couple of quickfire questions.

Are you really a qualified electrician? Yeah, I worked in the theatre in a place where in order to be stage manager, which I was, you had to be qualified by the local fire brigade and also the electricity board because you were dealing with stuff like that. Have you already had a preview of Stig Abel's second book in his new career as a crime writer? We are colleagues on the same station, just to put that into context. He's sending it to me.

I got an email, so I said, yeah, send it to me right away. It hasn't arrived yet, but we shall see. Lee Child and The Secret is out now. It is the 28th book in the Jack Reacher series. Well, as I said in the conversation, I had never read one of his books before, and I was really struck by, if you are a would-be novelist, I think the mistake a lot of people make is to try too hard,

to be too fancy, to overwork everything. And the beauty of Lee Child's writing is the simplicity of it, isn't it? Short sentences. It's very pared down really and and every chapter is quite short and it just moves so there's there's no kind of static emotional introspection it moves moves moves and that's what makes it so successful and page turning you know it really is and does can I just ask a question as you're a Jack Reacher expert? Does he age? No. So he's just a...

So he's got slightly older, but he's not moved through as many decades as he's actually moved through. And he's very firmly in the 20th century, isn't it? Because there's a lot of chat about fax machines. Yes. And he doesn't constantly have a mobile phone. Well, he hasn't got a phone. Yep. And there's not any real referencing of external events either. So in this book, The Secret, you can kind of work out what year he's in only because they're referring back to, you know, what happened in 1969 and everybody's kind of 30 years older.

So you could work it out from there. But there's no kind of description of, you know, a particular car or a restaurant or a TV show or something like that that would place you in a particular year. And it just means that you can read any of the books in any order, really, and know the world that you're going into. I don't know whether, is it possible to write an effective thriller now if you don't have really good knowledge of the technology? Oh, I think you can. And Stig's book, which we just mentioned very briefly there, so Stig Abel, our colleague here at Times Radio, has started writing a series of crime thrillers and he has deliberately taken his hero out of circulation

to a kind of slightly wild place with no Wi-Fi. So he didn't have to write about all of that mobile technology. And actually I get a little bit stuck in books where there's endless technology being referenced. You know, when every single crime is identified and the culprit is caught because you've triangulated a mobile phone call, you know, it's kind of like it's just not clever enough. It just technology can sort everything out. It's just really boring. And when somebody starts, I know what you mean. You know, it's kind of like, it's just not clever enough. It just, technology can sort everything out. It's just really boring. And when somebody starts, you know, trying to write some kind of face recognition, what's

it, not's it, I just... You lose interest. Yeah. I've got a very, I've forgotten any number of very weird, nerdy sides, but I... No, darling, you haven't. I have. I own it. Oh, sorry.

That's a good thing. Darling, you've got so many nerdy sides. Thank you. So I mentioned to you a book I'm sure you would have read called I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. You said you hadn't read it. Everyone's read it, darling. It's a fabulous thriller and I think you would enjoy it.

But after many, many years, I think it's eight or nine years, he's come up with another book, this guy Terry Hayes, and it's called The Year of the Locust. And I'm listening to it on my commute. It's an absolutely brilliant spy thriller with all the tech and all the descriptions. It's the absolute opposite of a Lee Child, but completely absorbing. And it is 29 hours of entertainment in audio.

And I've just written down, I've got another 26 and a half hours still to go so I could literally sit still for over a day and just finish the book wow and do you find it easy to read about technology does the plot make sense to you funnily enough it's not it's easier to listen to than to read yeah um I loved Iron Pilgrim but there's something about listening to this the narrator is fabulous I've got a real big, beefy American accent and it really, really works. What was the Robert Harris novel that was about technology

and it was basically about shorting the markets, wasn't it? Oh, God, yes. And there was a huge amount of computer tech in that. Yeah, that was the Robert Harris I didn't really like. It wasn't called, was it called? Bloody hell, not the Lazarus. No.

But I really love his novels and I was really taken by surprise because often they're set centuries ago and it's what lurks behind the toga that's thrilling but I couldn't get my head around that at all Jane. It won't dent his sails. I was going to say Robert, we're very sorry

indeed about that but that was the book you wrote that neither of us liked. I still finished it, though. It's Christmas ruined. The fear index. That's it. Well done. You really should have said yes to University Challenge.

Oh, God. Am I allowed to say it? Yes, I did get the call up this year, but I just couldn't make the dates work. Well, I love the fact that you... Because they ask you to keep two dates free, don't they, in case your team goes through. And I just assumed that the University of Kent at Canterbury wouldn't get through.

And what happened? We didn't get through. Oh, OK. But it didn't matter. There was something else coming up the next weekend. It didn't change a thing. I don't know who else. You see, what I really wanted to ask was, who else is in the team?

Well, you should have done. They would have told you. Oh, I know. Honestly, I couldn't have done it. Which of the alumni would you actually have tipped out for? Simon Le Bon. Oh. Yeah.

Imagine that. Wow. You're going to be gutted if on whatever. It'll be shown, won't it, on the 28th of December in the fog of Christmas. We'll be interested to see. And if Le Bon's there, no? The perfect event. Love it.

Yes. Anyway, I'll just have to. You're right, it will be shown on the 28th of December and nobody wants to be on. It's very common to be on television at that time of year. Everybody says that. Right, have a very good evening. I know it sounds farcical in the circumstances,

but if you do have any knowledge of the prison system in your country, we would welcome your input, just because I don't feel that it's exactly my area of expertise for the conversation coming up on Thursday with Chris Atkins. We might want to respond after you've heard him. Anyway, have a good evening, and we are back tomorrow. It's an email special tomorrow night, isn't it? Oh, it is, yes.

So if you've been waiting to hear something read out, we're putting some of the beefy topics into that. So I hope you can join us. There'll be light-hearted stuff as well. Nothing about pets, Kay, don't worry. You did it. Elite listener status for you for getting through another half hour or so of our whimsical ramblings.

Otherwise known as the hugely successful podcast Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. We missed the modesty class. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler, the podcast executive producer. It's a man. It's Henry Tribe. Yeah, he's an executive. Now, if you want even more, and let's face it, who wouldn't,

then stick Times Radio on at 3 o'clock Monday until Thursday every week and you can hear our take on the big news stories of the day as well as a genuinely interesting mix of brilliant and entertaining guests on all sorts of subjects. Thank you for bearing withover on settings so you can navigate it just by listening books contacts calendar double tap to open breakfast with from 10 to 11 and get on with your day accessibility there's more to iphone