The New Yorker Radio Hour - David Remnick Talks with Lee Child, the Creator of Jack Reacher

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Lee Child didn’t start writing novels until he lost a prestigious job producing TV in England during a shakeup that he attributes to Rupert Murdoch. He tried his hand at writing a thriller, and found that the new career suited him: with a hundred million copies of his books in print in forty languages, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels make up one of the most successful series in print. Every September 1st, he sits down to write a new one. He tells his longtime fan David Remnick that his all-American tough guy is a modern-day knight-errant wandering the land doing good deeds. But, at sixty-seven, Child has thought about giving Reacher up. What would he do instead? Catch up on his own reading, finally getting around to Jane Austen and other classics. “Remember, I’m from Europe,” he points out. “I have no work ethic.” Plus, the contributor Graciela Mochkofsky on three classics of Argentinean music that she hated growing up, but came to embrace while living in America under COVID. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, you might say with more than 25 Jack Reacher novels out there, plus a couple of Tom Cruise movies that maybe we don't need a Jack Reacher TV series. But who can ever get enough of Jack Reacher, that former military cop, who roams from town to town like some, crew-cut samurai, setting things right with his unerring an incredibly violent code of morality. The eight-episode series, Reacher, just premiered on Amazon.

Well, a smart move would be to shoot me right here, but you haven't done that yet. Maybe you don't want to draw attention firing outside a crowded bar. Or maybe you have orders to take me to your boss so we can find out how much I know. Whatever it is. It means that when I make my move, you're going to hesitate. And you guys know what Cato here. said about hesitation, right? He who hesitates? This All-American tough guy is the creation of Englishman Lee Child, who was born James Grant.

He graduated law school before beginning a career in television, all before his immensely successful run writing action thrillers. I had a chance to talk with Lee Child back in the summer of 2018. It was just before the Jack Reacher novel, Past Tense, had come out. Lee Child is an absolute delight to have you here. You've made so many summers come alive for me, reading you. I never read on the beach. I don't know why people do that, but at least I go outside and I read a Lee Child novel.

I'm a happy, happy boy. Well, I'm very glad to hear that. Thank you. Well, so I'm full of questions, and naturally I want to ask you about the way this all began. You were working as an executive in 1995, and you got fired and decided. I decided to hell with it, I'm going to work for myself and become a superstar writer of thrillers.

Well, it wasn't quite that linear. I was a television director and very happy where I was. It was in Britain, during what, in retrospect, looks like a golden age of drama as well remembered. I mean, my company did Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Prime Suspect, just some really terrific shows. but it was also a fabulous news station, documentary station. It was really the height of the height. And then broadcasting in Britain, like I think everywhere in the world, got shook up, particularly by Rupert Murdoch's influence,

and the whole thing started to fall apart. You lost your job because of Rupert Murdoch? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, Rupert Murdoch wanted to bring his satellite service to Britain, and in order to do that, he needed to attack and weaken the terrestrial services, the BBC, and the independent broadcasters. And it was a pretty transparent deal with the Thatcher government.

You know, you let me do this, help me out a little bit, and I will support you in my papers and on the air. Why did you, and you were named Jim Grant still then, why did you get fired? Because I was 39 years old, an expensive veteran with a big salary and benefits, a pension, and all that kind of thing. And they discovered that they could get,

recent graduates to do the work for a quarter of the price. So, no, what made you believe that you could walk out the door, sit down, change your name, and become a great writer of thrillers? Well, I didn't necessarily believe it. I just thought that at that age, that stage of your life, this is probably the last chance to try something new, to make a big break. I did not want to leave the world of entertainment. I'm just totally in love with that idea.

I mean, you very kindly mentioned, you sit out. outside in a chair and read my book and enjoy it. And I just absolutely love that transaction, that I can do something that somebody else is going to enjoy. And television satisfied that for a long time, but when I left television, I wanted to stay in that world, basically. So the question was, how can I stay? What can I do that will supply me with the same feeling?

So you did a particular thing, not just one, a series of particular First of all, you invented Jack Reacher and stuck with him. He's an American. You are not. He's a complete loner. Malcolm Gladwell and others have compared him to a kind of cowboy. It's like the form of a Western, a man who wanders into a town, in his case, hitchhikes in. No change of clothes.

His only possession is a toothbrush. He senses trouble and complications begin. Former military policeman. So how did you invent him? Why is he an American? Well, it was a whole batch of reasons that happily all pointed in the same direction. First of all, you know, really the hardest thing about being a writer or I suppose an artist of any kind is that you have to believe several different things, some of which are contradictory, but you have to believe them all 100 percent completely wholeheartedly. And of course, I believe that this is an art, it's a craft, it's a joy, it's creative, all that good stuff.

But it's also a job. business. And so I had a vague eye on the business side of it, which was that so many other people, in fact, everybody else that was writing a series was writing essentially a soap opera with a fixed location. It would be, it would either be location-based or employment-based or both. And the hero would have probably colleagues and a superior he didn't like and subordinates that were difficult. He would have possibly a partner, an apartment, a favorite bar, a favorite restaurant, neighbors, the whole thing, the classic soap opera, which I'm in no way denigrating. I've worked in television and I made my living on soap operas for nearly two decades.

They're incredibly powerful and actually quite sophisticated form of narrative. But everybody was doing it, so I thought, well, let's not do that. Let's do the anti-sop opera. Strip it down. Yeah, where there's only one character. There's no repertory cast surrounding him. There's one character, there's no location. He can be anywhere.

He has no job. can do anything. So it was really a study in loatliness, alienation in a way, and that had to be in America because Malcolm Gladwell talks about cowboys. Well, yeah, that's fine, but where did cowboys come from? The cowboy myth is essentially a development of a medieval myth from Europe, the knight errant. The knight who has somehow transgressed against the court and has been banished, sentenced to wander the land and do good deeds. Same thing in Japan, Japanese culture, the Ronin, exactly the same thing as Samurai,

who's been disowned by his master and sentenced to wander the land doing good deeds. So it's really that tradition, and you can't do that in Britain. Britain is too small. It is too densely populated. There are no empty areas. There's no mystery about it.

America has the frontier feel. wandering into the Cotswolds wouldn't work in the same way as Nebraska. No, I really wouldn't because everybody in the Cotswolds knows your business immediately and everybody knows everything. There's no possibility of hidden secrets. It has to be the wide open spaces. Now, I can't believe you write the way you've described this. You sit down every year at September 1st.

You don't sit down with an outline. You don't do research, even though some of your novels seem to indicate, you know, a knowledge of opioids or a knowledge of this. of place, and then you just start, and off you go. That's a very strange way to write any kind of novel, much less. It is. I would have thought a Jack Reacher novel would be pretty heavily plotted, and you'd have charts on the wall.

Absolutely not. Nothing on the wall. And, you know, at summertime now, acutely aware that September the 1st is approaching, and I'm thinking I have zero idea. How do you feel about that? Is it impending doom? Yeah, I mean, half my mind is in pending doom.

You know, the gas tank is empty. Finally, I've been found out. Finally, it's all going to fall apart. And then I think, well, wait a minute. You felt like that for the last 20 books. And so you've managed them before. You can manage this one. For me, it's always about the story.

And I want the story to be organic, naturally unfolding. And I feel that if I wrote an outline, it would be a rather artificial structure. I'd be forcing the story into an artificial. route that it probably didn't want to take. So I just start in the beginning and I hope to get a good first sentence or a good first paragraph and then I think, all right, now what happens? What happens now? Do you ever go 75 pages in and it's a bust and you have to start again? Never. Never. How is that possible? Well, two reasons. First of all, it's, that would be very inefficient. It would drive me mad to do that. And I would, I can usually tell,

before about seven words. If I'm heading down a bad track, I can tell pretty early. And so I'll sometimes delete seven words, but that hurts quite a lot, I'll tell you. But it's really about one thing leads from another in a very organic way. For instance, the new book, Past Tense, I wrote the first sentence in the first paragraph anyway. And there were two things in it. One I had mentioned Maine. Reacher has to start from somewhere.

So he's in Maine for the summer. Now he's planning to head south for the winter. And he gets to New Hampshire. Right. He only gets as far as New Hampshire. But he's planning to go all the way south to Southern California. Like the birds migrate. And I have a pretty mellifluous sentence there in the beginning about the migration of birds and typical species.

And I just wrote that thinking, okay, this is a good place to start. And then immediately, first of all, the bird watching. Well, years ago in one of the books, it was mentioned that, Richard's father was a bird watcher because I wanted the contrast between a pretty vicious Marine soldier and his hobby, which was bird watching. I found that an interesting contrast. So in the back of my mind, okay, why have I started this with a reference to birds? Maybe this book ought to be about Richard's father.

You know, I start on September 1st because that's the anniversary of when I started the very first book. So it's a sentimental day to start. I start on the 1st of September and work every available day until the book is finished, which is usually around the next March because a lot of other things get in the way.

Oh, you do leave your desk. You'll leave town. I have to. You know, I've got family stuff they want to do Christmas and all those kinds of things. It's horrible, isn't it? Yeah. You know, they drag you away.

Now, this is one of the most amazing things. At a certain point, I think you were writing Make Me, an English academic named Andy Martin sat there with you in your study and watched you write a novel. Yeah, he was... 30 cups of coffee a day like Balzac. Yeah, possibly more, I think.

My record is mid-30s. Mugs of coffee, not just little cuts. You know, let's get serious about this. That's impressive. You have an impressive stomach. Yeah, Andy was... It happened very short notice. He had...

He's a rather of a freewheeling academic from Cambridge University And literally days before I started that novel, he came up with that idea. And probably if I had to have longer to think about it, I would have said no. But because time was short, it was my 20th book. I just thought, let's do something different. And to a certain extent, I wanted to have it on record, not for me personally, necessarily, but for all of us in this genre, because there is a lot of cheap talk about how it's somehow easy to write these books.

that there are various terms used, crank them out and so on, which is actually very much the opposite of the truth. But even the way you describe it, it sounds easy. You sit down on September 1st. You don't write a second or third or 50th draft, no outline. So what is the difficulty? Describe that. Well, really the difficulty is with a readership, the size of a successful genre writer's readership is.

And what is this kill me? Go ahead and kill me. What is the scale of your readers? Well, millions of people. Globally around the world, a reach of book sells every nine seconds. So there's a lot of people reading them. And you cannot look at that as a monolithic mass

because with an audience that size, they're very striated. They're very different. At the center, you've got the expert readers who just read all the time, like Malcolm Gladwell. You know, mine is not the only book

that he reads that week, obviously. He reads constantly. So do a lot of people. and they have to be satisfied. But on the very far edges of the audience are the people that read one book a year, on their vacation, on the beach, that's all they will read.

And you've got to satisfy both those readers and everybody in between. And you feel them out there. You feel that immense audience. Yeah, because you meet them. You know, you meet extremely unlikely people that are fans. And then you meet people

who are clearly the one book a year person. And touchingly, their biggest compliment that they can pay you is they will say, I loved your book, I finished it, which is a huge achievement. They feel that it's their achievement. It's an unusual act. Yeah. They finished a book. They're very satisfied.

They're happy with themselves. And of course, they're happy with the book because the book has aided them to do that. And how do you do that? The real skill, and I think the skill that Andy Martin observed day to day is the rhythms of the book. The book has got to be a locomotive that drives people through without being noticeably such.

Finally, will Jack Reacher ever leave us or leave you? Yeah, I'm fascinated with the whole showbiz thing of leave them wanting more. Don't be the embarrassing guy that sticks around two seasons too long. We see that all the time. You know, shows on television. We see it with athletes.

You've got to pick your time to go. And I do not want Richard to become an embarrassing old character that's bought kind of out of habit or sentimentality. So you might leave him behind and write about someone or something else? No, I would leave him behind and retire completely. Do not forget, I'm from Europe. I have no work ethic. I want to, retirement is a phase of life that I'm keenly looking forward to. Are you? Yeah.

What would you do on September 1st? Read. That's the only thing I resent about writing is the time. takes away from reading, that I would, I mean, literally I've got rooms full of books just stacking up, just waiting to be read. What's the biggest masterpiece that's just sitting there staring at you and saying, you have not read me? I've never read Jane Austen, you know, which is shocking for an English person.

But the Russians of the 19th century, maybe Flobert, stuff like that. And then, of course, the fabulous thing about books is you don't know what the classics are. There's something sitting there in my living room right now that could be the best read of my life. And I don't know what it is yet because I haven't tried it. Well, Lee Child, I'm incredibly grateful to you, but don't leave Jack Reacher too soon, okay? You can squeeze in Jane Austen somehow.

I could probably read her in the evenings after I finished writing Reacher, but that would be quite a contrast. Lee Child, thank you very much. Thank you. I spoke with Lee Child, 2018. The most recent Jack Reacher novel is called Better Off Dead, and it was co-written with his brother Andrew Child. The eight-episode series Reacher premiered on Amazon on Friday. This is the

New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, we're in a moment when issues of speech are leading headlines week after week. battles over what people can or should be able to say on Spotify podcasts, Netflix specials, on social media, and in school classrooms around the country. Next week on the program, we're going to look at many sides of that complex issue. And one of the people I talk to is Cliff Nesteroff, who studies the history of comedy. Nesteroff argues that debates about representation, particularly of minority groups, are not new at all in our society.

It's interesting if you look at the 1930s. Of course, blackface was still prevalent and black stereotypes were prevalent. If you read the black press, which you can now do thanks to the internet, go back through the archives of newspaper.com, and read the New York Age or the Pittsburgh Courier or the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American or the California Eagle, the major black newspapers of the 1930s, you will see editorials and letters complaining about that shit all the time.

Why are we being insulted? Why don't they stop with this hackneyed, tired old stereotypes? We're beyond this. We're human beings. And nobody listened. So minorities and their concerns were very easily ignored in those days. I just came out with a new book recently, which is about indigenous representation or lack thereof. and I have an example in the book of a contingent of Native American leaders complaining about racist stereotypes in silent movies.

The year 1911. Oh, you can't joke about anything anymore in the year 1911. So that has gone on. Those grievances have been lodged for ages, but were willfully ignored as long as, indigenous peoples or African Americans did not have the purchasing power or the influence in the body politic to have their voices heard. More from Cliff Nestoroff and others on the struggle over speech next week. Now to close the show this week, I wanted to check in with Grasiella Munchkovsky. Grasiella writes for the New Yorker about politics and culture in Latino communities especially,

and she directs a program in bilingual journalism at the City University. of New York. Grasiella has lived here for years and she immigrated to the U.S. from Argentina in 2013. She told me that just recently, she started to reconnect to the music that she'd grown up with during the pandemic when she was spending a lot more time with her family. So, you know, it's me, my husband and my son. He's now 10. So the first year of the pandemic in September, we heard that he was going to go back to school to in-person classes every other day. So we decided to get a car, a little Honda fit, because we would go to the school. That was a 30-minute drive.

So this actually led to the need for music and playlists. Now, Grasiel, you grew up in Argentina. Is music something that brings back home in some way? Is there a nostalgic element to you? I'm not nostalgic. I never really miss home. I miss my parents. I miss people, but I don't miss the country. I was actually so sick of the country when we left. I just really, it was so frustrating. And so what happened when we studied, my husband

created the playlist is that, you know, he had a different relationship with the country. He grew up in exile. They were kicked out of the country during our last military dictatorship. So to him, going back to Argentina was always important. I grew up in a very small town in Patagonia and in the provinces, and I always wanted to escape. So one day we're driving, and my husband plays this music by this great Argentine singer, Luis Alberto Espinetta. He was a huge figure, a legend, in the history of Argentinian rock. We have a national musicians day, and it's this guy's birthday. I hated his music. I couldn't stand his voice. He has this very mellow voice, very lyrical, and when I was growing up, I just, I didn't connect with his music. And so we're driving on my husband plays.

a song by Espineta, and I'm like, oh, great. You know, the playlist thing created some tension in the cars. As it always does, as it always does. What's the name of the song, Graciela? So the name of the song is cantata of Puentes Amarillos. And how would you translate that? A song of Yellow Bridges. It's a nine-minute, 12-second song.

I think it's the longest song in Argentinian rock, and it was recorded in 1970. It's a song that connects very different surreal images that come from very different sources. So the song has this moment, which is where I actually converted to Alberto Spineta on that ride. We stop at a red light, and I hear him sing

this wonderful line that I'll translate us. Even if they force me, I will never say that the past was better. Tomorrow is better. And then at the end, he just sings tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. And this is September 2020. There was no vaccine yet. A song that really spoke to this moment, which was really unexpected,

because he didn't mean that. But, you know, that's what music does. What would be your second pick on the playlist? So as I mentioned, you know, I'm from the provinces, and in the provinces there's this folk music. It's called samba, and it's samba with a zid, so it's not the Brazilian samba. And samba is a dancing music where a couple dances with white handkerchiefs and they round each other. I hated this music because it was the music of the provinces and this oppression and being a woman growing up in the provinces, to me it was really difficult. So that's the music. So that's the music of the provinces and this oppression and being a woman growing up in the provinces. To me, it was really difficult. So that. music represented my desire to just leave and never listen to that music again. And one of our major folk singers, she passed in 2009, Mercedes Sosa is her name, and she was this huge, huge singer, and she was world-known, and, you know, she sang in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

She has a very characteristic voice, very deep, wonderful voice, with a very thick accent from the north of the country. I just couldn't hear that. It made me cringe. And so we But my husband loves her Everybody loves her except for me

So we're going to the Catskills one weekend And he plays Mercedes awesome like great, fantastic And then I start listening to this song It's called Samba For Obolidarte Which means Samba

You know, this music To Forget You And it's about the end of a love To forget the person She's loved But it's very sad and her voice is so deep and she's like there's nothing left of our love and there's only this song there's this song in my guitar and then like for the first time I can I'm

moved by her voice and I just listen to this song now all the time and it's become one of my favorite songs I think it's just beautiful And finally, we're now getting pretty far south on the FDR drive, close to your kid's school. And I have to remember my own kids when they were really young, and I was foisting music on them. You know, it was a complicated battle. Sometimes they liked it. Little kids always seem to like the Beatles. And then the next thing you foist on them, that's the.

end and they want their own stuff. What is the final song you're putting in front of your son in the car? I wonder how he's reacting, too. So he doesn't like any of this music, but this third song, he really likes. So this is the one we play the most. Those are too sad for him, you know? So the last one, it's called loco, to forma de ser. Loco means crazy, and To Forma de Ser means your way of being or the way you are. This is a song from the 90s, and it's a song by Los Authenticos Decadentes. the authentic decadents, I guess you'll translate their name. And it's this big band of guys who do ska and reggae and combined with Latin American rhythms like cumbia, candombe, and rock.

What are they singing about Graciella? So the wonderful thing about this song is I cannot translate it to you, really, because it's in the vernacular, like a very kind of low-brow, Buenos Aires vernacular. So the first scene is this woman comes into the bar, and she's with another guy, and she trips, and falls for some reason that's never explained. But then she throws, if you translate it literally, she throws a penguin at him.

And a penguin or a penguin is actually something only an Argentinian of my generation or older will know. But the penguin is a jar, a ceramic jar, in this shape of a penguin that was very traditional to serve cheap Argentinian wine before we invented Argentinian malde. So it was like the cheap wine you buy in a gallon plastic. Here would be this jug wine. Or wine in a box we now have. Exactly, in a box.

And you mixed it with Celsius because it was so bad. That's how my parents still drink wine. So I just feel this sense of exhilaration when I hear these words. And the song is full of these words that are very specific to a moment of Argentinian burnacular. And I do speak Spanish a lot in the city. but I speak Spanish now with Peruvians and Mexicans and Colombians and Caravians. You know, I speak Spanish at home with my kid, but I don't speak Argentinian anymore. So that's what this song is to me.

So it's just this joy of reconnecting with my language. Let's hear it. Let's hear the authentic decadence playing loco. Rassie, obviously for me, these three songs are new, and I'm a great pleasure to hear your memories of them. Thank you so much. Thank you. You can find Graciella Muchkovsky's work for us at New Yorker.com.

I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Hope you enjoyed the show and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Brita Gros, Kallalia, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Harrison-Katham, Harrison-Keelein, and Mung-Fey-Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.