Talk:Lee Child

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• I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun.

• I felt alienated by the experience and decided to stay away from corporate employment.

• I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.

• I had been coming to America very frequently for many, many years, so I had plenty of exposure - and maybe the best kind of exposure, because I think first impressions are very important. Maybe I notice stuff that is just subliminal to people who live here all the time.

• I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

• I just hang out and move on, like Reacher does. I depend on first impressions, because as a drifter, that's all that Reacher ever gets.

• I love touring. The rest of the year is very solitary, so it's great to get out with real live humans. I love to talk about books - mine or anybody else's. Can't think of anything odd that happened this time around. I met a few people I'd emailed with extensively - strange to put faces to names.

• I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.

• I wanted a happy-go-lucky guy. He has quirks and problems, but the thing is, he doesn't know he's got them. Hence, no tedious self-pity. He's smart and strong, an introvert, but any anguish he suffers is caused by others.

• I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

• I was determined to avoid the 'hero as self-aware damaged person' paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

• I was fired from my television job, simple as that. Well, downsized, really, a classic 1990s situation.

• I worked for the BBC's rival, ITV, the commercial network. What was great about it was that due to regulatory wrinkles, there was a lot of money that had to be spent on programming.

• I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.'

• I'm opposed to censorship of any kind, especially by government. But it's plain common sense that producers should target their product with some kind of sensitivity.

• In America, the fragmentation of the market spurred a chase toward the lowest common denominator and the cheapest programming. We'll never see the likes of Roots or Brideshead again, which is a shame.

• It's a tough case and the first time Reacher needs to recruit somebody to help him out. He uses a woman he knew in the army; she's a fascinating character.

• Obviously I watched the movies and the TV shows, but I guess I wasn't aware how deeply the influence was affecting me.

• She's a reflection of my fascination with the diversity of America— she's totally normal in New York, but a freak in Texas. There are dozens of such clashes in America.
  • About Carmen Greer, a character in Echo Burning

• So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

• Specifically, I was determined to avoid the hero-as-self-aware-damaged-person paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

• The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.

• The stories are all very contemporary, but Reacher is an old-West character for sure. He could be a Zane Grey character. But the funny thing is, I didn't really realize that until well after the first book was written, and I wasn't a big Western fan as a kid.

• There should be an unspoken rule that anything shown before, say, nine o'clock will be fairly inoffensive. After that, anything goes.

• Well, writers become writers because they love words and language, and attempting a non-native style is all part of the fun.

• What do I miss about the UK? Sadly, almost nothing. Maybe the midnight sun, in June in the north. That's all.

Redemption?

Have you actually read any of the books? Reacher's not "in search of redemption".