This article is about the British writer. For the Irish rugby league footballer, see Lee Child (rugby league). For the British tennis player, see Lee Childs.
Grant was born in Coventry.[5] His Northern Irish father, who was born in Belfast, was a civil servant who lived in the house where the singer Van Morrison was later born.[6][7] He is the second of four sons;[8] his younger brother, Andrew Grant, is also a thriller novelist. Grant's family moved to Handsworth Wood in Birmingham when he was four years old so that the boys could receive a better education.[9] Grant attended Cherry Orchard Primary School in Handsworth Wood until the age of 11. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham.[10]
In 1974, at the age of 20, Grant studied law[11] at University of Sheffield, though he had no intention of entering the legal profession. During his student days, he worked backstage in a theatre.[7] After graduating, he worked in commercial television.[11] He received a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree from the University of Sheffield in 1977 and returned to the university to receive an honoraryDoctor of Letters (DLitt) in 2009.[12]
After losing his job because of corporate restructuring,[13] Grant decided to start writing novels, which he later called "purest form of entertainment."[16] In 1997, his first novel, Killing Floor, was published. Child moved to the United States, where he married a New Yorker.[11] He starts each new book of the series on an anniversary of his starting the first book after losing his job.[17]
His pen name "Lee" comes from a mispronunciation of the name of Renault's Le Car, as "Lee Car". Calling anything "Lee" became a family gag. His daughter, Ruth, was "lee child".[18] The name has the advantage of placing his books alphabetically on bookshop and library shelves between crime fiction greats Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.[13]
Grant has said that he came up with the name Reacher for the central character in his novels when he was grocery shopping with his wife Jane at Asda supermarket in Kendal, Cumbria, when he was living at Kirkby Lonsdale.[19] Grant's height often leads to people asking him to get something for them from a high shelf. Jane once joked: "'Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.' ... 'I thought, Reacher – good name.'"[7]
Some books in the Jack Reacher series are written in the first person, while others are written in the third person. Grant has characterised the books as revenge stories – "Somebody does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge" – driven by his anger at the downsizing at Granada. Although English, he deliberately chose to write American-style thrillers.[13]
In 2007, Grant collaborated with 14 other writers to create the 17-part serial thriller The Chopin Manuscript, narrated by Alfred Molina. This was broadcast weekly on Audible.com between 25 September 2007 and 13 November 2007.
Grant worked as a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield from November 2008. In 2009, Grant funded 52 Jack Reacher scholarships for students at the university.[20]
In 2019, it was announced that Child would curate a new TV show called Lee Child: True Crime. The show will dramatise real-life crime stories from around the world and focus on average people who go to extraordinary lengths to fight crime or seek justice.[23]
In January 2020, Child announced that he would retire from writing the Jack Reacher series and hand it to his brother Andrew Grant, who would write further books of the series under the surname Child.[24] He intended to write the next few books with Grant before passing the series entirely over to him.[25]
Writing style
Grant's prose has been described as "hardboiled" and "commercial" in style. In a 2012 interview, Grant said many aspects of the Jack Reacher novels were meant to maintain the books' profitability, rather than for literary reasons. For instance, Jack Reacher was given one French parent in part to increase the series' appeal in France. The interviewer wrote that Grant "didn't apologise about the commercial nature" of his fiction.[26]
In 2019, Child collaborated with musicians Jennifer and Scott Smith of the group Naked Blue on an album of music exploring Jack Reacher, in song. He contributed vocals to the track "Reacher Said Nothing."[28]
"Too Much Time" (novella), "Deep Down", "Everyone Talks", "Guy Walks into a Bar", "High Heat" (novella), "James Penney's New Identity" (1999 version), "Maybe They Have a Tradition", "No Room at the Motel", "Not a Drill", "Second Son", "Small Wars", "The Picture of the Lonely Diner"
Safe Enough (2024), collection of twenty short stories:
"The Bodyguard", "The Greatest Trick of All", "Ten Keys", "Safe Enough", "Normal in Every Way", "The .50 Solution", "Public Transportation", "Me and Mr. Rafferty", "Section 7 (a) (Operational)", "Addicted to Sweetness", "The Bone-Headed League", "I Heard a Romantic Story", "My First Drug Trial", "Wet with Rain", "The Truth About What Happened", "Pierre, Lucien & Me", "New Blank Document", "Shorty and the Briefcase", "Dying for a Cigarette", "The Snake Eater by the Numbers"
"The Greatest Trick of All", collected in Greatest Hits (2005, edited by Robert J. Randisi), and in The Best British Mysteries IV (2007)
"Safe Enough", collected in MWA Presents Death Do Us Part (2006)
"The .50 Solution", collected in Bloodlines: A Horse Racing Anthology (2006)
Chapter 15 from audio serialized novel The Chopin Manuscript (2007)
"Public Transportation", collected in Phoenix Noir (2009)
One chapter from audio serialized novel The Copper Bracelet (2009)
Story collected in The World's Greatest Crime Writers tell the inside Story of Their Great Detectives, or The Line Up (2010), about Jack Reacher and his origins
"Me and Mr. Rafferty", collected in The Dark End of the Street (2010, edited by Jonathan Santlofer and S. J. Rozan)
"Section 7 (a) (Operational)", collected in Agents of Treachery (2010)
"The Bodyguard", collected in First Thrills (2010, edited by Lee Child)
"Addicted to Sweetness", collected in MWA Presents The Rich and the Dead (2011, edited by Nelson DeMille)
"The Bone-Headed League", collected in A Study in Sherlock (2011)
"I Heard a Romantic Story", collected in Love is Murder (2012)
"The Hollywood I Remember", collected in Vengeance (2012, edited by Lee Child)
"My First Drug Trial", collected in The Marijuana Chronicles (July 2013)
"Wet with Rain", collected in Belfast Noir (November 2014)
"The Truth About What Happened", collected in In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper (December 2016)
"Chapter 6: The Fortune Cookie" from the novel Anatomy of Innocence (March 2017)
"Pierre, Lucien & Me", collected in Alive in Shape and Color (December 2017)
"New Blank Document", collected in It Occurs to Me that I am America (January 2018)
"Shorty and the Briefcase", collected in Ten Year Stretch (April 2018)
"Dying for a Cigarette", collected in The Nicotine Chronicles (2020)
"Normal in Every Way", collected in Deadly Anniversaries (2020)
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), film directed by Edward Zwick, and written by Richard Wenk, Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz, based on the novel Never Go Back. With Tom Cruise reprising the role. In the film, the final scene is set in New Orleans, which was not a location in the book. Grant made a cameo appearance as an airport ticket agent in the film.
Reacher (2022), an Amazon Prime series starring Alan Ritchson. In the last episode of season 1, Grant can be seen in the last chapter as a man walking out of the diner who says "Excuse me" when passing Reacher. Reacher then speaks to Finlay and eats a piece of peach pie.
^ abcdWhite, Claire E. (August 2001). "A Conversation With Lee Child". The Internet Writing Journal. writerswrite.com. Archived from the original on 11 May 2013. Retrieved 7 October 2007.
