The Reacher Guy:
The Authorised Biography of Lee Child
Heather Martin
Constable – 29th September 2020 hardback £20.00 – also available as an eBook/audio
The definitive, authorised biography of
Lee Child
“Riveting . . . archival diligence . . . [Martin] is a skilled and audacious interlocutor, too, but her subject is just as adept as interviewee . . . starkly affecting” – Irish Times
The Reacher Guy is a life of bestselling superstar Lee Child, a portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. It tells the story of how the boy from Birmingham reinvented himself to become the strongest brand in publishing, selling over one hundred million books in more than forty different languages across the globe.
Heather Martin interviews friends, teachers, colleagues and neighbours, including agents and editors. Based primarily on her conversations with the author over a period of years, together with readings of his books and research in his literary archive, this authorised biography reveals the man behind the myth, tracing his origins back through the generations to Northern Ireland and County Durham, and following the trajectory of his extraordinary career via New York and Hollywood until the climactic moment when, in 2020, having written a continuous series of twenty-four books, he finally floats free of his fictional creation.
Lee Child comments: “I met Heather Martin some years ago, and we started talking about why people love telling and hearing stories. To get more depth and detail we started talking about why I do. Eventually I said, ‘If you want to really get to the bottom of it, you’re going to have to write my biography.’ So she did. It was a fun and illuminating process. I had forgotten a lot, and it was fascinating to be reminded. Now it all makes sense.”
“Vivid and entertaining . . . a must-buy for any aspiring novelist, thanks in particular to its terrific insight into how Child’s first book was written, rewritten, edited, sold and published.” – The Telegraph
“You’ll emerge from the first 300-odd pages knowing more about [Child’s] formative years that you do about your own.” – The Times
My Review
Thanks to Anne, of Random Things Tours, for organising this blog tour and to the author and publisher for my copy of this book.
Lee Child is a bullshit merchant who mythologises his own life to everyone. Born James Grant in Coventry, brought up in a nice area of Birmingham and going to good schools, the second of four boys., He maintains that he went to a rough primary school and got beaten up for going to the grammar school. And that’s just the start of his stories about himself
Luckily, Heather Martin is good at context and peels away his stories to find an approximate truth. She visits the places he’s lived, places his family are from, and speaks the people who were there at the time. Despite his self-aggrandisement and arrogance, Child comes across as actually really great company, for a limited period of time.
I also think he’s autistic, and so was his father. But that’s another thing altogether. Something about the way he orders custom picture frames and doesn’t like speaking to people just screams ‘autistic’ to me. That and his similarities to my dad in the way he self-mythologises. The collection of trivia. Watches. I don’t know.
The Reacher books are a part of his self-mythology, his alter-ego translated from Brum to the US. While Child himself has never been in the armed forces, both his father and grandfather served. His grandfather, John Grant senior, born in Belfast, served in the First World War, and lost his leg at Gallipoli, while his father, John Grant Jr, also from Belfast, was an engineer who followed the forces from D-day to VE day, and was among those who entered Bergan-Belson. He came home uninjured but not unaffected. Determined to build a better life for his own children, John Grant joined the civil service and worked his way up to the bowler hat and umbrella that meant middle class respectability.
Child resents his parents efforts to raise him in better times than they had been. They are ‘boring’, ‘distant’, ‘didn’t want him’ and were already dead for five years when they died. He didn’t attend his mother’s funeral in 2016 because he had other plans already made and didn’t want to disappoint his friends.
Reading this made me really dislike Lee Child. I totally get the ‘cutting off abusive family’ thing, and not wanting to break plans when you’ve made them, but that’s just cold. And unhealthy. And yet, I know autistic men of a similar generation who react in similar ways.
The 40s, 50s and 60s were pretty awful, dull grey, poor, in Britain so I understand the need to romanticise things. And Child used that to write his novels, making things bigger than reality could possibly be, to produce Reacher, an unrealistic character that is extremely popular.
Heather Martin does an excellent job of revealing the layers of Lee Child and his fictional characters. This is a hefty book, at over 500 pages. She keeps the reader fascinated and engaged with the narrative, while parsing Child’s stories, both those about his life and those he has written.
Author biography:
Heather Martin was born in West Australia. She grew up in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, and Perth, where she would fall asleep to the sound of the Indian Ocean. She left Australia for England to become a classical guitarist but found herself singing with a Venezuelan folk group and learning to speak Spanish instead. She read Languages at Cambridge, where she also did a PhD in comparative literature, and has held teaching and research positions at Cambridge, Hull, King’s College London, and most recently, the Graduate Center, City University New York. Heather is a long-time Reacher fan. While waiting to get her hands on the next in the series, she once read a Lee Child book in Spanish and wound up writing to the author about the fate of his character in translation. The Reacher Guy is her first biography.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 
Thanks for the blog tour support