Recalling “Killing Floor” to “Blue Moon”

Mike Stotter and I were thankful to Publisher / Editor and Literary Raconteur Otto Penzler, for a specific book he’s just released, and we got the opportunity to thank him personally while we were at Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans.

I first heard of this book during the London Book Fair when I had a meeting with Otto Penzler. As a long time reader of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels - I quizzed him about this book during last May’s Crimefest event in Bristol.

The book I am referring to is ‘Reacher: The Stories behind the Stories’ – a book that I was highly anticipating.

So, what are my thoughts once I had a copy in my hands?

This interesting book will not only appeal to readers of the Jack Reacher novels, but also to readers [and writers] who wish to uncover the physical mechanics behind the writing process; the dynamics that powered one of the world’s best-selling thriller series.

Written in a series of short chapters [which were initially short introductions to the limited print run special editions of each Jack Reacher novel solely written by Lee Child] from the first [Killing Floor] to the twenty fourth [Blue Moon], this book is so very interesting.

It opens - On Monday September 5th, 1994, at home, at the dining room table, I sat down to write. An hour later, I gave the first chapter to my wife. I asked, “Should I continue?”

“Yes,” she said. “I like it.”

Child’s self-deprecating, modest and amusing style at times raising a smile, while at others forcing the reader to pause for thought and ponder upon the hand of fate. The combination of the author’s work ethic, built-in self-reliance, positive [and generous] nature - collided many times with the hand of fate as he watched the cards fall, not always in his favour – but he always seemed to play the best possible hand. Case in point – the circumstances of the purchase of his Property in Southern France, as well as its subsequent sale.

Read the full review HERE

After completing this slim tome, including the new Jack Reacher short story “A Better Place” which closes this interesting book – I had a few questions, and thanks to publisher Otto Penzler, who spoke with Lee – I got my answers, which are presented below for our readers.

I closed my review –

“This is the most informative and entertaining book I’ve read so far in 2025. Reacher: The Stories behind the Stories helped recall how much pleasure reading the Lee Child novels had on me, enriching my own life by distracting me from my own [at times] Bad Luck and Trouble.”

I understand the importance of literature - good writing – and the power of stories in helping manage the randomness of life and its challenges.

Stephen King summed this importance in his book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”.

“Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around”

I managed my life through my love of books and reading, so over to a story teller that helped me overcome the challenges that life presented me from 1997’s ‘Killing Floor’ to 2019 and ‘Blue Moon’ – Mr. Lee Child.

Ali: I first heard about ‘Reacher: The Stories behind the Stories’ in March, from Otto Penzler during the London Book Fair. Would you tell us about the book’s genesis and was it your idea or that of Penzler’s Mysterious Press?

Lee: Entirely Otto's idea - both originally and contemporaneously.  Otto did very limited editions of the Reacher books for his collectors, 126 printed per title, and asked for added-value forewords for each, year by year.  I did them as diaries, really - where I was, what I was thinking, etc, while I was writing each book.  Then he wanted to publish them in a single widely-available volume.  Which felt weird, frankly.  I knew collectors rarely even open the book - they shelve them reverentially and worry about cracking their spines.  So I thought no one would read this stuff, so I made the intros quite personal and unguarded.  Transworld picked it up as a subsidiary deal for the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

AK: I see there will be an audio release, will you be narrating / reading it or will Jeff Harding do the honours again? AND what’s your take on the growth of Audio Books, and the Reacher novels in particular?

LC:  I narrated the main part of the audio myself, because it feels a bit autobiographical, like a memoir.  That was the first time ever for me.  Jeff Harding did the non-me parts, including a brand new Reacher short story we put in as bonus content.  Audio is getting huge now - inevitably, I think, because for most of our evolution storytelling has been oral, and we seem to be hardwired for it.  I'm all in favour - I'm a storyteller rather than a writer, so I'm happy for people to get the story any way they want.

AK: I enjoyed the Reacher short story “A Better Place” that closes “Reacher: The Stories behind the Stories”, so after last year’s collection ‘Safe Enough’ and previously ‘No Middle Name’, will we be seeing more short fiction from you?

LC: I'm sure I'll do short stories now and then.  There's always someone asking.  If I'm around long enough, there could be enough to make another collection.

AK: As a fellow bibliophile - I was amused when you mentioned about renovating the manor house in Sussex, including building a library “…for the first time in my life, I had more shelves than books….though that moment did not last long…” So tell us about your own book collecting over the years, and what is the state of your book collection currently?

LC: I'm not a collector per se - I have probably ten thousand books here and there, but fewer than twenty are actual valuable volumes.  I have a Kelmscott Chaucer - folio size, hand-printed by William Morris, illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones, often called the most beautiful book in the world, and a first edition, first printing of The Catcher in the Rye, and a signed first of The Silence of the Lambs.  Plus a couple of James Bonds.  Stuff like that.  But most of my books have little resale value, except they're much loved by me.

AK: Naturally, there is little mention of the Amazon series REACHER due to the time frame [Killing Floor to Blue Moon] – so what can you tell us about Season Four – and is it based on your novel “Gone Tomorrow”? And what about the spin off series “Neagely”?

LC: Yes, the TV seasons post-date the forewords in the book.  Reacher season four is almost done - yes, Gone Tomorrow - and the Neagley spin-off is almost through post-production. 

All good.  I'm enjoying the process.

AK: Can you tell us a little about the ‘Lee Child Archive’ held at the University of East Anglia [UEA] in Norwich?

LC: Like the memoir book [Reacher: The Stories behind the Stories], the archive is another thing I never expected.  UEA is very much "the writers' university", a bit like Iowa State in the U.S., and I know Henry Sutton, who teaches there.  He asked for my archive.  I wasn't sure I had one, as such - just a bunch of old boxes with all kinds of stuff thrown in.  But they have made wonderful sense of it - it has turned out to be beautifully curated and quite impressive.  I started long enough ago that plenty of it is on physical paper, not just electronic.

AK: And tell us a little about why you enjoy attending festivals that celebrate writing, as you [and Brother & Co-Writer] Andrew attended both Crimefest and Theakston’s Harrogate and you are a guest author at the the inaugural Whitby Literature Festival this November.

LC: I love festivals, and go to as many as I can fit in.  Readers and writers are like my family, and it's great to see them periodically.  I like to meet the new writers - such passion, energy, and ideas - and such great books! And yes, I'll be there on November 8th, at 7pm at Whitby in November. 

Now I'm back in the UK, I decided to do stuff I had to miss before.  I like Whitby - I had a nice holiday there once.  And it's a new festival, so I wanted to help launch it.

AK: Mike Stotter and I attended Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans, and enjoyed a film on Saturday Night following the Anthony Awards entitled “If Jack Reacher Could Sing” featuring a band called Naked Blue – would you are to comment?

LC: By an outrageous coincidence, unknown to each other, I was their fan and they were mine, and eventually we met.  Obviously we immediately pledged to make an album together - I would write the lyrics, they would write the music.  It took us fifteen years to get it done, but we did it.  A real high point in my life.  Total fun, with two lovely people.

AK: Thank you for your time, and the trip down memory lane with Reacher: The Stories behind the Stories. Your work has always been important to so many readers.

LC: My pleasure as ever.

Shots Magazine would like to pass our thanks to Otto Penzler of The Mysterious Press / Penzler Publishers and Patsy Irwin of PenguinRandomHouse for helping organise this short interview and of course to Lee Child for his time.

5 Min video Below: Lee Child and Andrew Grant at Crimefest May 2025 Bristol UK recorded in Gonzo-Vision. 

The Reacher Guy: Always Lucky by Dr Heather Martin

He loved stories. He’d always loved them, ever since he was a little boy. One day he would grow up to write them. But the one story Lee Child didn’t want to write was his own. He knew too much about it. He might get bored. He wanted new stories. There were too many unread books in the world to go back over old ones.

It was something the author of the bestselling Jack Reacher novels had become famous for - not planning his writing in advance. Mainly this was down to his preoccupation with authenticity. He didn’t want to mess with the instinctive narrative voice that had served him so well from the start, and anyway, once he’d set Reacher up, it was up to Reacher to ‘sort things out’. But it was partly to save his own sanity. It was already a monumental challenge to write book after book about the same character, to keep the series going for upwards of twenty years. If he knew the ending before he started out, he wouldn’t be able to summon the necessary energy and enthusiasm. He wanted to experience as a writer the joys of the reader: the same twists and turns, the nail-biting suspense, the righteous passion, the pursuit of justice, and the satisfaction of resolution.

So no, he wasn’t going to write his own story. It wasn’t that he’d never thought about it. He had a title, ‘Always Lucky’, which I stole for chapter 13 of my biography The Reacher Guy, a title that Lee had likewise served up on a plate in countless interviews across the globe. Still, he’d done a few rough sketches, three of which are included in my book. 

The first dates from 2014, when on the one hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war, Lee wrote a letter to his late Irish grandfather (wounded at Suvla Bay), reassuring him that he would survive to father a son, who in turn would father another, who would be born into ‘a different world’. ‘It comes out well in the end,’ he signs off. ‘I promise.’ It’s precisely the promise Lee makes to his readers, and so reliably keeps (hence in the same year Forbes magazine pronounced him the strongest brand in publishing, commanding the greatest loyalty among returning readers). At 277 words, this is the longest of the mini-autobiographies, informed not only by his big-picture view of history, but his warmth and humanity too.

The second dates from 2017, when Lee reestablished contact with his best friend from Sixth Form at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. ‘Not much to report . . . 18 years at Granada TV, which was a fun job, but it all fell apart in the upheavals of the 1990s, and I became a writer as a desperation move, but fortunately it worked out OK.’ Only forty words, but eloquently conveying the lack of self-importance that so endears Lee to his millions of fans both in and beyond the book-writing world.

‘I learned to write in my Physics class,’ Lee said. ‘The teacher was an absolute tyrant, but he taught me how to be brief and concise.’

He wrote the third in 2017, for me. It started well: After ten years as Aston Villa’s top scorer and a brief marriage to Charlize Theron ... But he never got beyond those 15 gem-like words.

Therein lies the problem. This is a guy who loves making things up, not least about his own life. In The Reacher Guy I’ve tried to stick to the facts - and to be fair, Lee did his best to help.

There are a few ways I tested his memory. One of the most instructive was by sifting through the 22 boxes of his literary archive, held at the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia. Another was by interviewing witnesses at the scene. I spoke to old school friends, and teachers, and colleagues from Granada Television, and sometimes I would go back to Lee with what they’d said, setting up a dialogue between past and present in the hope of locating the truth somewhere in between. 

‘I don’t want to be remembered,’ Lee told me. But I doubted others would feel the same way. ‘No one will want to read about me,’ he said. ‘No one will be interested.’ In writing The Reacher Guy, I hope just for once to prove him wrong. 

The Reacher Guy by Heather Martin is out from Constable at Little, Brown on 29 September. 

Jack Reacher is only the second of Jim Grant's great fictional characters: the first is Lee Child himself. Heather Martin's biography tells the story of all three. Lee Child is the enigmatic powerhouse behind the bestselling Jack Reacher novels. With millions of devoted fans across the globe, and over a hundred million copies of his books sold in more than forty languages, he is that rarity, a writer who is lauded by critics and revered by readers. And yet curiously little has been written about the man himself. The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. Through parallels drawn between Child and his literary creation, it tells the story of how a boy from Birmingham with a ferocious appetite for reading grew up to become a high-flying TV executive, before coming full circle and establishing himself as the strongest brand in publishing. Heather Martin explores Child's lifelong fascination with America, and shows how the Reacher novels fed and fuelled this obsession, shedding light on the opaque process of publishing a novel along the way. Drawing on her conversations and correspondence with Child over a number of years, as well as interviews with his friends, teachers and colleagues, she forensically pieces together his life, traversing 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 breaks free of his fictional creation.

Cover Reveal - The Reacher Guy!

Cover photograph by Aris Photography

 

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 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.

The Reacher Guy is by Heather Martin and is published on 29 September 2020 by Little, Brown Book Group.

Jack Reacher’s 21st Birthday

Mike Stotter and I reflected how time flies as we clutched our invitations to celebrate with Penguin-Random House’s Transworld Imprint, Jack Reacher’s 21^st Birthday.

Well we actually mean Lee Child’s 21^st published novel featuring the laconic loner Jack Reacher. It seemed only yesterday that we found ourselves celebrating Lee’s first decade in print, on the banks of The Thames.

Shots have a long history following the career of Lee Child, from reviewing Killing Floor right up to his 21^st Novel Night School, which we reviewed here.

As ever, Child shows himself to be a master of the game of building up narrative tension page by page, while keeping the action thundering along. In Reacher he has created one of the outstanding characters in the thriller genre; a man too world-weary to be a hero, and too decent to be the cynic he thinks he is.

Long-standing series, even ones that sell around the world in the volumes that Lee Child’s Reacher novels do, are often subject to the law of diminishing returns. Night School is the 21st novel in the series and side-steps that trend with no sign of running out of steam any time soon.

Highly Recommended 

Read More Here

Shot’s first interviewed Lee Child when he was touring in 2002 with Echo Burning and the year after during Bouchercon Las Vegas we recorded a lengthy interview for January Magazine.

As big fans of the work of Child our paths often crossed in Europe as well as North America.

A major event for Crime fiction readers was the Lee Child Interview with Maj Sjöwall at Crimefest 2015, which we recorded here, as well as my own fascination with the Jack Reacher novels here, here and here .

The Shots Team are just one of many, many readers who find the tales of the laconic drifter magnetic; as Child was awarded the Crime Writers Association Diamond Dagger Award in 2003, and this link recorded the event. And we haven’t even spoken about the Hollywood adaptations.

So we arrived in London’s West End to celebrate Jack Reacher’s 21^st Birthday. Joining us was the Ubiquitous Barry Forshaw as well as Robert Peppin, Henry Sutton, Mark Sanderson and from Shots our Social Media Blogger Ayo Onatade and columnist The Talented Mr Mike Ripley and many many others.

There was champagne, a delightful finger buffet as well as most amusing speeches from Publisher Larry Finlay and the author himself which we recorded below.

  

The most important aspect that worried many of us is Lee Child’s wicked rumour that he circulated; that Jack Reacher #21 would be titled DIE LONELY, and would be the last in the series – We can reveal that it was indeed a joke.

So here are some photographs of the event

Left : Henry Sutton & Patsy Irwin

Right : Ayo and Mike Raising their Champagne Flutes for another 21 Jack Reacher Novels

Left :The Mysterious Brad [Lee Child’s Security Man] 

Right : Mike Ripley

Shots Ezine would like to pass our thanks to Patsy Irwin of Transworld for the invites to this wonderful party, celebrating 21 novels of Jack Reacher with Lee Child.

More information at www.leechild.com 

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

Jack Reacher fans will be pleased to hear that not only have they started filming but they have also released a list of the cast for Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.  Tom Cruise is both headlining and producing Reacher.  Jack Reacher: Never Go Back will be released in cinema’s in the US on 21^st October 2016.

More information can be found here.

Hotter in July

 The Bookseller reports that the weather forecast is good for July, as we have Jack Reacher week –

Transworld has partnered with the Sun to host the first Jack Reacher Week, promoting books featuring the character by Lee Child.

The partnership will see coverage in the Sun newspaper and online on its website, with the editorial and promotional campaign running next week (6th to 11th July). Coverage will include a major interview with Child, additional features based around the 19 Reacher books, and a review of the Jack Reacher back catalogue.

There will also be an opportunity for readers to win the prize of having their name used as a character in Child’s next book, and 2.7m samples of the first 14 pages of Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel, will be included with every copy of the Sun on Saturday 11th July.

There will be daily offers for readers to win holidays to cities in the US visited by Jack Reacher.

Users of membership scheme Sun Perks will be able to download an electronic copy of Killing Floor, and have the chance to meet Child at an exclusive event in September when he will be in the UK to promote the new Jack Reacher book, Make Me, which is published by Bantam Press on 10th September.

Transworld’s marketing director Janine Giovanni said: "Although Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers always reach the number one position in the bestseller lists, and his sales continue to grow both in physical and digital formats with each book, we are constantly looking for ways to reach new audiences.

"This is the first time Transworld or the Sun have run a campaign like this and we are very excited about the opportunity of reaching their 7m daily readers in the paper and online."

Sean Hamilton, deputy head of content at the Sun, said: "We know the Sun's readers enjoy the Jack Reacher novels and with summer approaching many of them will be grabbing Lee Child's books to take on holiday. This partnership will not only allow us to provide extra insight into the author and characters, but also offer Sun readers the chance to take part in brilliant competitions and grab free downloads and giveaways."

Read More Here and further information available at www.leechild.com 

If you missed Lee Child in conversation with Maj Sjöwall at Crimefest 2015, Shotsmag have the exchange on video here and last year’s Rapsheet interview is archived here

Top Photo © 2015 A Karim [“Lee Child and Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders”]

Bottom Photo (c) 2015 A Karim [“Lee Child with Maj Sjöwall”]

Newsy Stuff - Lee Child: Adventures of an over-reacher

An excellent interview in the Independent with Lee Child by Andy Martin who teaches French at Cambridge University; his latest book is 'Beware Invisible Cows' (Simon & Schuster). Andy Martin talks to Lee Child about his roots in Birmingham and his character Jack Reacher. The interview is below and the link to the interview is here ----

It was a classic Lee Child moment. A yellow cab is parked one fine night on Broadway and 19th. The cab driver is a small Sikh guy and his passenger is a big drunk fratboy who is bad mouthing the driver, refusing to pay, and at the same time sticking like glue to his seat. Our hero marches across the street, yanks open the door, and orders the unruly passenger out. No ifs or buts. Fratboy meekly obeys and staggers off down the street.

No, this was not Jack Reacher, the unreasonably well-built and overwhelmingly powerful protagonist of Lee Child's novels, but the author himself – the UK's No 1 bestselling hardback novelist of 2010, with not just one but two new books this year, 61 Hours (Bantam, £7.99) and Worth Dying For (Bantam, £18.99. Both were also No 1 hits in the US).

Another time, 1.30am in Manchester, he stops at a cash machine, withdraws £100 and turns around. Suddenly there is a semi-circle of three likely lads in front of him. Child fixes his gaze on the ringleader – the one in the middle – and shoots him down, verbally: "You have got to be fucking joking!" They part, like the Red Sea, and let him pass. It's true that Reacher is capable, in one recent novel, of cowing a throng of approximately 100 bad guys, like Jesus quelling the storm, but this was close.

"It's all down to confidence," says Child. "That, and being brought up in a rough neighbourhood of Birmingham and having to go home in my grammar school blazer. Violence was the default setting." Child is close to Reacher in height: 6ft 4in to Reacher's 6ft 5in. But he is no hulking 250lbs and doesn't wear cheap shirts and chinos from the local hardware store. "Male authors always take care to make their heroes at least one inch taller than they are, and considerably more muscular," he says. "Just as female authors give their heroines better hair and slimmer thighs."

Lee Child and I are having coffee at his hotel in London (if you have the finely-honed intuitions of Jack Reacher, you should be able to look at a map and pin him down to within a block). Or rather he is knocking back a jug of black coffee, just like the highly caffeinated Reacher, while I am sipping a latte. He considers this to be "suspect", but agrees not to beat me to a pulp for the time being.

Child famously re-invented himself after he was sacked from Granada Television, aged 39. And rebranded himself. The origin of his name goes back to a mid-1970s train ride in the US. He and his wife fell into conversation with an American who told them that he owned a "European" car. It turned out to be a Renault 5, marketed in the US – to give it a certain Parisian chic – as "Le Car". But the friendly American said: "Lee Car". After that, "Lee" became their surrogate definite article: "Can you pass lee butter, please," and so on. When he and his wife had a baby, the kid was inevitably nicknamed "Lee Child". "I was looking for a name that was short, crisp and memorable," he says. Lee Child (Snr) was born.

Child reckons you only need two qualifications to write a decent book. First, "you must have had word-games in the family when you were growing up." Second, "you have to have read a few books beforehand." One of the first books he read at the public library, aged only four or five, was the beginning of his "love-affair with the US". The 12-page board book was called My Home in America. Its last page showed an apple-cheeked boy looking out of his apartment building across the Manhattan skyline. "It was a revelation," Child says. "Just as Jan Morris used to say she was 'a woman trapped inside a man's body', so I had this feeling – I knew – that I was this New York boy trapped inside a boy living in Birmingham, England."

He went to Sheffield University, married a visiting American student and fully expected to decamp to the US on graduation. "But she turned out to be an Anglophile, and I had to wait another 20 years." Now he lives in an apartment across from the Flatiron Building in New York, with a view out over the Manhattan skyline, and supports the Yankees (while following the fortunes of Aston Villa from afar).

All of which might help to explain why it is that Jack Reacher is a fairly complex figure. He is to muscles what Bill Gates is to money. But he is also a liberal-minded guardian angel trapped inside the almighty body of a US army MP (rtd) turned lone-wolf drifter. He really hates bad guys – that is for damn sure, to use one of his catchphrases. And he tends to make mincemeat out of them in unarmed combat.

Beloved of paratroopers and GIs, he is the hard man's hard man, a monster of machismo. But when he gets tired of kicking teeth in, he is quite capable of quoting Nietzsche and coming up with the etymology of "Xerox" and "vagrant". And his mother is French, so he has the outsider's sensitivity to the infra-ordinary details that the natives are liable to miss. "He is like a gorilla that can paint," says Child.

Child reckons he may have been inspired by certain hypertrophic rugby players who are meek and mild when not in shorts. There is no comparison with James Bond. "Bond is not enough of a maverick – he is employed, he has an office and a secretary." Child sees Reacher's precursors stretching back into our mythic past, to the knight errant, the grail quest, and the saviour. He certainly saved Child's bacon, just when he was running out of redundancy money. "The thriller is not a recent invention," he says. "It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling."

The point about Reacher (evoked in the novels' recurrent refrain, "back in the day") is that he is a Rousseau-esque noble savage, a hunter-gatherer wild man who happens to have wandered into town. He only wants coffee and a square meal, but he can get riled. All conflicts arise out of the collision between the rootless nomad and the settled community. Or, as Child puts it, "it's a naked exploitation of people's frustrations". Reacher appeals to women readers as much as to men. "They love the idea of walking out of the door and not looking back."

The high body-count is balanced by a seductive minimalism of style. In Reacher's latest outing, Worth Dying For (his 15th), a villain comes through the door armed with a belt-sander, "already loaded with a fresh loop of coarse-grain abrasive". Child has applied something similar to the pulp vernacular. The Philip Marlowe wisecrack has got the chop. The hard-boiled has been boiled down to "a sullen, sardonic humour". The most frequent sentence is "Reacher said nothing". Amid this zero-degree discourse, a little can count for a lot. "In Without Fail the vital clue was a hyphen" Child recalls. In Killing Floor (the first novel), it's a possessive apostrophe.

Despite being handy with all sorts of weapons as well as his bare fists, Reacher is not the pin-up boy of the National Rifle Association. They suspect him of being a closet leftie. Child stirred up a "shit storm" in the US with Nothing To Lose, which brings the fallout from Iraq to the foreground. When Reacher discovers the escape route of American deserters, he turns a comradely and sympathetic blind eye. Child was able to point out that everything Reacher says that is critical of the American military was lifted direct from all the emails sent him by serving soldiers.

Child's grandfather was wounded at Gallipoli and his father fought his way across Europe in the Second World War. "But I started out knowing no more about military life than anyone else," he says. Now he has become a "conduit" for the innermost thoughts of frontline troops. "They can't tell their superior officers and they can't tell their families either. So they tell me."

Child recently found himself sitting next to Martin Amis at an awards ceremony. It was a showdown between popular fiction and literary fiction. In a straight fight I would bet on Child to knock out Amis in the first round. "He is ferociously intelligent, of course," says Child, benevolently. "Classic academic." Child likes to write "spontaneously, without prior thought, blindly". Ironically, he is now an honorary doctor of letters and a visiting professor at Sheffield but, he insists, "only in exchange for the usual old boy donation" (He generously funded 52 "Jack Reacher scholarships" – the only requirement is that you have to take on six heavy hombres in a bar.)

I first came across Reacher in a seemingly innocent bookstore in Pasadena. Now I'm hooked and one day my habit of snarling, "You can walk out – or they can carry you out in a bucket!" is going to get me into trouble. Other addicts will be relieved to know that rumours of Reacher's imminent demise are premature. "It's not in my hands," says Child. "So long as readers keep reading and my publishers keep publishing, I plan to keep on writing. I'd have to be an idiot to be burnt-out in this job."

But even if he is not about to have Reacher go over some American Reichenbach Falls, where Arthur Conan Doyle pushed Sherlock Holmes, Child has a cardinal rule: "You mustn't fall in love with your own hero." He feels it has happened to certain writers with disastrous consequences. Child tries to keep his alter ego at arm's length. "I never succumb to the temptation to stop Reacher doing something unpleasant."

Before Lee Child was Lee Child, when he was growing up in Birmingham, it was still a manufacturing city, full of small artisanal workshops with a lathe and a drill. "They did it all by eye then. But they still managed to make things to a fantastically high degree of precision. They did their job with a certain pride but also modesty." Child sees himself as carrying on that almost forgotten tradition. "I'm an artisan," he says. "I'm making useful things. With a degree of pride." It might also explain why there are so many tools in his books, lathes, drills, screwdrivers, wrenches and cutting equipment. Child reckons he should have gone to technical college, not grammar school. A fine-tuned sense of mechanical precision permeates his writing, where you can hear the hum of engines and the grinding of gears, and bodies can be expertly taken apart. And Reacher always knows the time, without reference to clock or watch. "I could have made head of engineering at London Underground, given the chance," Child sighs. "I would have been happy with that."