Having sold $3 billion worth of books, the Jack Reacher creator talks retirement, legal weed and how Hollywood bought him a Renoir
After 25 years, more than 200 million books sold, countless corpses and hundreds of thousands of clipped sentences, Lee Child, Britain’s greatest living thriller writer, is retiring. The new Jack Reacher novel he is co-authoring with his younger brother Andrew, which he began on September 1, just like he has every year since 1995, will be his last. Andrew will continue writing the saga, but Lee is holstering his typing fingers.
“It’s a strange thing,” he says, over video from his house in Colorado. “I’ve been doing it so long and now I won’t be doing it any more. But I’m British, I value retirement. I’m old enough to remember when people had those phases in their life. I remember my grandfather retiring when I started primary school. I said to my mother, what is ‘retiring’? And she said ‘well, he’s not going to do anything any more’. There I was, struggling with reading, writing and arithmetic, and I thought ‘that sounds pretty good’. I’m looking forward to getting there.”
He certainly seems relaxed about it. His transatlantic accent, an inscrutable mix of Birmingham, London and American, has grown subtly more laconic over the years. His lean, 6ft4in frame folds comfortably into his chair. Behind him, arranged along the walls, is a bank of guitars. Gibson Les Pauls, a Fender Stratocaster, and a Fender Jazz from 1954, the year of his birth.
It is unusual to hear a novelist speak so warmly of retirement. Writers tend to treat their work as a vocation. Those who have announced they are stopping, such as Philip Roth, are so rare as to be notable. Child has just celebrated his 68th birthday and seems set on this course of inaction.