anyway again welcome to the Jean Cocteau and welcome to lis child - there's non Cocteau we we are very honored to have Lee here in the Land of Enchantment I think it's his first visit to us I bet Lee just recently in New York City at the thriller fest where I was given the thriller award thriller master and he was the previous year's thriller master so he he presented it to me I knew before I met him that he was the author of Jack Reacher books but I never actually read any of them so leading up to that before I went in there I said well I ought to read one of these books so I know this guy was gonna give me this award here so I read one of the Jack Reacher books and then I read another one and then I read another one and then I was another one this guy is a crack dealer the these these books are absolutely addictive when you when you pick them up you can't put them down you stay up all night reading the books and then you want to read another one and I'm not sure I'm reading him in the right order I was reading and I mean completely random order but it also seems to me that you were writing them and completely random order is completely random and I did that deliberately well partly for two reasons number one I cannot stand Siri mystery series in particular where the characters talk to each other about past cases you know where they sort of say to each other do you remember the affair at the Jean Cocteau theater in in New Mexico and you know they had this conversation about something that it's obviously significant to them but it means nothing to you because you didn't read that book partly its characterization of Reacher he's not interested in what happened yesterday he's not particularly interested in what happens tomorrow it's all about today for him so he would never refer back therefore you can you can pick up the series anyplace any book is self-explanatory you can start anyway you can read them in any order and I felt that was I mean that's commercially advantageous in a sense but also it's reader friendly because if somebody tells me about a series that is great but you have to start with book one then maybe the bookstore doesn't have book one and you got to start searching for it in about 45 minutes later you've forgotten all about it and you you really don't make the effort it's much better if you can just start with with any one of them which you can I wish is just challenging for the author in the sense that you've got to introduce the character each time sufficient for a brand new reader but not to bore the readers that of red 22 already you know that's a challenge author wise how many how many this is the this is the new one that's number twenty three twenty three yeah that's quite a few did you plan on that many when you started we're just hoping that I'm gonna write one and see if anyone likes it as you know it's as everybody who's in any way connected with entertainment you can't make a plan you know if if in the middle middle 1990s Otis said yeah I'm planning a twenty three book series but I sent the guys with the straightjacket because you just can't do that everything is an accident the first deal was a two-book deal because what publishers do they take a chance on the first book they promote it as best they can but they do not want another publisher to reap the benefit for the second book so they usually buy two and I remember at the time thinking great that's two years before I got to get another job now is after twenty three books I'm just beginning to think maybe I'll never have to get another job I would I would hope not but you know I started writing when I was like a kid in grade school little little stories for the neighborhood kids and all that but you actually had another job you had a whole nother career before you started writing reading books you were a television producer and executive and yeah and people say you know one of the standard questions you get asked is when did you know you wanted to be a writer and lots of people like George I mean my friend Harlan Coben for instances has a line about this there are some writers who have composition books full of four-page novels from when they were seven and then the next author says oh I knew when I was five and then some some authors knew when they were still fetuses that they wanted to be right and I never wanted to be a writer I never did what I wanted to be was was broadly speaking an entertainer I wanted to do something that made you happy for an hour or a day or two days just to make just to make you feel good and I'm completely transparent about it I understand myself very well I am trying to get from you the lovin approval I did not get as a child and I have I have met numerous we have plenty of sheets in French folks lots of writers are like that lots of stand-up comedians are like that lots of actors are like that there they lacked something in childhood and they're trying to make up for it now and I'm completely open about it that's what I'm that's what I'm doing my mother and father hated me so I hope you like me I think you want their money too at the beginning that was what it was I I was broke I had a career as he said I had a career in television that I worked for a company called Granada television in Manchester England and it was a fabulous fabulous place we made great shows it's well remembered for its drama but it also had some great documentary and news strands but principally it was a drama producer we made jewel in the crown Brideshead Revisited prime suspect cracker we may fabulous fabulous stuff great company it was a it was a fabulous place to work and no doubt I would still be there except one day my bus said something to me that made it just impossible for me to continue he said you're fired and not for any misdemeanor or felony on my part I assure you it was and it was not just me it was 300 people it was that thing that happened in the mid-nineties happened to millions of people still happening to millions of people sadly they find I was 39 years old and therefore an expensive veteran with I had benefits of pension I had a great salary and they made that discovery hey we can find some kid who'll do this for a tenth of the price or we could maybe program a computer and so we were all out of work and so the question was the fundamental thing you got to understand about me is I come from Europe therefore I have no work ethic therefore my first my my my first decision was can I retire at 39 and I thought sadly I felt several million dollars short of that so I thought all right I better get another job and another characteristic of me is that if I really enjoy something then I want to be doing it and that is impossible in almost all situations I will probably sadly never play centerfield for the Yankees all of these things that I would like to do I can't but I had all my life being a huge reader I just read constantly it was the only thing in in our lives when we were kids I don't know about Bayonne New Jersey but for Birmingham England where I lived there was nothing to do back then other than read and so I just read constantly so I figured curiously I had never ever really wondered where books came from I just thought they were there in the library and then I was literally 35 years old before I thought wait a minute somebody's actually writing these and publishing these this is a process and I thought well I could participate in that maybe so yeah you were mentioning some of the things for Grenada a jewel in the crown Brideshead Revisited but what you chose to write when you made the thing we're mysteries or thrillers that they were quite sure of the distinction between them but had you always loved that I mean did you grow up reading you know Raymond Chandler and and - Hale Hammett and and people like that yeah I had I mean the difference between a mystery and a thriller so they say is an extra zero on the advance so and I have broadly speaking I started I mean Sherlock Holmes obviously and there was a British kids author called Enid Blyton who I'm never actually certain whether she was a real woman or whether she was some kind of sweatshop with about a hundred and thirty writers because the the output was phenomenal I mean they were like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books and it broke down into into certain series the most famous probably was the famous five which was four kids and a dog and transparent wish fulfillment in as much as the parents were always absent and so these these kids were just having a great time on their own but then there was a another series called the secret seven and that was really a mystery 101 it was full of you know clues deductions disguises how to get out of a locked room all this kind of thing it was kind of a primer for mysteries and I did love it and then I graduated to a Scottish writer called Alistair MacLean who was a really popular solid thriller writer at the time and then I moved on to the the brain and Chandler Dashiell Hammett John Dee MacDonald and I've really yeah I'm basically a mystery writer I like the idea that you will have a problem and solve a problem because I think that is absolutely the consoling thing it's why people love these books because real life is terribly unsatisfactory you know real life nothing ever gets fixed if your car gets stolen you'll never see it again if your house gets broken into you they'll never find the guys you'll never get your stuff back that's the reality and it's so we live with this constant buzz of frustration and the idea that in a book you bet you're gonna get your car back you bet Reacher is gonna find those guys and he's gonna shoot him in the head and we love that consolation that's satisfaction now you're a mystery writer but I know you were as you say you were English grew up in Birmingham worked for Grenada all of that but richer is a very American character you you're an American even you live here now but he's a he's a very American he's not Sherlock Holmes Ian in the least and he's certainly not Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot he's he's not solving the murder of the vicar in the in the library he's seems much more in that in the tradition of Hammett Chandler Travis McGee Spencer did was that a conscious decision or do you like just like American mysteries better than British it was you know it is it is common that people say yeah this is a this is a really American archetype and that is actually a little bit cheeky in my opinion because what this really is this is a this is a timeless character the noble the noble loner the mysterious stranger and certainly yeah I mean that's hugely American if you go back 150 years to to the westerns that they absolutely use that character over and over again Zane Grey do breeds angry you know the typical Zane Grey scenario is you've got a there's a homestead lone somewhere on the prairies completely lonely and for some reason the men are absent there on a cattle drive somewhere a thousand miles away and the women and children are in the homestead and there's a desperate peril coming and everything is about to go really really bad and then a mysterious rider comes in off the range and in exchange for a woman cooked meal he will unsheath his rifle he will take care of the problem and then crucially he will ride off into the sunset because the writhing off is the most important part because what do you do with the guy if he sticks around there's all those gratitude issues in fact but but that character was was not invented by the westerns that character was inherited from really medieval Europe where instead of being the Prairie out west it was usually the Black Forest and instead of being a homestead it was a band of pilgrims they were traveling to the Holy Land and through the Black Forest which was this huge uncharted dangerous terrain and there's some kind of terrible problem and it's all about to go really bad and at the very last minute a knight rides out of the trees takes care of the problem and rides on this and you know medieval Europe didn't even invent its scandinavian sagas had it first and then anglo-saxon poems had it you could even go back to religious myths the arrival of a savior you can go back to the ancient Greeks the Odyssey this is a character that's been around forever and so yes certainly reach or operates in America and the reason for that is because that character was driven out of Europe when Europe became settled densely populated relatively safe I mean now the Black Forest is a cutesy tourist attraction you're not gonna get in trouble there anymore because and therefore that character the frontier character was shoved out to where there was a frontier which is the was the US and actually Australia and Japan hasn't say you know Japan has this myth the ronin a samurai that has been disowned by his master sentenced to wander the land doing good so it's a totally timeless and international character it pops up in every single culture and so I figured that's what I want to do because it's been market tested for 3,000 years it works you know I think within within modern mysteries or thrillers though Reacher is unique because most of the other big series characters are definitely grounded I mean Spencer Spencer is there in Boston with with hawk and cases are coming ham Travis McGee is living on a houseboat in the in the Florida Keys other people are you know they're gumshoes in Los Angeles they're waiting for someone to come through the door and say here's the case Reacher is just wandering around you know the United States with with no luggage buying fresh clothes every three days which is just amazing it still astonishes me every time I I come on that he has nothing but his toothbrush and his passport if I understand that's pretty astonishing yeah I mean it was if if you look at what everybody else is doing it's essentially a soap opera and I say that with no denigration whatsoever a soap opera is incredibly sophisticated way of serial narrative drama and again without any integration soap opera audiences because I made my living for nearly 20 years from from television audiences soap opera audiences are extremely sophisticated also yeah there are multiple story strands running for months and some of them don't recur for three four five weeks at a time and yet the audience remembers and picks up on them is alert to them so I've got nothing bad to say about soap operas and actually a lot of good to say about him but everybody else was doing it so I thought I've got to do something different because again I was broke I was out of work it was not a hobby it was not a sort of kind of thing I would kind of sort of like to do it had to work otherwise I mean literally I when I when I got kicked out of TV they gave me a certain amount of money as severance and by the time I paid everything off I had seven mortgage payments in the bank and so I had to get this done within seven months otherwise I'd have been losing my house and so it had to work and so I thought be distinctive do something different don't do the same as everybody else does and it took away a lot of good stuff you know soap opera is powerful because of this the responsibility is shared between a larger cast and for instance my daughter loves Patricia Cornwell books and I said to her really you like Kay Scarpetta and she said no not really I like Lucy you know there's always somebody else that can carry the weight so I gave all of that up should try and be distinctive and again I was really really aware that from working so long in in entertainment that it is not the author who decides whether the character is cool it's the reader you know you're completely helpless all you can do is just do an honest portrayal the way you think you should and if it works it's the audience that decides it's not the writer in fact it's terrible when the writer tries to push it too hard you know yeah my guy is really cool that's just awful well you the first book you had considerable challenges you were talking about some of them last night at dinner promoting it getting it out the initial print runs it was we had last night it was real fun because we went over the the early days and to me it's been 21 years since the first book came out but to me obviously I've lived that day-to-day and so what is that expression about you know a frog in the hot water that you never really notice it day by day but when I look back yeah it's insane the first print run of killing floor was 18,000 and these days I get 18,000 shoplifted in Manhattan alone and the first years were all about you know please exist that noticed me read these books and we would do stuff like giveaways we we bought 500 killing floor paperbacks and gave him away at Grand Central and Penn Station to people going on the train we did the same in London the train that runs from London to the airport's Gatwick and Heathrow we gave books away and then they tried to stop you too what do you think you're doing what are you doing giving away giving stuff away you probably need a permit it was it was hard going at first and I distinctly remember I mean you go to these all the time conventions great fan and writer conventions the first one I ever went to for Mystery Writers it's called bhauja con named after antony Bowsher who was the New York Times Book Review are probably the first person who took mystery seriously so they named the convention after him and I remember going to my first one and sitting around with with a bunch of other authors and I mean obscurity would have been a giant leap forward for any and we sort of looked at we were looking at each other and and we decided yet if we just keep on working keep on showing up one of us might make it and that bunch of people there was Michael Connolly Harlan Coben Dennis Lehane George Pelecanos Laura Lippman and none of them ever made it remember that just that feelings show up keep showing up and one of us will make it and it was a great generation but I have to say it was a generation that was really coming in on the very end of the old style of publishing because all of us were supported for multiple years I mean it was probably six or seven years before the publisher made any profit early on any of us but they were playing a long game back then mm-hmm and I think now they're not playing a long game anymore so you know people look at my career and think yeah it's possible you know sadly it's a little less possible now than it was when I started but having said that I remember starting in 1997 and speaking to a lot of established authors at that time and they all said oh I'm really glad I started when I started and then the very old ones were saying no no it's just I'm really glad I started when I started it's like everything else in life it gets worse every day you started pretty pretty quickly I mean that first book of yours won a couple of awards as I recall it did it was a really solid cult hit inside the the genre community and then the second one a little bit more and the third one a little bit more and then it would break out in it broke out sporadically in different countries New Zealand for instance on the third book New Zealand is the world capital of region madness it just went crazy after three books Bulgaria I remember thinking at least I can put that on my tombstone he was huge in Bulgaria I was really interested as to why because it was insane in Bulgaria it would always come out in October the book there and it would go straight to number one and it would stay at number one until the next October when the next book would be number one and I thought how is this happening because maybe I could bottle it and reproduce it in other countries so I went there and the reason was there was a guy who did The Tonight Show in Bulgaria it was an exact facsimile of the Jay Leno style Tonight Show except instead of Jay Leno it was this guy called slavi Trevor Neff and he was a Madras - and for five nights a week in peak time he talked about nothing else you can't buy that kind of publicity you really can't I mean God knows we've tried and you were on you were telling me last night you were on the Craig Ferguson show yeah I got on the Craig Ferguson show quite early because he's he's another British refugee and in fact we worked at the same place at the same time we both work for Granada never knew each other at the time but we pinned it down we were there at the same time so um Reacher um I read your introduction to the the first book which I guess was for the the reprint of the first book wasn't originally part of it and there were a number of unusual things about about Reacher and and some of the decisions you made I'd be interested to hear your your thoughts about them I mean you talked a little about how he moves around the knight errant you know nobody instead of a lance of the shield he has a toothbrush and a and a passport he's also gotta be one of the most physically formidable characters ever seen in you know when when I'm reading a Reacher book & 8 bikers are coming around him in the parking lot I'm sorry for the 8 bikers there and they're in trouble whether they know it or not [Music] did you give that a lot of thought to make him such a physical I mean in in one of the books I read recently some of the other characters are calling him an Incredible Hulk and and Bigfoot and so forth he's really tough yeah I really did say it was a it was a two-part decision it started with one decision that then led to another decision the one decision was that as a reader of the genre I was getting really bored and fed up with the dysfunctional hero which you know started a long time ago you could say 30 40 years ago you might say James Lee Burke David Robichaux was the first of these wounded heroes alcoholic or recovering alcoholic and the problem with that is that Matthew Scudder yes gutter there you go the problem with that though is that the first time around anything is is good his fresh it's new it's exciting the first time around but then subsequent writers would imitate it and fall prey to a kind of inflation so that you know after five years or ten years they were super miserable they were divorced they were recovering alcoholics they were divorced they're they all had teenage daughters who hated them some of them had you know made a mistake they've been cops or something and it had been a stakeout in the dark at night and they'd shot at a fleeing shadow and it turned out to be a 12 year old boy and they were so traumatized they had to go and live in a cabin in the woods and talk to nobody it just got more and more and more miserable and I was thinking fundamentally surely we don't really want to read about miserable people so what I wanted to do was skip way back skip backward to when the hero was a fairly plain and uncomplicated person with no problems and then I so the second decision was well why not take that even further because all all novels have got to involve conflict at their core whatever whatever sort of novel it is there's always a conflict if it's a literary novel it might be a conflict between two philosophical poles or or two feelings or something there's always a conflict and the greatest conflict paradigm of all time is is David versus Goliath and I really want as a kid I read that story and I would I really liked Goliath I wanted Goliath to be the good guy and I just thought how would it work if we have a non miserable hero who was actually physically unafraid of anything so that he didn't have to be worried or miserable would it work and theoretically it really shouldn't work because the character needs edge or something to be interesting and a flawless person should not be interested not should not be interesting but the thing about Reacher is that he is actually fairly eccentric and he is fairly odd but the crucial thing is he doesn't know that he he thinks he's perfectly normal and so you get his characteristics without the navel-gazing so he's not tiresome he just goes about his business he thinks he's normal but I did want that feeling again for consolation for the reader because all of us I think all of us have been in situations where you know it's late at night you're walking down a city street and you see you know somebody coming towards you you're a little bit nervous you know a little bit is this gonna be alright suppose you didn't have to feel like that suppose that you just knew that it was a million-to-one that the next guy to come around the corner would be any trouble to you I just thought would that be attractive would that be different and I guess I loved it I mean I would I would love to be like that I mean it a little bit you can put it on you know because I remember when I went to college I was at a party and a guy left real late and I was walking home at about 5:00 in the morning down this bad street in the city where the college was and in the in the distance I saw this really nasty looking guy walking toward me on the same sidewalk and we were getting closer and closer to each other all the time and I was thinking oh no I thought I cannot cross the street to the other sidewalk because that is just you know that's just a confession that's just an invitation I thought you know I'm gonna have to stay and and confront him and we got closer and closer and closer and then he crossed the road and use use the other side I've wondered about your own background I mean the fight scenes the action scenes and they're in the Reacher books are really first-rate and there's a tremendous amount of seeming expertise I'm a I'm not expert enough to judge whether you're getting it all right enough but all the stuff about guns and this kind of gun and that kind of gun in this kind of ammunition and all that do you have considerable background and guns and shooting and weaponry and police techniques and because Reacher certainly does and the books are have a tremendous sense of verisimilitude in that way yeah they do and it's all completely made up I mean I have I have no expertise of all with guns you know I i'd love machines you know I love manufacture I grew up in a manufacturing town where they did in fact make guns BSA British small arms made guns and eventually motorcycles but so I love the idea of a precision machine that feels really good in your hand but I have no real interest in guns I don't own one I have never fired one I've never even held one apart from when a photographer wants me to pose with one so the gun thing is not is a question of intra I mean not research in a painstaking way because like I said I like I like small machines I understand how they work and it's very easy to figure it out but and I people volunteer they're their assistants because when you're on tour in the u.s. typically the publisher will arrange for what they call a media escort to meet you in each city and they take you around all your appointments they deliver you back at the airport the next morning you fly on and you meet a new media assistant and one year there was Waldenbooks in Little Rock Arkansas really wanted me to go and in Little Rock is really not much of a media market so there was no media escorts there so instead they hired a retired business guy who volunteered to do it and he picked me up at Little Rock Airport and the first thing that I noticed was parking at Little Rock cost 25 cents no it was like 17 dollars at LaGuardia and 25 cents in Little Rock and then we went for barbecue which was lovely and he he had gotten the press pack that the publicist sends out which is the schedule for the day in the press release and a copy of the book and bless him he had read the book and like you he then read another one and another one and so and indeed read them all and then he picked me up and we did the event which was an afternoon event on a Sunday and we finished about 5 o'clock and he said to me do you want to do you want to comfort do you want to have a pizza and I thought well it's 5 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon a Little Rock Arkansas what else am I gonna do so I said sure George let's go and have pizza so we go back to his house and we go in his house and he has all the blinds drawn against the Sun and so my eyes acclimatized to the gloom inside and I see that on its dining room to his dining room table is covered with guns and he says to me Lee this is one of every gun the Reacher has ever used in your books and I thought who knows I'm here but it turned out to be really fine he was a very nice guy he was relatively sane and I said to him George surely it's nice of you to buy the books but please don't tell me you went out and bought all the guns as well he said no no they're for my collection he took me into his garage which was a triple garage completely devoid of cars it was just had rack after rack after rack at guns he was a big gun collector he had some of those al capone tommy guns he had a he had a perfect condition 1873 Colt Peacemaker alongside a rusted-out frame of the same thing that he'd found in a streambed and the hammer was rusted in the back position so that presumably this was a gunfight somebody was about to shoot at somebody else they got shot instead died in the stream the gun was left behind and he said if there's any anything daddy that I wanted to know I should just ask him and he gave me a kind of free sample he said did you know that the two main types of revolver the two main manufacturers of revolvers in the US which were Colt and Smith & Wesson the cylinders go around opposite directions per manufacturer no I did not know that and so I thought great I said I put it in the next book and that doesn't always work because a little while later I I was in London and I I had dinner with a writer called Andy McNab who is he became famous for a nonfiction memoir about the first Iraq war he was a member of the SAS which was the the British equivalent of Delta Force and at the time he had left the British Army he was the the most decorated soldier in the British Army and he told me over dinner he's I was interested in a professionals attitude towards guns because guns are so fetishized generally I just here's a guy who's really walked the walk and I wanted to ask him how he how he regarded guns and he said he didn't care he didn't care what it was that he would take any gun out of the store and you didn't care what it was except he had one rule only which was that he would not use an automatic weapon that was already loaded because he wanted to load it himself with a fresh magazine because he was worried that if it had been left loaded a long time the spring temper might have been lost so that it wouldn't it would not load the second round and I thought great here is the most decorated soldier in the British Army giving me some really good technical information so I put that in the next book Reacher would never use a pre-loaded thing because he's worried about the temper of the spring and I got like immediately I got like 10,000 emails from Texas alone [Laughter] [Music] a gun that was loaded since 1947 and it works just fine so you can't win you know research you cannot win the I mean you mentioned the army and that's another thing of course the many to reach her books are after his military career where he's you know traveling around the United States with his toothbrush but there are a number of them that are also during his career as a as an MP rising quite high two major I believe in the MP and once again they're there there's a real sense of verisimilitude a lad like you really you really know what you're talking about with the MPs and the military have it have you ever been in the service yourself or no I never was my dad was in the British Army for in World War two and my grandfather in World War one but my dad remembers nothing about MP's other than they which come jump out of a jeep outside a bar and hit ever hit everybody over the head with a stick so I just figured that you know the police department anywhere in Santa Fe presumably the police department regard themselves as tougher and more efficient than the population as a whole because they got a police you and so I figured same for the army that the military police especially the the CID elite units are gonna be tougher than the general population and so I sort of took it from there but subsequent I mean actually the major part his rank he's a West Point graduate in a major and I did that because of fealty to the myth of the knight errant because to be a knight errant first of all you got to be a knight and therefore you had to have significant rank and so I felt a commissioned officer a major that fit the bill whereas the stuff that he talks about having done is actually really not what a major would do it's much more like what a Warrant Officer would do but that is part of what we have to do you know you get it slightly wrong in order to get it right in a larger sense do you I'm often asked about my fantasies if I have you know charts and notes because there's very complex is a lot of characters a lot of history etc and I wonder the same thing about Reacher with twenty three books now plus short stories that you've done do you do you have like a big chart of Reacher's entire life and well this is what he was doing in November of 1994 and and then this is here he was in in 1997 and in 2012 this happened to him no absolutely not I have what I have is I mean it's just a big chaotic and I use it and I made a bad mistake one time if you trace back his alleged promotional path second lieutenant lieutenant captain major then it went back to being a captain at some point and I thought that was just a pure mistake and so for one of the books called the enemy I think he yeah part of the plot becomes that he's demoted he's dropped a rank and so people think wow I'm really organized like planned that eight books in advance and actually no it was just a complete mistake but since then I there's a retired schoolteacher who is a big fan and she maintains a mental database and if I if I need to know what he was doing in November 1994 I she's called - I just emailed her state thought what was Reacher doing in November 1994 and she tells me I I have those two I have a couple friends in Sweden Elio and Linda and I have to you know yeah they they I particularly make a mistake with people's eye color I'm constantly eye color is changing and once a horse change sex between two books and my fans write me letters about that but now I write to Elio and Linda's and what this character I think he was in the third book what color were his eyes and and they tell me they it's very useful to have these goober fans what do you have Reacher's life you know plot it out I mean or do you just when it's time to write your 24th book and your 25th look in your 26 are you just gonna make it up what do you or you know what those books are gonna be and how his life I have no idea what the next sentence is gonna be I mean I really there are so many different ways of doing it there are some writers for instance I Jeffrey Deaver you anybody read Jeff really nice guy good friend of mine but here's the exact polar opposite of me because he he will do a 300 page outline that then he turns into a 500 page novel and I couldn't do that because for me it's the story that I just loved the story I it's why I became it's how I knew I could become a writer actually is that all my life literally all my life I have always just told myself stories daydream stories just lived in a fantasy world you know I never I never drive to the store I'm always piloting a fighter jet through hostile territory you know I never drive I'm never driving here or there I'm always gonna check point charlie and Berlin to pick up some secret agent you know I just live in a fantasy world and I figured all I got to do is write it down so for me it's this I just loved the development of the story and if I knew the story in advance even if I made one page and notes even though if I said this happens then this happens but really it was that then I've told myself the story I'm done with it I want the next story so I'd like to I just make it up literally and for instance this book the new book past tense the opening paragraph I just write an opening paragraph as well as I can and then I think all right now what's the next paragraph and in the opening paragraph of this one I mentioned two things Reacher has spent the late summer in Maine and now because Reacher breach has very few rules but what he likes to do is be warm in winter so he's gonna head south and then I put like the birds in the air above him he's going to begin his migration and then I just thought why did I first of all I mention Maine and then I mentioned these birds and I thought all right what's that telling me the main thing I thought Steve King lives in Maine could I do a Stephen King type of strand in this book and the other thing was the birds way way back for no reason at all I mentioned that reaches father in order to balance the fact that he was the stone killer as a marine infantry officer he was also a bird watcher to show the sort of peaceable side of his nature so I thought all right I'm gonna do a Stephen King type strand and I'm gonna do something about reaches father because I mentioned birds so then it just takes off from there and I have no clue whatsoever what is going to happen I do not know what's going on I don't know how it's going to end up it just the story just works itself out and for me that's really important because if I had a plan I'd be bored of it and the boredom would show through in the in the writing and I also feel that there are so many glorious byways and highways that you can take just odd little things changes the direction I would be intimidated I would be inhibited from doing that because it would not be in the plan and so the plan would get in the way for me so I is that this is the 23rd it's the 24th book already written and no it started it's about 1/3 of the way through it's called blue moon and I really have no idea what it's about yet because it's nothing and you do one of these a year right yeah which is you know people say that with some kind of wonderment about it you know one I'm not gonna point out that not not all writers do a book every year for only seven years later the new one I'm sorry but you know people think one a year is like a big deal and it's it really it's not you know I came from live television where your deadline is is zero or you know best five seconds there's a scene in is it him is it in broadcast news that movie where you know somebody is it's literally right dictating into the anchors earpiece and he is saying the words a sec later I those those were my deadlines in the past so the deadline of a year is an absolute luxury and it compares very badly to those people we were talking about earlier there's all top writers who I'm regarded as this grizzled old veteran because I've done 23 books people used to do hundreds hundreds of novels and so the modern style one book a year is really very very easy you know it is it is better than digging a ditch believe me now I haven't event although I've read by this point a considerable number of the the Reacher novels I haven't read all of them yet but he does seem to travel around Maine and Pennsylvania to Northeast there I've seen that and you've gotten him out to the Dakotas and all that but maybe they're just in books I haven't gotten to but I I haven't seen too many like in the deep south and I don't think he's been out here to the Land of Enchantment yet he has not he's never been to New Mexico as far well he might have been because he doesn't tell me everything but I think he's certainly been to Georgia he's been to he's been most places Texas he's been Wyoming and the last one I love I mean he goes where I wouldn't want to send him obviously because that's that's my do you go to all these movies for him I don't go for the purpose of research because I think that is you know one book a year is like I said not a difficult target but it is it would make the research too fresh and the thing about research is that especially the location research you've really got to let it percolate for a long time until you understand which are the important parts and which aren't you know it's like that iceberg thing you got a throwaway 90% of it and use the 10% that that means something and and that takes a certain amount of time to become clear in your mind so I will always do it backwards you know I'll have been somewhere first and then a book will I'll need to write a book and I'll think I'll think all right what sort of feel do I want for this that starts to dictate the location based on what I've seen before you know if it needs to be gray and cold it might be the coast of Maine in the spring if it needs to be hot and sweaty he'll be Texas in the summer or something like that and so it's it's based on what I already know rather than fresh research because fresh research just sticks out like a sore thumb we've all read books you know where you can hear the authors saying I've done the research that I'm gonna put it in damn it whether I need it or not so in other words it's we're gonna have to wait a few years before we see Jack Reacher eating green chile and visiting me our wolf what do you like green chili I'm sure he would there is no real gourmet he like what he likes best is a cheeseburger and a peach pie or something like that yeah coffee of course coffee yes yes we were trying to determine the proper cocktail here and lastly last night and coffee seemed to be his uh his beverage of choice well why don't we throw it open do we have uh the second microphone here to to run it to and fro here and we'll throw it open to the audience and let's let's get the microphone in first so we can hear your question oh do we have it there well we could ask a question I'll repeat it until we get the e to microphone oh here it comes okay all right there's a microphone yes go ahead good right back there yes oh you yeah fine hi how do you feel forgetting the box office that's still left with Tom Cruise about casting a diminutive actor to play Jack all right I I have to I have to jump in here last night at dinner I I asked the same question somewhat different words Tilly and said I'm not gonna bring this up during the interview and he said don't worry when you throw it up to the audience the first question and you have proven him to be a prophet from the beginning is and it has it has a conclusion so we'll go through the whole story it was you know it's a binary decision do you want a movie or not and I love the movies I love the movies and to me the idea that that some little thing I had done could will be forever in the world of movies was just lovely I really wanted that to happen you know like you get worn at bat in the major leagues you're in the baseball encyclopedia forever I just wanted it to be like that so I really wanted a movie so back we had a lot of movie deals right from the very beginning and we were ran through all the usual upsets that happened with Hollywood the very first deal that the company was bought by another company and it became an orphan project the second deal we was with Sony Pictures and the executive died so it was literally an orphan project and then it rolled around to 2005 which is now 13 years ago and we did a deal that involved the usual number of executive producers you know when you go to the movies you see all these names at the beginning and they're the people that that basically finance it and organize it and paramam was involved and Cruz Wagner which was his production company at the time was involved as executive producers nothing more and then it went into development for six whole years and in 2011 the screenplay was written by Chris McQuarrie who had won an Oscar for his screenplay for the usual suspects and it was a great screenplay and it circulated amongst all the interested parties all the executive producers and Tom Cruise read it and thought wow I want to play this character I did not know that at the time I got a call from the the executives and they said they were going to fly to New York to take me to dinner and the restaurant they mentioned was such an expensive restaurant and so difficult to get into that I knew they were going to tell me it was Tom Cruise if it had been somebody else we'd have gone to a cheaper restaurant so I get I put on a tie which I have only won and I get to the restaurant there's a little bit of chitchat and I say come on guys just tell me it's Tom Cruise right and they say yes it is and I sense that I had like half a second if I had thrown myself on the floor screaming and yelling they would have undoubtedly cancelled the project but then I went down the rabbit hole of thinking thinking about it strictly from my point of view you see and here's my point of view I wrote the book the book is the ultimate product there is nothing beyond the book nothing can ever change it or modify it or alter it the book is the definitive thing and a movie is just a side project like many other side projects for instance there's a long time ago now after about 12 books we got a message from Poland there was a thrash metal band in Poland that wanted to do an album where each of 12 tracks was a Richard book condensed into a five-minute thrash metal song in Polish [Laughter] and and they sent me the lyrics and for approval which I couldn't read because I can't read polish so somewhere out there there's a twelfth track thrash metal album in Polish and nobody thinks that is ruined the reach of books you know because it's that is a peripheral side project so from my perspective I felt that the book was invulnerable nothing could change the book nothing could alter the book and again selfishly from point of view how do I promote in Indonesia or China or Brazil you know the way to do that is to have a big international star do you movie so I was relatively happy about it at the time in fact I really didn't care they could have had Katie Holmes play Jack Reacher's as long as the brand was this is somebody these are people sitting down at a table saying we would like to spend a hundred and twenty million dollars promoting your brand you know so I did totally totally totally underestimate how upset the readers were going to be and and with Tom Cruise was a lovely guy we got on really really well we had a lot of fun he works like crazy he's terrific no he'd never ever mentioned Scientology to me the whole thing was just the whole thing was a delight from my point of view but I understand the readers were very upset so there's a clause in the movie contract that says after two movies I have a veto whether there will be any more and so today is what Sunday so a week ago Wednesday I did a deal where we are going to take it to television instead we're going to do long-form you know season-long binge watching tight probably Netflix or something and with a new actor and we're gonna what I what I would like to do is involve all the readers as an expiation I would like to I would like to involve all the readers to choose to nominate to suggest to decide but they have to be and it will be the biggest you have ever seen which you have got to you've got to take you've got to be careful about who you suggest because already you know people that over the years have suggested our Tom Cruise is awful should have been Daniel Craig well Daniel Craig is smaller than Tom Cruise I was once on a plane with Daniel Craig and I got up to go to the bathroom I tripped over so we need a huge you know we and I would love it to be an unknown guy I would love to go back to that model that we had you know 50 60s maybe a little bit in the 70s where you could you could like the Sean Connery thing with James Bond you know an unknown guy steps into the role I would love it to be that and I think television can stand that you know it should be pointed out that the first place in the played James Bond was Woody Allen so there is that but Woody Allen wasn't available for Reacher I guess there are people that said he would have done just as well all right we have another question over here thank you so much for coming to New Mexico can you tell us how you use agents and lawyers to help you protect your work I'm pretty careless about that to be absolutely honest that you know it's a bit of a myth that people get really worried I've seen lots of starting out writers you know they put copyright and all that stuff and they mail it to the Library of Congress or whatever they do I have really never ever heard a serious case where a publisher or an agent has stolen anything it's a it's a largely overblown fear and then the rest of it takes care of itself that if the book is making money for the publisher then the publisher deals with all of those aspects which now in the digital age is very very serious you know I bet that we I bet that we have two three four hundred times a week these torrent sites we have to attack in some way but fortunately there's a whole industry that does that for you now but the paranoia about your idea being stolen I mean I can honestly say I have never seen that happen and so I think there are better focuses for once lawyers and agents to be working on rather than paranoia about that honestly I like li I've never I've never seen a real confirmed case of a studio or a network stealing the idea of some writer and making a television show a movie of it the the real danger for writers comes in the other direction I mean if you have anything successful sooner or later there's going to be somebody in Fargo North Dakota who you know find some local ambulance chaser and Sue's you because you stole it from him and you say I've never heard of you or met you how could I possibly well I had the same idea and I showed it to my Uncle Fred and he said it's just the same I mean absolutely that happens it's it's just like a it's a routine scam you know it's like these Nigerian banking scams where literally every time one of my books comes out I probably get I don't know 20 25 letters saying you stole my idea or I'll settle for $10,000 first row here thank you for coming to Santa Fe I may be your greatest fan but I don't know there may be 129 do you think the same thing my first question would have been about TC so we'll just let that go I love your books the very first one I ever read 21 years ago it is so daunting to me that I have to wait 364 days after that I've read the book when I get it in my hand I am a Reacher creature I'm very proud of that and I want to tell you what I love about him not as a woman but as a as a vulnerable person in the world today his well I think what what you have done with the right in the wrong the good and the bad that there that there that the right and the good always wins and I love that particularly today in our world where there is so much corruption and I love that Reacher has such a sense of dignity and integrity whether he's in his clothes of three days or has just finished basically beating someone to a pulp I love that there is so much dignity with that and I'm not I don't like violence but I am I root for him when he starts in on someone so I just want I really seriously and I and I I to him like George what you have done with fight scenes and guns and how you describe that is incredible a friend of mine has met you several times in Houston and he says he believes you are a genius and so I share that with you today well that's very sweet thank you I don't know why people keep saying thank you for coming to Santa Fe you make it sound like you learn better or assemble like that whereas it's a hard thing but I'm glad you know that's really nice to hear and obviously and because it is a he there's a huge leap of faith for a writer because one thing I learned very early and it's it's really well summed up in a there's a book by David Mamet who was you know a screenwriting guy from Hollywood who he's a bit weird now but it used to be very sound it's a book called David Bambi versus Godzilla and along the way he makes a point about he's really actually talking about actors on the screen but I think it translates just as well as characters in a book when the character in the book steps steps on stage it's he's funded its basic subliminal psychological transaction he steps on the page and he says hi I'm the main character and the audience then says oh are we gonna like you and the absolute worst answer is yes you are and I'll tell you why that's the worst possible answer the best possible answer sucess Mamet and I agree with him the best possible answer is are we gonna like you the guy says you might you might not and I really don't care and so that is the only way to make a convincing character and it is but it's a leap of faith because you are not trying to curry favor you're not trying to make him likable you just present him and then you cross your fingers and hope somebody will like him and I'm very happy that you do thank you know it's interesting that Kipling once wrote the famous line there there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal leis and every single one of them is right and I think that really covers writing too because I'd you know listening to Lee you know my own philosophy is so different in my books the guy steps forward and says hi I'm the main character and six chapters later I kill him and then the reader says what you can't do that he was the main character then they're afraid for the rest of the book which is but there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal leis and and every single one of them was right do we have other quit there's one back back that okay yeah right there okay when you're in the process of writing a new book what is your morning routine my morning routine yes or just your routine throughout the day well it's fun of you say morning because I that is my one for a munch a kebab aleef that nothing of value is ever achieved in the morning so it was really one of those things you know having worked it was you know TVs are 24/7 business and having worked a rotation or roster system that would sometimes be all night sometimes early morning sometimes the evenings I thought being a writer I can work when I want and I never ever start before about 12:00 or 1:00 and I get up maybe 10 and I have what I call the great British breakfast which is six cups of coffee and five camels and then take a shower get dressed and start around lunchtime and so there's no morning routine whatsoever but I work every you know it's a serious business you got to work it's a it's a job you got to do the work and so I work every day that's available to me until the book is finished because not every day is available because you got other things to do and then you got you know like coming up family stuff presumably Thanksgiving Christmas they'll want to do something so that'll delay me a little bit but I work every available title it's done and I only work a question in my own place at home you know I'd like to be undisturbed but I I know other writers who like will work on the road like did you did you write five pages this morning or no that's my other problem that I that if I know that I've got to finish at a certain time then it just paralyzes the whole day there's some kind of in inhibition about oh it's not really worth developing this strand or this idea because I'm going to have to stop soon even though I might stop then anyway just the knowledge that I've gotta stop makes it worthless so I can't write on the day when I'm doing anything else and so which is fine because then if there are days when you're doing something in the evening or an appearance or something you can do all the businesses stuff you know email and and put all your receipts in ready for the taxman and all that kind of thing yeah we're exactly the same in that regard if I have a you know doctor's appointment at 5:00 in the afternoon I can't work at 10:00 in the morning I do emails and business see stuff as you say but I don't want to just a looming presence of that five o'clock because it looks like a problem ahead of you and I certainly don't write you know in distant hotels or on airplanes or on trains or any of the stuff like some of my colleagues do no I don't either because it's a you know it's an actual joy and a pleasure to do it I really really find that that it's busy you know it sounds stupid but if I if there's a good sentence or a good paragraph or particularly a good pivot because pivoting from one thing to the next thing is often the hardest thing you know people say getting him from one room to the next room is the hardest part of writing if it comes out really well even if it's just a couple of lines the huge satisfaction in that is you know obviously it's very private to the writer because I don't expect anybody else to understand it but it is just a wonderful feeling so I love to be at home just enjoying it did your years and television influenced your novel writing I mean did you ever write screenplays or teleplays and and you obviously read a great many of them you know the the format yeah I think it it it really didn't all that much because it's such a huge the key difference between movies and TV and book writing is is a technical technical thing called point of view control because a camera is a roving thing a camera can can go anywhere and look at anything with complete equality whereas in a book you gotta have a lot tighter point of view control whose scene is this whose eyes are we looking through and that dictates what you can see and so there isn't actually that much commonality in terms of the writing but there's a huge commonality and in that it teaches you real quick this is not about you this is not about you being a cool guy buying a black turtleneck and a black leather jacket and being a writer yeah you know it is about the audience first second and third it's about the audience and and so working in TV really you get over yourself real quick you do leave speaking point of view you leave research point of view occasionally or not yeah yeah I mean there's a some of the books the first person entirely reached his point of view so I'm a third person more omniscient than others so I do change it up in that sense but within the book itself there's a rigorous discipline about not breaching the point of view because readers don't necessarily understand what's happening to them but they feel seasick a little bit it feels a little bit diffused they they don't necessarily know why it's not working but that's why it's not working because you're the classic case is if you're the main character and you're on the phone then we're entitled to know about you but then we get comments about the person you're talking to you know she shrugs or she she she makes a she looks away or something we can't know that if we're looking at you and she's a hundred miles away we can't know that and if you put it in that destabilizes a narrative in a way which makes the reader queasy in a subliminal way we have one back there thank you um the question I have is something from reading one year a few years you have a kind of retroactive look at Reacher when he says something about when he's in a movie theater as a child and it was an experiment and in this movie theater there's a horror moment and all the other children sit back and Reacher goes forward and I'm just curious where you got that from what research you did for that because it's it seems to be a way that you described why reaches willing to walk into danger so easily yeah well that was largely I'm not sure I'm sure there is a study like that because you know the Department of Defense did endless studies one of the things I love about history is what the Department of Defense and CIA and stuff did in the 1950s which was practically everything and it was completely insane a lot of stuff they did just wild things and so I'm sure there are studies like that but I made that one up but I wanted just to just there was that happens to certain people it happens to me when I was a little kid if there was a threat I learned to step toward it rather than back off from it because there's a lot it's a lot more efficient you're you're closer to the guy when you have to hit him and so there is a fundamental difference between people if something bad happens some people step forward and most people step backward and I wanted to illustrate that that's happening to reach her as a young kid that was the first fight a-about I was three years old my elder brother was a real geek and a nerd and little emaciated kid with big sticky-out ears and he was always bullied and particularly by this kid from the next street called Nikki I remember really really well and I was out with my brother and sure enough Nikki shows up and starts taunting him and Richard my brother spoke back and I thought great great he's gonna stand up to him there's going to be a fight I thought wonderful and I was already watched this fight between Richard and Nikki and Richard said if you say that again I'll smash you and I thought wonderful and so of course Nikki said it again so rich had been the smart guy that he was he said Lee smashed Nikki right well okay one over there highly to no doubt on process for a second you talk about writing story like inventing the story as you write it but also looking backwards that what you've written to figure out what the story is that you're trying to tell with Maine and birds at the end of writing do you then revisit the whole thing to tease out the elements and the shape of the story that's emerged or do you just trust the process of driving by looking in the rearview mirror well at the end of the process I'm always aware of I I still have a kind of disjunction between this type of book needs a lot of pace you know needs a lot of forward momentum momentum and so you're racing through it you're burning through ideas and I always still after 23 books fear the book is going to be too short because of that and so I'm always aware at the end of it I've left in a couple of maybe paragraphs a couple you know maybe six lines here are there six lines on one page or something there a baggie and I at the time I know they're crap but I don't take them out because I think the books gonna be too short anyway I can't take out another six lines but of course I get to the end of book it's perfectly long enough so then I I go back and take out those two baggy sections maybe and then I don't do anything else i I never rewrite I never change anything because you know I'm I'm a normal rational person believe me but at the time that I'm writing it this is happening this is what is happening and I felt I feel instinctively somehow that to go back and change it is dishonest this is what happened you can't it's like you know you look in the back of your closet and there's a shoebox full of those old photographs in the 1970s and you with your terrible hair and your terrible clothes it's who you were you know you can't alter it and so I just leave it as this is what happened in my editor sometime says to me wouldn't it be better if this happened after that and I say yeah probably but it didn't so so your work with Granada your work in television you weren't doing scripts you weren't on know that so you never had to deal with the notes from the network and the notes from the studio and the notes from the director and notes from the star and any anybody's notes no I've done that subsequently I mean in television I was a director and so there was a lot of covert rewriting when stuff wasn't working but you could never take credit for that because it would offend the actual writer but I've done it subsequently I had a wallet you know I said in 2005 the deal went to Paramount and Kruse Wagner the there was a disappointed suitor to that deal that we did not go with who wanted to he was just desperate for some some part of me or something and so he gave me this project that was a great great capsule pitch it was a really great pitch but the actual screenplay was unbelievably bad it was like has this guy ever seen a movie it was a terrible screenplay so he wanted me to rewrite it which I did and I really loved it I loved the rewriting I wrote a really really good script of course he never got made because so many things don't but it was a really satisfying thing to do but then those those story conferences afterwards dry drove me nuts because you know literally every cliche you've ever heard could he have a dog maybe the dose gut maybe the dogs only got three legs maybe the dog got cancer and there was there was one scene it was basically a terrorist movie and they were gonna dump some poison in a reservoir and so there was this scene low camera angle pushing through a cornfield west of Chicago and suddenly there's a big clearing and there's a white helicopter ready to take off and dump the poison and I remembered you know we got to that scene you know that white helicopter could it be black [Laughter] and I sort of figured it out later though that they were they were thinking ahead to the point where we all come out of the movie theater and we're on the sidewalk lighting our cigarettes and we say I really loved that part where they want that part to be their idea and the only way to make it their idea is to have every idea so it's all it's a necessary part of the process but then that that got that led to other things like then did story doctoring for for this guy where I would get calls at midnight you know they've been Toronto shooting a movie and you know the last scenes not working so would I read the screenplay and rewrite the last scene for six o'clock the next morning and I'd loved doing that too I love working at night I love fixing things I had I had a really nice time doing there and then he would start sending me he had title problems with a couple of movies he would send me the the pre-release DVD would I look at it and suggest a title I had a really good thing going with that but unfortunately no more because that guy was Harvey Weinstein how much do you get paid for a title I got charged him you know the original screenplay deal I had had a polish fee and a 40 grand and I anything he wanted me to do was 40 grand so if you came up with a one-word title you're getting 40 grand a word that's pretty good rate what do we have do we have something else here we have backlash for other yeah thank you Lee I'm continuously amazed as someone even though we have more or less a shared language someone who basically it sounds like you were in England until the mid 90s all your books you just nail American culture and colloquialisms and for someone even though we have such a shared you know movies and the Beatles and whatever you just nail things as if you're a native I'm just how do you do that well you know I moved here in 1998 but I had been my first visit to the u.s. was 1974 because in college I married an American woman and she you know therefore visiting her relatives most of our vacations were here and between 1974 when I first came in 1998 when I emigrated completely legally I hasten to point out part of the legal immigration process is you got to go through a whole lot of weird stuff including when you show up at the port of entry on your date of immigration you have to be carrying in your hand a chest x-ray proving that you do not have tuberculosis there's a whole lot of stuff to go through and one of the things you go through is you have to list every previous visit to the US so that they can presumably check for police records or felonies or whatever and so I had to dig out all my old passports in between 74 and 98 which is 24 years there were exactly 100 visits so I knew I felt I knew America pretty well especially because American culture you know you do not spend a lot of time hiding it under a bushel it is all around the world every single country in the world British papers are about British news and American news French papers are about French news and American news you know it's a huge globally dominant thing and I also believe that as an outsider I see better you know I see stuff that you are so familiar with you no longer see it's all new and fresh to me so I would actually argue is easier to write about a country that it or a culture that is not exactly your own because you know that you can't relax for a minute you can't take anything for granted I felt I feel like if I was writing about Britain I would be kind of yo-yoing between familiarity and invention in a way that would be confusing in a sense whereas with the u.s. I have to be careful about everything I have to be totally in the zone about everything and I think it is actually easier so if you intended as a compliment I accept it it's completely spurious Lee actually I think it's simpler to do thank you all right we should do about three more and then we have to let Lee sign we had two a one here in the first row if you could bring to my cup right right here in first row thank you my question I had a question about why you choose the first person in some books and why you use the first person first and because they're very different obviously different storytelling techniques so I was hoping you could elaborate on that yeah I mean I think that the the most natural way of telling a story obviously is in the first person I did this I did that that is how we all tell stories you know unless you're seriously weird you're going to go home and say I did this I went there you don't refer to yourself in the third person so it's natural its organic it's a very quick and and personal introduction to the character it's an instant bond with the character but there are two disadvantages with the first person one is that you can only know what the hero knows that point of view control again you can find to his eyes and his brain you know nothing that he doesn't know and in the classic thriller form you want to know more than that you want the meanwhile back at the ranch you want the a role in the B role they are going to collide at some point so thrillers plot wise are much easier in third person and first person gets a little bit stressful for the for the author because it's so pompous iiiii it feels very very self-centered and it feels a little more relaxed to be able to step back and refer to the character in the third person and there are certain things that you can say in the third person you can say he's a good looking guy who women like him you can say that perfectly easily you can't say hey I'm a good-looking guy you can't say that and so it's its strengths and weaknesses I guess I would prefer to do first-person all the time since simply because it's the most natural but it is it's hard and it is very confining to the plot yeah the first person would be the natural preference but third person works much better for the story generally speaking and a little little distance from the character I mean Reacher cannot actually bear too much ironic distance I have to be totally on reaches side but I find it easier to talk to talk about him as he rather than I you ever you know change gears in midstream like write one chapter and say oh I wrote it in first person but I think this one would be bearing a third now I usually start out with that with a sort of general sense I'm gonna need the bad guys point of view and therefore that dictates third-person from the start I had two more questions this is a bucket list moment for me to my favorite writers in the same room thank you the other thing really is why the name Jack Reacher well it was you remember I said that I I was trying to be distinctive and not to in the sense that I didn't want to do the soap opera thing that everybody else was doing I wanted to carve out my own territory part of that was reacting against certain things and in particular I had a there was a guy that had started out just a few years before me that I'd read his I'd read his early books and I knew this guy was gonna be huge and so I thought all right I'm not gonna do what you do and this was Michael Connelly who early on I knew is going to be fine and his guys called Hieronymous and so I thought alright my guy's gonna have the simplest name I can find and I figured what are the simplest names Jack and Joe probably so one was going to be breacher and the other was going to be his brother and the richer and the richer itself was that came from my wife it was you know like I said I did not I wasn't deluded enough to think I'm gonna write a series of 23 books or whatever but I hoped you know I kind of hoped it would work at least for a while so they figured all right the name is going to be reasonably important with a bit of luck people are gonna start mentioning this name or thinking about this name so the name was crucial and I really couldn't come up with anything I couldn't come up with a good name at all and like I said I was out of work and the huge problem with being out of work is that you're at home all the time and therefore your wife assumes that you're available for errands and she said to me we got to go to the supermarket I knee my wife she claims she's 5 foot 1 and she's at actually 4 foot 11 she she said I got to go to the supermarket to help her drag the heavy stuff home so I said fine so we went into the supermarket and every single time I've ever been in a supermarket which by now must be well into double figures there is always always a little old lady who says to me oh you're a nice tall gentleman could you reach me that box and so my wife said you know what if this writing cake doesn't work out you could be a Reacher in a supermarket [Laughter] that that the question of names does bring up the also the question of you your name is not actually li child your you so you've started writing under a pseudonym why why did you choose a pseudonym rather than your your birth name well for habit basically you know I originally I started that before television I was in the theater and backstage assistant stage manager in the theater and in Britain the the Union for Assistant for sedation management is the same as actors its Actors Equity and British Actors Equity had a firm rule that if your name was the same as an established member you could not use your name and so there was actually a character actor who had my actual name so I was obliged to work under a different name at the beginning and then that just became a habit then I went to Granada where I was under contract I was a staff director which meant that if I wanted to do anything that was interesting as a side project or moonlight for a friend or something like that I had to do it under a pseudonym that was the convention so altogether I I was thrown started up the other night it's either six or seven names I've worked under and it just seemed to me obvious that you start a new project you have a new name and I wanted to my own name is is Jim grant and that is I anecdotally I've always found that a hard name for people to hear and repeat they they don't they think it's brown or Brant or especially on the phone or something like that and this is such a word-of-mouth business that you do not want your name to be subject to confusion so I wanted a name that was easy to understand and child is is also a noun as well as a name with warm associations that for most people and it's crucially let us see which is you know I started out in the analog era where we had shelved books in the store and used in the West we browsed from left to right we get bored and fatigued very quickly and to be in the c-section it was absolutely I checked this when I was starting out in 1994 I was working all this out 63% that best sellers were written by authors beginning with see you know it's such an obvious visual thing that it like I said this is a it's an art it's a joy it's creative it's wonderful all those good things but it's also a business and you've got to take both sides of it equally seriously look at wikipedia says it's because it was between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie that's made up I mean it's you very rarely find Christie and Chandler's show up in the same spot I mean Barnes and Noble and shelved in in general fiction not mystery fiction I don't know why but I never thought of that it was just I wanted to see and I wanted something that was easy to hear and repeat alright one more question there's got a good one here don't be intimidated okay there's over there so if the stories are falling out of you as you're writing do you ever get to the end and find yourself surprised what happened oh yeah all the time I mean there's two kinds of surprises one is that you you know something just really wonderful comes along that is irresistible you've got to go down that direction which then leads you to a great conclusion and then there's those sort of surprises where the shorthand is the character takes over which is really I mean who is doing the typing here the character does not take over what it actually means is that your head was not sufficiently in the game you weren't totally in the zone and your subconscious is telling you that you're screwing up you know there was a there was a - scene in one of the books where there's there's a veteran in the hospital with a brain injury and you know he's very touchingly described he's got a breathing tube taped in and he's in a vegetative state but his wife wants him treated with dignity so research offers to shave him so there's this scene where Reacher's shaving this guy and then I realized wait a minute he's got a breathing tube tape to his face was that possible and that's the sort of surprise where you're not in the zone enough so yeah there's those two sources prizes but and there are things that you just put in in my very first book I put in a thing about glasses somebody was wearing eyeglasses and that was just purely a page paragraph Hillary it was just a filler paragraph and then a couple of chapters later I realized wow that's a great thing I can use that going forward and you lay these gifts to yourself along the way and some of them you don't use and that doesn't matter because they're interesting in themselves but some of them you really can exploit later to to wonderful effect well thank you Lee thank you all very much thank you we will we will send Lee out to the lobby now if you guys could hold out till he gets set up I asked him last night about his you know signing procedures and basically he will personalize your books and he says photographs are okay and you'll sign anything that they present to you within reason anything that's that's a check or a confession all right so my guys will escort you out and I'll see you out there shortly and we'll let him get settled and then we'll send out a few a few you guys to join him but thank you thank you for for coming everyone it's been great I hope some of you will come back further some of our other events that we have here we have quite a few good ones coming up some people are sneaking out already I hope they're just leaving and not trying to jump the line let's start with this side the last three rows here this side the last three rows thank you
