Lee Child

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Lee Child (2009)

Lee Child CBE (born October 29, 1954 in Coventry , Great Britain ) is a British - American thriller writer . He is known for his novels, which always focus on the former US military policeman Jack Reacher . The name Lee Child is a pseudonym for the actual name James Dover Grant . Child's worldwide circulation is 60 million in 96 countries.

Life

Child grew up in Birmingham and studied law at Sheffield University in the 1970s . In 1998 he moved to the United States . He lives in Manhattan today .

He got into writing when his production career at Granada Television in Manchester ended in 1995 with a layoff due to cost savings. Since he had been a works council there for the past two years , his employment opportunities at other media companies were minimal.

He repeatedly admits in interviews that commercial reasons led him to write, although he had obviously been drawn to entertainment all his life. He had devoted so much time to theater at Sheffield University while he was a law student that he had to retake a few exams.

The later employment with the entertainment medium television seems to have been a consequence of this tendency. From his time in television, when Granada produced the award-winning series Brideshead Revisited , The Jewel in the Crown and Prime Suspect , he says he has taken with him the conviction that commercialism need not reduce literary standards to the lowest possible level.

Lee Child states that the first books he devoured were exciting children's books by Enid Blyton and WE Johns , and later the novels by Alistair MacLean . In his childhood he did not read westerns, with which one could definitely compare his books. Only after he had finished some of his novels did he read Zane Gray and find parallels, which is probably due to the fact that the patterns are much older than the respective genre.

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Lee Child in September 2005

The main character of all of Childs' previous novels is the former military policeman Jack Reacher , a man with a strong sense of justice, upright and tough, without family ties, violent and merciless in combat.

Child began work on the first Reacher novel when it became clear that Granada would part with him. This debut novel The Killing Floor (German translation: megalomania ) was an immediate success and received two prestigious literary awards. Meanwhile, Lee Child has a large fan base around the world who call themselves Reacher Creatures .

He knows that his books are big sellers among US ultra-conservatives, although Reacher is also committed to helping the underprivileged. Child calls his union involvement at Granada Television his reacher moment , i.e. the point where he and his protagonist have the greatest thing in common: the interest in enforcing justice at all costs - even that of one's own existence.

According to Child, his style was not trained in literary but in factual and specialist texts. The very terse, sometimes mannered main sentence-heavy style of his first novels has become smoother and easier to read over the course of the book series and is only used as a kind of identification mark at the beginning or in action scenes. His physics teacher forced him to write briefly and avoid ambiguity, says Child today. Likewise, the need to write precise office memos or trailer texts for television, in which a clear punch line was important, shaped his writing style.

The film Jack Reacher is based on Child's Roman Sniper (original title of the novel: One Shot ). In this film, Child has a cameo as a police officer. The second Reacher film , which came out in cinemas in autumn 2016, is based on the novel Die Haunted (original title of the novel: Never go back ). In this strip, too, Lee appears briefly as an airport employee.

In January 2020, Child announced The Sentinel, the 25th volume in the Jack Reacher series. The book will be published in English on October 25, 2020 and will be the first in the series that Child has written with his younger brother Andrew. As Child announced at the same time, he plans to write further books in the series together with his brother and in the medium term to hand over the continuation of the novel series completely to his brother.

Novels

  • 1997 Killing Floor . Putnam, New York City 1997, ISBN 0-399-14253-3 .
    • Megalomania , 1st Reacher book, German by Marie Rahn, Heyne, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-87957-0 .
  • 1998 The Trying
  • 1999 Tripwire
  • 2000 The Visitor - US title: Running Blind
    • Zeit der Rache , 4th reacher book, German by Georg Schmidt, Goldmann, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-442-35715-2 .
  • 2001 Echo Burning
    • In the last second , 5th Reacher book, German by Wulf Bergner, Goldmann, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-442-35577-X .
  • 2002 Without Fail
    • Deadly Intent , 6th Reacher Book, German by Wulf Bergner, Goldmann, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7645-0164-2 .
  • 2003 Persuader
    • Der Janusmann , 7th Reacher book, German by Wulf Bergner, Goldmann, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7645-0181-2 .
  • 2004 The Enemy
    • The hit list , 8th Reacher book, German by Wulf Bergner, Goldmann, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7645-0182-0 .
  • 2005 One Shot
    • Sniper , 9th Reacher Book, German by Wulf Bergner, Goldmann, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-7645-0237-1 .
  • 2006 The Hard Way
  • 2007 Bad Luck and Trouble
  • 2008 Nothing to Lose
  • 2009 Gone Tomorrow
  • 2010 61 hours
    • 61 hours , 14th Reacher book (1st book of the Susan Turner tetralogy), German by Wulf Bergner, Blanvalet, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-7645-0418-2 .
  • 2010 Worth Dying For
    • Waspennest , 15th Reacher book (2nd book of the Susan Turner tetralogy), German by Wulf Bergner, Blanvalet, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7645-0419-9 .
  • 2011 Second Son , short story (story chronology: Jack Reacher as a teenager - published as an e-book and as part of a paperback edition of "The Affair")
  • 2011 The Affair 16th Reacher book (story chronology: Jack Reacher's last case in the army [between The Enemy and Killing Floor ])
  • 2012 Deep Down , published as an e-book and as part of a paperback edition of "The Affair".
  • 2012 A Wanted Man
    • Der Anhalter , 17th Reacher book (3rd book of the Susan Turner tetralogy - chronologically after Worth Dying For ), German by Wulf Bergner, Blanvalet, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-0-593-06573-0 .
  • 2013 High Heat , short story (story chronology: Jack Reacher as a teenager [between Second Son and Deep Down ] - published as an e-book and as part of the paperback edition of "A Wanted Man")
  • 2013 Never go back
    • Die Gejagt , 18th Reacher book (4th book of the Susan Turner tetralogy - chronologically after A Wanted Man ), German by Wulf Bergner, Blanvalet, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-7645-0542-4 .
  • 2014 Personal , 19th Reacher Book
  • 2015 Small Wars , short story
  • 2015 Make Me , 20th Reacher Book
  • 2016 Night School , 21st Reacher Book
  • 2017 No Middle Name . Delacorte Press, New York 2017, ISBN 978-0-399-59358-1 . (This anthology compiles the Reacher short stories published to date and includes an additional, Too Much Time , which leads into The Midnight Line .)
    • The loner: 12 Jack Reacher Stories , German by Wulf Bergner, Blanvalet, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-7645-0652-0 .
  • 2017 The Midnight Line , 22nd Reacher Book
  • 2018 Past Tense , 23rd Reacher Book
  • 2019 Blue Moon , 24th Reacher Book
  • 2020 Sentinel , 25th Reacher Book, in collaboration with Andrew Child

Non-fiction

  • 2019 The Hero
    • The hero: How heroes change the world, and why we need them today more than ever before - An essay , German by Wulf Bergner, Blanvalet, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-7645-0735-0 .

Awards

Web links

Commons : Lee Child  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lee Child on Encyclopedia of World Biography ; Retrieved November 30, 2010
  2. ↑ David Smith: Sacked at 40 and on the scrapheap. Now Brummie tops US book charts . The Guardian. June 22, 2008. Retrieved July 8, 2008.
  3. ↑ Andrea Sachs: Lee Child on His New Thriller, Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher and Wandering Heroes In: Time, September 12, 2012.
  4. ↑ a b Lee Child Explains His 'Jack Reacher: Never Go Back' Cameo - Exclusive Image. In: Entertainment Weekly. October 5, 2016, accessed October 7, 2019 .
  5. ^ "New Book Announcement" - Contribution from the official Facebook account of Lee Child
personal data
SURNAME Child, Lee
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grant, James Dover (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American thriller writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Coventry