A question I’m rarely asked and would have seemed obvious:

What do I think of the Guards?

I have the height of respect for them. They are still unarmed, and the new breed of criminal is armed to the teeth.

Every weekend, when the young folk go on the piss, young girls go into the water, usually in the canals and usually about three in the morning. Young Guards plunge into that freezing water and rescue them.

And how do the Guards feel about me?

Mmmmm…

When The Killing of the Tinkers was published, a parcel came through my door, a solid silver Zippo with the Garda insignia on it and a note that read,

“We don’t always approve of what you write,

but keep it up.”

It’s not exactly an endorsement, but, you know, it sure made my day. And what impressed me most?

It was primed, fueled, flinted.

You might say,

Good to go…

As is Jack, for one more run at it.

Or, perhaps… limp at it.

Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England. His family soon moved to Birmingham, where he went to the same high school that J. R. R. Tolkien once attended. He received a formal English education, reading Latin, Greek, and Old English, then attended law school in Sheffield. After working in the theater, he began an eighteen-year career with Granada Television in Manchester. When he was made redundant due to restructuring, he embarked on a fiction-writing career.

Jack Reacher, who has been featured in all of Child’s novels, made his first appearance in 1997 in Killing Floor, which was an immediate success, winning both the Anthony and Barry awards for best first novel of the year. The series has increased in popularity each year, with foreign rights selling widely around the world, while making regular appearances on major bestseller lists everywhere. One Shot, Child’s 2005 novel, is in development with Paramount Pictures.

The James Bond-ish Child drives a supercharged Jaguar and divides his time between the south of France and Manhattan, where he has become an enthusiastic fan of the New York Yankees. He is married and has a daughter.

How far back should I go with this? Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997-Saint Patrick’s Day-when Putnam published Killing Floor in the US, which was Reacher’s-and my-debut. But I can trace his genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February of 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse.

What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term-I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me except one woman.

At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?”

I said, “I’m going to write books.”

Why that answer? And why then?

I had always been an insatiable reader. All genres, all the time, but very unstructured. I naturally gravitated toward crime, adventure, and thrillers, but for a long time in the UK we lacked genre stores and fan magazines, and of course the Internet hadn’t started yet, so there was no effective network capable of leading a reader from one thing to the next. As a result, I had come across some very obscure stuff while being completely ignorant of many major figures. For instance, in February of 1988-while the ink was still drying on our new TV contracts-I took a vacation in the Yucatan. I flew back via Miami and picked up John D. MacDonald’s The Lonely Silver Rain at the bookstall in the airport. I had never heard of MacDonald or Travis McGee. I read the book on the plane back to London and loved it.

I was back in the States at Easter that year and bought every McGee title I could find, which added up to about a linear yard’s worth.

Nobody needs me to sing MacDonald’s praises, but that yard of books did more for me than provide excellent entertainment. For some reason the McGee books spoke to me like textbooks. I felt I could see what MacDonald was doing, and why, and how, as if I could see the skeleton beneath the skin. I read them all that summer, and by New Year’s Eve I was completely sure that when the ax fell, I wanted to do what MacDonald had done. I could stay in the entertainment business but work for myself in the world of books.

It took six years for the ax to fall. But fall it did, and so it came time to make good on that earlier ambition. I went to W.H. Smith’s store in the Manchester Arndale mall-which the IRA destroyed a year later-and bought three legal pads, a pencil, a pencil sharpener, and an eraser. The bill was a penny under four pounds.

(I read Ngaio Marsh’s essay in Otto Penzler’s 1978 book The Great Detectives, and she reports doing very much the same thing, except that 1931 prices were radically lower than 1994’s, and she didn’t buy an eraser-maybe she already had one, or was more self-confident than I was.) Then I sat down with my purchases and let years of half-formed thoughts take shape. But not just six years of thoughts-now I have to take the process back another thirty years or so, to the point when my reading habit first took hold.

I had found that I liked some things in books and disliked other things. I had always been drawn to outlaws. I liked cleverness and ingenuity. I liked the promise of intriguing revelations. I disliked a hero who was generally smart but did something stupid three-quarters of the way through the book, merely to set up the last part of the action. Detectives on the trail who walked into rooms and got hit over the head from behind just didn’t do it for me. And I liked winners. I was vaguely uneasy with the normal story arc that has a guy lose, lose, lose before he wins in the end. I liked to see something done spectacularly well. In sports, I liked crushing victories rather than ninth-inning nail-biters.

Some of my reading was directed, of course, in school. I was part of probably the last generation ever to receive a classical English education. I read Latin and Greek and Old English, all the ancient myths and medieval sagas and poems. I met the “knight errant” at its source.

Then I took a law degree at university. I never intended to be a lawyer, but the subject knit together all my nonfiction interests-history, politics, economics, sociology… and language. Legal language strives for concision and avoids ambiguity wherever possible. The result is inevitably dull, but all that striving and avoiding really teaches a person how to write.

Then I went to work in the theater, which back then featured plenty of experimental theater, some of it good, most of it awful, and I developed a growing contempt for those who saw their minimal audiences as badges of honor.