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Lee Child
"I'm a naturally belligerent person. Show me a challenge, and I'll beat it or die trying."
Lee Child is the man behind the world-renowned Jack Reacher novels. These thriller novels follow the adventures of Jack Reacher, former American military policeman. As Child himself puts it, they are ‘revenge’ novels, in which someone does something terrible, then Reacher takes revenge.
There are currently more than 25 novels in the Jack Reacher series, including Die Trying, Echo Burning, Without Fail, and One Shot. The series has been adapted for film starring Tom Cruise, and more recently has been made into a television series.
Meet Lee Child
Lee Child (real name James Dover Grant) was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended.
He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theatre he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV's "golden age." During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker.
Child was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars' worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series. The book was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new instalment.
Lee has three homes - an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever air-plane cabin he happens to be in while travelling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.