‘He’s ninety per cent me,’ Lee said, when on 14 January 2019 he first mentioned to me the idea of handing the Reacher franchise on to the youngest of his three brothers, Andrew. ‘Maybe even ninety-five per cent.’ It would be ‘the same but different’, his mantra since the early days, ever since his father told him that was what he looked for in a good book. Inspired advice for the man whose body of work––consisting of a loose sequence of twenty-four novels featuring a single unchanging character––would be described by Robert Macfarlane in November 2020 as perhaps ‘the great, experimental roman-fleuve of our time’.
Superficially it was true enough. They had the same parents. Both consumed books voraciously and grew to the same height of six foot four inches (brothers one and three were five foot eight; the shot above shows Andrew, Richard and Jim/Lee). They went to the same university in Sheffield, the older to read Law, the younger English; they shared a love of Shakespeare and each paid their dues in the theatre; both had American wives and had become writers later in life. They both wrote thrillers. Andrew’s thrillers, and his views on writing them, owed much to the towering presence of his big brother, whose influence over a generation of thriller writers was both indisputable and inescapable.
Andrew had bragging rights, too. Aged twenty-six, in March 1995, he––along with Lee’s wife and fourteen-year-old daughter––was one of the first to read the original draft of Killing Floor, then known as ‘Bad Luck and Trouble’, or ‘Bad’ for short. One of the first to give Reacher the thumbs-up and surrender to the spell. He’d lived with Reacher from the start, in both literary and biographical terms. Frankly, there was no disputing his claim to the kingdom. No doubting he was ‘a safe pair of hands’, in the go-to metaphor among early readers of The Sentinel, the first iteration of the Reacher reboot (where Lee’s original ethical thug, inflected by Andrew’s previous career in telecommunications, becomes something of a techie). Blood was thicker than water.
Adopting Reacher out was an entirely natural and sentimental move. ‘I’m very tribal,’ Lee commented. But it could also be rationalised aesthetically, in the same way Lee had justified the casting of Tom Cruise (and would any other actor), as someone else’s interpretation of a character that transcended his creator, like a cover version of a hit song, or a remix. It merely ratified his own superstar status. The original twenty-four books would remain intact, inviolate––nothing and no one could change the words that he, Lee Child, had committed to the page. It was win-win all round.
The argument was legitimate, dispassionate, and above all pragmatic. As such, it was entirely characteristic of Jim Grant.
But it was possible to contest that high percentage. Or argue that the residual five to ten per cent punched above its mathematical weight. Because the ‘different’ mattered as much as the ‘same’. Which was why back at the beginning Lee had determined to use his second book, Die Trying, to extend Reacher’s range by telling the story in the third person rather than the first, and having his hero collaborate with the Pentagon rather than fly solo in some fictional back-of-beyond.
Andrew, born in May 1968, was the first of his brothers to at last convince the teenage Jim that he wasn’t a changeling. They were alike in character, as well as stature, and similarly at odds with their stiflingly middle-class parents. But they didn’t grow up together under the same roof and their relationship was never tested by close proximity (perhaps fortunately, since each is on record as saying they ‘don’t play well with others’). The earliest picture I have of them together dates from 1969, when Jim was around fifteen and Andrew not yet two. You could be forgiven for assuming that the already adult brother Richard, with babe in arms, was the father, and Jim the doting uncle––Andrew is closer in age to Lee’s daughter than to Lee himself.
Never mind the same, the differences run deep. Blessed or cursed, Lee feels acutely defined––branded, even––by the time and place in which he was born, a point he insisted on throughout the time I was writing his biography. He is at pains to highlight the bleak postwar years of his boyhood, the fact that a ration card was taken out in his name, the Midlands metalworkers who forged him as person and writer, the obsessive desire to escape. And his means of escape was Reacher, not only in economic terms, from the age of forty onwards, but going right back to his childhood, as an anonymous but recognisable alter ego, sought out through reading and lived out in the playground. Jim was playing out his heroic fantasies long before he ever dreamed of reinventing himself as Lee Child. Had it not been for the ‘real’ Reacher of his multi-million-selling novels, Jim might not have got further than American in-laws and a foothold in upstate New York. But with Reacher at his side, the sky was the limit.
None of this applies to Andrew. By the time Andrew was born, the Beatles were already old news, the curtain had gone down on those grey postwar years and life was being lived in flower-power technicolour. And whereas Lee was born in Coventry but grew up in nearby Birmingham, Andrew was born in Birmingham but grew up down south in Harpenden. He didn’t go to the same schools as Jim. He was (more) a home counties than a Birmingham boy. In Lee’s worldview, differences didn’t come much bigger than that.
Jim was an unappreciated second son, overlooked in favour of a high-maintenance firstborn. Andrew was the baby of the family, ‘a happy accident’ as Lee described him, smiled upon by a trio of amused older brothers. Jim had taken him to Leicester Square to see Star Wars on its release and generally tried to compensate for any lack of parental affection. Andrew may likewise have ‘chafed’ and rebelled against his parents, but it’s safe to say that he was demonstrably loved as a child in a way the young Jim had never been. And the teenage Andrew had supportive escape built in. Whereas Jim had stayed out all night, turned up at school high, and had several close calls with the law, at fourteen Andrew was a regular house guest in Manchester, at one degree of separation from the Golden Age of British television, spreading his wings under the protective eye of a stand-in father, and himself a loving uncle to baby Ruth.
Put simply, Andrew didn’t need Jack Reacher the way Jim had. And had Reacher not already existed, it seems unlikely that Andrew would ever have invented him. But by 2019 Reacher had done his job ten times over. Lee didn’t need him anymore. There was only one problem––his readers did.
Luckily, the solution was staring him in the face. Ultimately––it was one of his most firmly held beliefs––for a book to work it had to be the product of a single mind. But Lee could trust his ‘little’ brother to hold the baby. Even if it did weigh in at two hundred and fifty pounds and six foot five.
Heather Martin’s authorised biography of Lee Child, The Reacher Guy, is published by Constable at Little, Brown in the UK, and in the US by Pegasus Books.
