Review: The Reacher Guy: The Authorised Biography of Lee Child, Heather Martin

Heather Martin has written an exhaustive authorised biography of the celebrated crime writer who recently retired and handed his record-smashing franchise to his younger brother. If anything, it’s a little too exhaustive.

It dwells at great length on the early life of Jim Grant (his real name), family environment and the society in which he grew up – a grim postwar Britain he did not delay in leaving for New York once he hit the big time.

She has done a scholarly job, a social and cultural history as much as a biography, particularly in depicting the rise, operation and fall of Granada as a major public TV producer and broadcaster. This includes fascinating insights into the job Child held for decades, until age 40, in programming. This was highly technical and skilled role (now completely automated) before the redundancy that both sparked Child’s writing career and influenced his unforgettable character.

Martin has clearly spent years on this book and got to know Child as well as you would imagine possible.

Details of Child’s life and character are thoroughly, almost obsessively, tied to the Reacher novels, and she makes a real, sympathetic yet clear-eyed attempt to understand the man behind them.

I couldn’t help thinking it might be flattering to be written about in such detail, as though every aspect of you was interesting; surely this biographer has tried harder to understand and catalogue her subject than many people’s closest loved ones ever do.

It is not nearly as effortless or enjoyable a read as the Reacher books; indeed, I found it very slow. The opening failed to grab me and I put it down for several months, and even when I picked it back up I was frequently tempted to skim and a few times to give up altogether. I wondered whether it was quite necessary to include what felt like every person who had ever known Child and their family background as well. This won insights, sure, but these sometimes felt repetitious and laboured. I felt the book could have done with a good hard prune by an editor focused on creating a story readable for the mainstream (that is, Reacher readers) instead of a 500-page tome you’d expect more for a biography of Churchill.

Thankfully, about two-thirds through it finally engrossed me by getting to Child’s craft, its principles and processes, and the structures and people supporting his surprisingly delayed rise to fame. It gave these a similarly thorough treatment and was excellent food for thought for a writer, full of fun nuggets of wisdom and trivia and well depicting the mixture of inspiration, luck and hard work that anyone needs for success, and indicating the size and strategy of the marketing machine surrounding Child (and the size and deployment of his eye-watering resulting fortune).

It is a shame the details of the handover of the franchise were not included in the discussion about Child’s retirement. It would have been intriguing to hear something about the brothers writing together or any training or oversight Andrew Child received. I gather from reading between the lines that the publishers are keen to preserve the idea that Child has an active hand in them and this is perhaps no longer the case, so it would make sense they might not want the handover process examined.  

Beyond this, it is hard to imagine that any further biography will be required of Lee Child. I feel this is about as definitive as it gets.

If you’re a writer, or academic, who loves Lee Child books and is keenly interested in the craft, industry machinations and context that led to his domination of the global market, read this.

If you’re a fan with an inexhaustible interest in Lee Child and exactly how he and his life history correlate to his books and main character Jack Reacher, read this.

If you’re anyone else, perhaps think twice.