Jack Reacher has millions of fans worldwide, but its creator, Lee Child, has revealed that he doesn’t “like Reacher that much” and originally planned to finish his best-selling thriller series by having his character “bleed to death in a dirty motel. ” bathroom floor. ”
Child said he had a motto about his former 6-foot-5-inch cop in the US military: “I need you to like me less than you will.”
According to its editors, its 24 novels about Reacher, a lonely wanderer who corrects mistakes before continuing, with the toothbrush in his pocket, faced with the following problem, have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.
“The best thing you can do is not get too close to the character,” Child said. “That is what keeps him alive, honest and authentic. There are many series in which the author clearly falls in love with the character and begins to be too protective. I have always been very hard at heart. I don’t really like Reacher; I am in full control of him. I am the only person in the world who is afraid of it. “
Child described Reacher as “the lone noble, the mysterious stranger, essentially the knight errant,” and said that he came as a character “almost fully formed.” Child recently announced that he would be handing over the series to his brother, Andrew Grant, rather than continuing it himself.
But this had not always been his plan, he told the Guardian. At first, he thought he would have to end the series with the brutal murder of his main character. “Initially I had the idea that in the last book I would die in a blaze of glory or noble personal sacrifice. It would have been difficult to plan, because he is a very capable guy, but there would have been some situation where he would have to either give up on the person he was protecting or give up on himself, and he would obviously give up and bleed to death. some dirty motel bathroom floor.
This last book even had a title, Die Lonely. But when he mentioned it to fans, “they would growl in abject misery,” he said, so he had to rethink.
“I thought that maybe we could have a metaphorical version, where he goes to the bus station to leave the city, but he stops and thinks: ‘Maybe I will stay here and adopt a dog.’
“But I moved through that and thought, ‘Let’s just let Andrew move on.’ He really is me 15 years ago, still full of energy, still full of ideas, and so I think this is the perfect solution,” he said. Child.
“I thought it would work until I couldn’t do it anymore, but he [Reacher] It proved to be so genuinely popular, that people really like it, and I started to feel a little bit of responsibility to keep it going. “
Sara Paretsky, by contrast, has no plans to pass on her creation, Chicago private eye VI Warshawski. She said, “I have to put in writing that there will be no one to take over the series when I die,” he said.
“People in the industry talk about the character being your ‘brand.’ Well, thanks, she is not Pampers or a tampon, she is a living person in my imagination, not a commodity to be bought and sold by other people. I was very surprised when I read the news about what Lee Child was doing. “
When Paretsky started writing his best-selling series, which now has 20 books, he wanted to age Warshawski in real time. However, it stopped at about 50 “because I just don’t want VI to be helpless.”
For Child, a long-running series works because while the plots change, the central character of the story remains the same.
“If you study English literature, they teach you that the character must change and go on a journey. I want the opposite very much, ”he said. “As a reader, I love the series because of the familiarity, so I’ve worked hard to keep Reacher from changing. So people love series: it’s like putting on an old, comfortable sweater, they know what they’re going to get. “
Ian Rankin has taken a different approach with his creation, the curmudgeon John Rebus, who has aged “more or less in real time” as the series progresses. “That keeps him cool, that keeps me interested in him, because he’s not the same person he was when I started writing,” Rankin said.
But “there are problems with that, as I have discovered,” he said. “He had to withdraw. He retired twice, in fact. She retired at the end of Exit Music, because she had reached the mandatory retirement age for police detectives in Scotland. I found a way to keep him in the force by working as a civilian for a while. So even that had to come to an end.
“But I keep finding things for him to do. I am writing one right now. Now he has health problems, but he is still getting into trouble and the mysteries are still to be solved. “
