Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Bad Luck and Trouble

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Bad Luck and Trouble

Lee Child was born in the exact geographic center of England, in the heart of the industrial badlands. The sort of place where minor disputes were settled with box cutters and bicycle chains. He's got the scars to prove it. But he survived, got an education, and went to university where he spent most of his time in the university theater; after which he went to work for Granada Television in Manchester. Over eighteen years he was involved with more than 40,000 hours of the company's program output. He also wrote thousands of links, trailers, commercials and news stories, most of them on deadlines that ranged from fifteen minutes to fifteen seconds. So the thought of a novel-a-year didn't worry him too much, in his next career.

But why a next career? He was fired in 1995 during a "downsizing". After eighteen years, he was an expensive veteran, and he was also the union organizer, and neither thing fit the company's plan for the future. He had an idea for a character who had suffered the same downsizing experience but who was taking it completely in his stride. He named the character Jack Reacher and wrote Killing Floor as fast as he could. He needed to sell it before his severance check ran out. He made it with seven weeks to spare.

Lee moved from the UK to the US in the summer of 1998. He lives in New York and France with his American wife, Jane. They have a grown-up daughter, Ruth. He likes to travel, for vacations, but especially on promotion tours so he can meet his readers, to whom he is eternally grateful.

His latest novel, Nothing to Lose, was published in the UK in March and will be released in the USA in June.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Bad Luck and Trouble. It originally ran in June 2007 and has been updated for the March 2008 paperback edition. Go to magazine.