The author is currently on a massive tour through the United States, where Bad Luck debuted only this month, and he’s penning an amusing blog about it all. During his travels, he was tapped by novelist-interviewer Craig McDonald for a piece in This Week, a community paper in Ohio. Not surprisingly, Child attributes most of his success over the last decade to the reader appeal of Jack Reacher. Recalling the 1997 publication of his first Reacher book, The Killing Floor, Child says:
“What’s interesting is that, obviously, when that book was written, I was the only person on earth who had heard of Reacher. As soon as it was for sale, increasing but small numbers of people had found out about Reacher. Now, after 10 years, it’s as if the ownership of Reacher has migrated outward to a public ownership. Certainly, I’ve written them all, but by [the] fact that people have read them all, they’ve invested a lot of themselves in him. In a sense, he’s created now as much by the reader as by the writer.”Child observes that Reacher has changed over the years, as evidenced in his latest book:
“I wanted Reacher to be a little tiny bit insecure about his own choices,” Child said. “He’s been very confident up to now. I thought it was time to see him evaluate himself just a little bit. Of course, he wouldn’t do that for anybody except his old buddies who he had been so close to. I wanted to see how he would measure himself up ... thinking, ‘Have I made the right choice, or have they made the right choice?’To read more about McDonald’s encounter with Child, click here.
“I also wanted to see if his natural authority would assert itself in a free-form situation--without the formal command structure of being in the Army. I had a lot of fun, actually, writing from the point of view of four old buddies. The banter, the self-deprecating, sort of between-the-lines thing where nobody actually says that they care about each other, but it’s perfectly obvious they do.”
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