Saturday, January 18, 2020

Child Keeps It in the Family

This news from The Guardian is more than a bit surprising:
The author of the Jack Reacher series of novels is retiring and handing over the writing duties to his brother, according to a report.

Lee Child said he has been searching for a way to kill off the title character, portrayed on film by Tom Cruise, for years but has ultimately decided his fans deserve to see him live on in books which will now be written by Andrew Grant.

But Child, who was born James Grant, has reportedly set out a condition for his brother: he too must change his surname to Child.

“For years I thought about different ways of killing Reacher off. First of all, I thought he would go out in a blaze of bullets, something like the end of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It would take an army to bring him down [but] Reacher had to have an afterlife after I was done,” Child told the Times.
Andrew Grant—born in Birmingham, England, but currently living in Wyoming with his wife, fellow novelist Tasha Alexander—has established his own thriller-writing career. His latest book is Too Close to Home, released earlier this month by Ballantine.

FOLLOW-UP: The Gumshoe Site says that “The next and 25th Reacher novel, The Sentinel (Transworld UK), written by Lee Child and Andrew Child, will be out coming October.”

1 comment:

Goodbye Jack. said...

That’s disappointing. I read his early stuff but found his second piece (Die Twice) to be incredibly shallow and have not read his stuff since. Felt he was cashing in on his brother’s name and fame.

An Amazon review sums it up for me - “ This was his second book. I did not think he was a very good writer. I would not buy another of his books although I might check one out of the library.”