Lee Child warned an enthusiastic audience that he was not going to read from his new Jack Reacher novel, 61 Hours. Besides giving away crucial plot information, he said that he did not want to bore us with his monotonous voice. Well, I wanted to jump up and say, “No, we love your voice! Please let us Southerners hear your beautiful New York-softened English accent!”
We did get a good listen while Lee shared many of his thoughts about different book markets and readers, about his diligent work as a writer, and of course many tidbits about 61 Hours and Jack Reacher.
An unforgettable story about 61 Hours was how he named some of his characters. He agreed to name a couple of the characters after the winners of an auction. One winner asked if a character could have his wife’s name but also requested that the character have sex with Reacher. As we roared with laughter, Lee replied that the performance anxiety might be too much for Reacher. You’ll have to read the book to find out what really happens for Ms. Turner.
One of the most interesting things Lee talked about was the difference between readers in the UK and the US. He said that the most recent statistic showed that 60% of the British population had never read a book, and he feels that the remaining 40% are cautious readers. As he says this, I am thinking about the grim statistics that have been popularized in the media about the US population. One statistic for American readers shows that 42% of college graduates never read another book after college. Of course, we all know that statistics can be manipulated and can sometimes be misleading. However, the point is that people don’t seem to read very much.
On the upside, Lee also enlightened us about the distinct difference between American and British book culture. He quickly noted that Lemuria Books was not just a brick and mortar store. Lemuria is a community of readers who talk about what they are reading. We make recommendations and we know the readers who come into our store. I think Americans often think of the UK and Europe as being more literary. It is hard for me to believe, but Lee put it like this: “The United States is still the wide American frontier of the book industry.” Readers will take a risk and make an investment of time; they’ll take that recommendation from another reader! The British, Lee suggested, might even think a recommendation from a bookseller as bad manners.
Having Lee at Lemuria also got John and I talking about the history of mystery writers he has included in the First Editions Club since 1993. When John opened Lemuria in 1975, he took the suggestion from a customer to read Raymond Chandler (right) and he soon became acquainted with the “hard-boiled school of detective fiction,” a genre that is as uniquely American as the blues and jazz. Chandler was accompanied by John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and the counter-culture writer of the group James M. Cain. It was this school of writers who inspired the next generation, writers such as Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly. This groups includes Lee Child who has perhaps been inspired by John D. MacDonald’s character Travis McGee–a “knight in rusting armor,” a noble loner of sorts. Over the years, John has brought many writers of this new generation to Lemuria, included them in the First Editions Club in order to extend this unique genre to our readers with an appreciation for these two generations of writers and their influence on American readers.
Lee has grasped the psyche of American readers for a long time, understanding the broad spectrum of readers: the smaller group of experienced, critical readers to the larger group of reluctant one-book-a-year readers. We learned that Lee consciously thinks of these “Rings of Saturn” in crafting his series while at the same time creating a character, Jack Reacher, who is predictable yet not constrained by the mundane. Lee reads his peers in the mystery genre, knows what is going on their heads and also knows that his readers read from this community of writers and that there will always be new readers to his series. He says that Jack Reacher is a character who never bores him; he sits down with excitement every September to write the next novel with no plan for the first half and enjoys the suspense of making it all work out during the last half of writing. Having successfully developed Reacher for more than a decade, it is obvious he does so with heart and sincerity.
I have a friend who often expresses his gratitude toward comedians who spend their whole lives trying to make us laugh. This reminds me of Lee. He communicated to us how he has employed his diligence, uniformity, and discipline, as well as knowledge of his readers and the book world to entertain us with the novels of Jack Reacher. We may not have been able to pick Lee up in a helipcopter and deliver him to the top of a skyscraper as New Zealand does, but we were certainly proud to have him here in Jackson, Mississippi, and call him one of our new friends.
For more about Lee Child and his novels, see his official website.
Maggie also posted part of an interview with Lee Child about the Reacher series.
