Lee Child
Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher adventure, The Affair, the 16th book in the series, is now available.
From Child's Q & A with Erik Spanberg at the Christian Science Monitor:
"The Affair" deals with the early part of Reacher’s career and why he left the Army. Why did you want to tell this story?--Marshal Zeringue
Because readers have always wanted to know two things, essentially. They’ve gotten used to Reacher as he is now and they’ve always had two questions.
What was he like when he was in the Army, and that was answered in the eighth book, called "The Enemy," which was a prequel and it was set during his military service. And the other question I’ve always had, of course, is why did he leave the Army. So that is the question this book answers. It’s the 16th book, people have been asking this questions for years and they deserve to find out.
You had lost your job in television when you wrote the first Reacher book. Given what’s going on in the economy now, it’s somewhat of an uplifting story, but how concerned were you in 1995 when that happened?
You’re right, it’s happening all over again. There was a wave of it back then and there’s a wave of it now. I was pretty concerned. With one-half of my brain I was terrified, basically, because I was just coming up to 40 years old. That’s not a great time to be out of work and I felt too old and too tired to start at the bottom of something else. And I didn’t want another boss and that kind of thing.
The other half of my mind, I just played a psychological trick on myself. I knew that you couldn’t do this if you were worried about it, so I just assumed that it would work. I just made myself 100 percent convinced that it would work. Which is a ludicrous thing to do because saying that you’re going to make a living writing fiction is a bit like...[read on]
