Way too often main characters in suspense fiction are like show lofts in new developments: they’re designed within an inch of their lives. You’ve been there: you walk through the cement dust and the broker opens the door and suddenly you’re in a million-dollar big bland space planned to hit the ninety-ninth percentile smack between the eyes. It’s sensible, it’s considered … except there’s a thing in there: maybe a dead tree painted white in a pot, or a big rock in the middle of the floor, or a black-and-nickel Les Paul leaning against a four-cab Marshall stack, buzzing and crackling and humming. It’s something that says hey, dude, you’re not really boring, no sir, you’re hip, you’re out there, you’re on the edge, you respond, you like this apartment. 

Main characters are like that. They’re white knights, upright guys, moral and decent … except at that point on the mental checklist the writer gets worried about ninety-ninth percentile blandness, so he adds in a thing … maybe my guy is an alcoholic? Or in recovery? Cool. Or maybe he’s traumatized because he was on a stakeout in the dark and he shot someone dead but it turned out to be only a kid … or, better, a black kid … or maybe the kid didn’t actually die but now he’s in a wheelchair and my guy can demonstrate the guilt he’s humping around by visiting the kid … every month, no, every week … like a sacred trust. Cool – that’ll show how caring he is. That’ll give him edge. Or, no, maybe he’s both things … maybe he was an alcoholic first and shot the kid because he was drunk … no, the booze came later … because he wasn’t watching his partner’s back either, and his partner went down … double load of guilt and trauma.

Oh, please. That’s too grafted on. That’s too for the sake of it. That’s a dead white tree in a pot. That’s a boring apartment with a big rock in it. That’s why with very few exceptions the best characters in suspense fiction are the sidekicks. The spotlight is off the sidekicks. They can get away with being real. Think back to the Robin Hood story. And be honest. Who would you rather spend time with? An upright tight-ass like Robin? Or a balls-to-the-wall hooligan like Little John? Read the Robert B. Parker books … who really floats your boat? The sanctimonious Spenser? Or the terminally cool Hawk, who’d kill you as soon as look at you? Try the early Harlan Cobens … who’s the real draw there? Myron, the nice-guy do-gooder who loves his folks? Or his psychotic buddy Win? Check out the pre-Mystic River Dennis Lehanes … fine series, and Patrick and Angie are cool, no doubt, but come on, we’re really loving the psycho sidekick Bubba. Aren’t we? No question about it. No question at all.

Works with non-fiction too, which kind of proves it. Guys my age grew up with stuff like The Dambusters. Rent the movie, read the book. Who’s the real star there? The oh-so-correct Wing Commander Guy Gibson? Or the Aussie Flight Lieutenant Mickey Martin? Clue: it ain’t Gibson. Mickey Martin was a real-life psycho hooligan who could give any fictional counterpart a run for his money. He used giant four-engine Lancasters like dive-bombers. He scared the shit out of everybody. Except himself.

Sidekicks are great. So great, you start to see the reason. Sidekicks are like the loft apartment you design for yourself in your head. You can let it all hang out. You can let it be exactly what you want. No resale issues. And that’s the point. In a suspense series, the lead character has to carry a lot of weight. The lead character is the unique selling point. Career and success are on the line. That’s a lot of weight. So design raises its ugly head. PC timidity creeps in. Blandness beckons. So you put a big rock in the middle of the floor, but that’s not enough, so then you add in a sidekick. It’s a cry for understanding: this is who I really wanted to write about, but I thought I better not.

Lessons for a writer? Simple: you make the lead character and the sidekick the same guy. You write about the sidekick. That’s what I did. My guy Jack Reacher is rough, tough, snarling, dirty, unacceptable in every way. I wrote him with a sense of doom. It was like a Zen proposition: if I try to make him popular, he won’t be popular. It was like, well, I like him, so up yours, pal. So, of course, he was popular. But don’t just listen to me: think about Ian Rankin’s John Rebus. Now there’s a real hooligan. In the first Rebus book he stole an apple from a greengrocer. Not some over-designed cop fraud: he stole an apple. He sleeps in an armchair. I bet Ian had no real expectation that Rebus would catch on big. But he did. Just like Reacher did. Because neither of us cared.

Copyright 2004 by Lee Child

Lee Child was born in the exact geographic center of England, in the heart of the industrial badlands. Never saw a tree until he was twelve. It was the sort of place where if you fell in the river, you had to go to the hospital for a mandatory stomach pump. 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 law school, but only because he didn't want to be a lawyer. Without the pressure of aiming for a job in the field, he figured it would be a relaxing subject to study. He spent most of the time in the university theater - to the extent that he had to repeat several courses, because he failed the exams - and then went to work for Granada Television in Manchester, England. Back then, Granada was a world-famous production company, known for shows like Brideshead Revisited, Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect and Cracker. Lee worked on the broadcast side of the company, so his involvement with the good stuff was limited. But he remembers waiting in the canteen line with people like Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Natalie Wood and Michael Apted. And he says that being involved with more than 40,000 hours of the company's program output over an eighteen-year stay taught him a thing or two about telling a story. 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, back in 1995, that's why. It was the usual Nineties downsizing thing. 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. And because of the union involvement, he wasn't on too many alternative employers' wish lists, either. So he became a writer, because he couldn't think of anything else to do. He had an idea for a character who had suffered the same downsizing experience but who was taking it completely in his stride. And he figured if he brought the same total commitment to his audience that he'd seen his television peers develop, he could get something going. 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, and luckily the book was an instant hit, selling strongly all around the world, and winning both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel. It led to contracts for at least nine more Reacher books, which currently extend all the way to the year 2006.

Lee moved from the UK to the US in the summer of 1998. He lives just outside New York City, with his American wife, Jane. They have a grown-up daughter, Ruth, and a small dog called Jenny. Lee fills his spare time with music, reading, and the New York Yankees. He likes to travel, for vacations, but especially on promotion tours so he can meet his readers, to whom he is eternally grateful.