Seeing the Skelton Under the Skin

Never forgive, never forget: Lee Child got fired, and then he got revenge.

Lee Child was a television producer for Granada Television, a British independent television franchise in Northern England before he became a world-famous crime novelist and invented the bestselling Jack Reacher series.

“I’d always been a huge reader. It was my main enthusiasm. I just read constantly, hundreds of books a year,” he says. “But I had never really stopped to think where they came from. I had never really examined the process. I never really thought about it.”

As he read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, “I began to see how he was doing it,” says Child, whose real name is Jim Grant. “I could almost see the skeleton under the skin. I said, ‘Yeah, I could do this.’ Genre books are not really all that different from a television show or a movie. But that was on the backburner because I was still working. But it was always a Plan B.”

Then he became shop steward at the office and figured he seriously needed to have a Plan B in his back pocket. He immediately clashed with management over corporate restructuring proposals that would result in layoffs and firings. They consumed much of his final two years with the company.

“I was very aware that the two-year struggle with management was dooming me for any future employment with the industry. I would be blacklisted. It was a very conscious choice. Over those two years the importance of Plan B became paramount.”

On September 1, 1995, he was fired and immediately set Plan B into motion. The next day, he purchased six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils to begin working on his first novel.

“It was a very deliberate process…This was a fork in the road. I was starting a new phase of my life…I didn’t have a computer. I felt I had to earn a computer with a new career.” So, he borrowed his daughter’s laptop.

Child threw himself into the task, understanding only too well the importance of first impressions. “Unless you put everything in the first book, there won’t be a second. It wasn’t difficult to write. It was quick. I wrote with a great deal of passion. I still regard it with a great deal of pride.”

His first novel Killing Floor went on to win the Anthony Award from Bouchercon, the Barry Award for first novel from the editors of Deadly Pleasure quarterly, and the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Award.

Success also brought him another kind of pleasure. Years later he ran into his former Granada Television boss—the one who fired him. “I bumped into him in an art gallery. That was quite a sweet moment. By that point I was doing much better than he was.”

Child remembered many verbal jousts with management, but in the surroundings of the gallery, his former boss “was forced to have a polite conversation.”

Success was the ultimate revenge. But, Child adds, he will “never forgive and never forget” what management did to the Granada Television staff. “It was a very stupid policy and trashed a good institution.”

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Former investigative reporter Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. He’s also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

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