Lee Child

Ureka! another non-political post! Today Joe and I went to hear and meet Jim Grant, a/k/a Lee Child. Obviously I am a huge fan and have read all 13 of his Jack Reacher thrillers. The event was held at the Mohegan Sun casino.

The setting was a small 200 seat theatre in the casino. Lee/Jim was on stage in a lounge chair, as was his questioner, who was a local journalist. Jim spoke for about 40 minutes as he answered questions from the journalist, and these ranged from how he got started to who based Reacher on, etc. All normal questions that any fan would be interested in. They then opened the questions to the audience for about 20 minutes. Jim/Lee couldn't have been nicer and he really seemed to be enjoying himself. Some of the interesting things discussed included:

it makes much more sense to launch a writing career in the US rather than the UK because we read much more and the normal word of mouth doesn't work there in the bookstore.

He spends about 5 hours a day from Sept to Mar each year writing book.

He hopes to top out at 21 Jack Reacher books.

He doesn't like to change the character too much because we have come to expect certain things about Jack Reacher.

etc

Anyway, we then proceeded to the book signing, which included about 80-100 people in line. Again, he couldn't have been nicer, as evidenced by him allowing me to take a picture with Joe.