Blockbuster author talks about his man of mystery

I've said it before, and it stands: Jack Reacher is the thinking reader's action hero. The moral center of 10 best-selling thrillers by British-born Lee Child, Reacher is physically powerful and fearless — but he also stays several mental steps ahead of his enemies. He likes to win by being the smartest guy in the room.

Reacher's an ex-U.S. Army cop, drifter and diehard coffee connoisseur who treasures his solitary anonymity. Somehow, though, he always ends up solving other people's messy problems.

Author Child, as cool and efficient as his creation, spoke recently from his Manhattan home about, among other things, Reacher's latest opportunity for solving somebody's mess: "The Hard Way" (Delacorte, $25), at No. 3 on the Publisher's Weekly best-seller list.

In the book, our man stumbles into an explosive situation. The wife and daughter of a creepy security expert have been kidnapped, and the security expert is determined to use his shady colleagues (instead of the police) to get them back.

Q: I figured I'd better drink some coffee while we talk, considering Reacher's obsession.

A: I just had a whole pot.

Q: Reacher's name came about because you're tall, and women in supermarkets ask you to reach for stuff. Your wife suggested that, if this writing thing didn't work out, you could always be a supermarket reacher. True?

A: Absolutely, yeah. There's a lot of literary discussion about it being a dynamic, forward-moving name, but it was completely accidental. I find making up names difficult, so that was a gift.

Q: What went into creating Reacher?

A: I was fed up with the genre's heroes — miserable, traumatized alcoholics or recovering alcoholics or divorced, recovering alcoholics. We need peril and thrills, but fundamentally we want to read about easy-going, happy-go-lucky people. That's Reacher. He's cut loose from the Army, the only world he knew, but he doesn't see that negatively.

Reacher goes back to a purer sort of hero, a really ancient tradition. These characters get reinvented over and over, but they're fundamentally the same — the mysterious loner who rides in, sorts out the trouble and rides into the sunset. The same character showed up in the Middle Ages in Europe, the knight errant condemned to wander the land doing good deeds.

And because Reacher's a committed drifter, the books can be set anywhere. They can be small, lonely stories in West Texas or big tales in New York. Makes it more interesting for me.

Q: Drifting is a fantasy for a lot of people, maybe especially guys.

A: Yeah, certainly it's wish fulfillment for me, and I think I'm a fairly average guy. No commitments, no responsibilities. But what's surprising is that the books also appeal to women. Women buy more books anyway, but in this series it's exaggerated — the bulk of the passionate fans are women. There's a number of theories about that, the main one being that women are offended by injustice.

Q: In Reacher books, something unfair becomes fair.

A: Yeah, by spectacular methodology. And I think women get tremendous satisfaction from that.

Plus with women there's the idea that Reacher might show up at your door and spend the night, but he'd always move on — the perfect three- or four-day affair.

Q: Reacher owns only the clothes on his back, literally, then buys more when they get grungy.

A: Yes, but in one book ("Running Blind") I was so concerned with the pace that I forgot to put in the clothes-buying scene. Technically he's in the same gear throughout the book, while flying coast to coast and killing numerous people. I got letters about that one.

Q: What's the deal with underwear?

A: Ha! The question is, how do you know he wears any? It might well be that he does if he's got 'em and he doesn't if he doesn't.

Q: Will there be more prequels (like "The Enemy") about Reacher's Army days?

A: Certainly, at least one more, because we need to show the case that broke him loose.

Q: You're married to an American, and visited a lot before moving here. Still, you're a native of England. How do you get it right, the feel of life in the American military?

A: Well, broadly right. It comes from an obsession with reading about it. Also, the American military is a big presence, it's not exactly a secret how they operate. And militaries tend to be the same. My father was in the British army, and his stories are of a universe completely divorced from the civilian universe. That's what I've tried to capture.

Q: You had a long career in British television.

A: Yes. I was a presentation director, like an air-traffic controller for a network. Keeping the network transmissions together and making items like news and sports broadcasts and commercials. Also exerting editorial control when there were emergencies.

Q: Which taught you about working quickly and efficiently.

A: Absolutely — I'm unafraid of deadlines. And I absorbed a lot from writers and editors — how to tell a story, how to pace.

Q: Do you live in Manhattan full time?

A: Yeah, pretty much. We have a house in France, so occasionally I'm there.

Q: And you have a grown daughter.

A: She's a graduate student at Columbia. We're very proud of her. I bet she'll end up as a Ph.D. in applied linguistics.

Q: You've described yourself as "a classic happy immigrant."

A: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Proud to be born an American." I wasn't born in America, and some feel that makes me less of an American. But I think I'm maybe more of an American, because I chose to come here.

Q: In "The Hard Way," Reacher gets involved in rescuing a New York security expert's kidnapped wife and daughter, but the action shifts to rural England. Why?

A: Simple — my English publisher was always asking, "Why can't you bring Reacher to England?" Plus, I wanted the technical challenge. I've been a foreigner writing about America through the eyes of a native, but for half of "The Hard Way," I had to be a native (Briton) writing about England through a foreigner's eyes.

Q: So what's next?

A: Another Reacher, in about a year. The working title is "Bad Luck and Trouble." It starts off with a guy with two broken legs being loaded onto a helicopter. It flies for 20 minutes and hovers 3,000 feet up, then they open the door and throw him out. Reacher used to work with this guy in an elite MP unit, so he tries to reunite everyone to avenge his friend's death.

Seattle writer Adam Woog's column on mystery and crime fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month

in The Times.