Lee Child: ‘If it comes to it, I’ll kill Jack Reacher. No problem’

From Irish Times:

The writer on prizing plausibility, the casting of Tom Cruise as a giant, and migrating to Netflix

Reacher said, “This is a random universe. Once in a blue moon things turn out just right.” Scholars of Lee Child’s oeuvre may have detected a certain quality of cynicism in the titles of his Jack Reacher thrillers, from Killing Floor and Die Trying to Bad Luck and Trouble and Nothing to Lose.

So it comes as some surprise to learn that Child himself believes that the inherent optimism of Blue Moon, the title of his 24th Jack Reacher novel, is intrinsic to his appeal.

“It’s always my ambition to do what you could call a low-concept thriller,” says Child. “When you do a book per year for so many years, and keep on with the high concept, ramping it up and up, then you end up in a completely ludicrous situation, where in every book a terrorist has a nuclear bomb or something, and that just gets too big and too overblown and too fundamentally implausible. I’m always trying to make an exciting story out of something small, because I really feel that you can’t do it year after year if you’re saving the world every single time.”

read more here @ Irish Times

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