The Times - Dominic Maxwell
[B]limey, future biographers will be hard pushed to outdo Martin for details.
The Irish Times - Paraic O'Donnell
"[Martin] is a skilled and audacious interlocutor... but her subject is just as adept an interviewee... The superhuman Reacher may be loved by millions, but it's the Reacher Guy who has the edge: he knows what [it] is to be human."
The Telegraph - Michael Deacon
The Reacher Guy is a must-buy for any aspiring novelist, thanks in particular to its terrific insight into how Child’s first book was written..."
TuftsNow
"Martin touches on the dark poetry that runs at the base of these violent thrillers."
The Sydney Morning Herald - Fiona Capp
"This superbly crafted biography of Lee Child... is a homage to the bestselling thriller writer even as it casts a wry eye over the man and his tough guy hero Jack Reacher."
(Praise for Lee Child) - George RR Martin
Lee Child ought to be illegal.
A couple of years ago, I was supposed to receive an award from him at a banquet. I had never read any of this books, so thought I had better check one out before I met him. I picked up a Jack Reacher book, entirely at random, and figured I'd try a few pages. Next thing I knew I'd read it all. "Hey, that was really good," I thought. "I'll try another." I did. And then another, and another, and another, and... well, you get the idea. There are an awful lot of Jack Reacher books, and now it seems I have read them all, and cannot wait for Lee to write a new one.
His books are utterly addictive. You can't stop reading them. Or at least I can't.
Surely that should be a crime.
The Best Crime and Mystery Criticism of 2020 CrimeReads
"By the end of reading this one [The Reacher Guy], you just might find yourself liking Jim Grant even more than his novels."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-30
A life-spanning biography of bestselling novelist and critics' favorite Lee Child.
Born James Grant in Coventry, England, in 1954, Child felt “so unloved as a child” that he devoured books about orphans. As an unsettled teen, he broke a rival kid's arm and played in a rock band. He worked in theater and studied law before settling in at Granada Television in the late 1970s, where he enjoyed success as a presentation director. Partly owing to his stance as a union organizer, he was fired after 18 years, becoming a writer "because he couldn't think of anything else to do." After turning out more than 20 thrillers featuring the hulking, Zen-like, all-American problem solver Jack Reacher, Child announced he would be turning over the series to his younger brother, mystery writer Andrew Grant, with whom he co-wrote the forthcoming Reacher book, The Sentinel. In her first biography, based on personal correspondence with Child, Martin offers a variety of intriguing stories about her subject. However, the narrative is so crowded with extraneous material (the author profiles seemingly anyone who ever knew Child) and so prone to redundancies and head-scratching allusions—e.g., the lasting impact of tennis great Chris Evert's "glow"—the reading experience becomes a chore. The publisher says that Martin had "disarmingly frank" conversations with her subject, whom she calls "Lee" or "Jim" throughout, but he is only superficially revealing, leaving her to hold up excerpts from his novels as mirrors to his soul. As for Child's exceptional style as a novelist, the fawning Martin offers little critical analysis beyond comparing him to Camus and Borges. "He feels, as much as thinks, his books into being," she writes, while noting his obsession with figuring out the right “ratio” among “overall number of pages, number of lines per page and number of characters per line.”
An exhaustive and exhausting account for only the most committed fans.
