Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV's "golden age." During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars' worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.
Lee Child Quote
"My books are straightforward, old-fashioned adventures where there is a clear-cut, binary choice: You are either with the hero or against him, and that determines your fate."
"Reacher will be an intensely fun companion for three or four days, and then he will be gone, and you will never, ever see him again. You can absolutely guarantee that. He won’t write; he won’t call; you will never see him again."
Novels by Lee Child: Bad Luck and Trouble (Jack Reacher Novels), Running Blind (Jack Reacher), The Enemy (Jack Reacher), The Hard Way (Jack Reacher), Echo Burning, Tripwire (Jack Reacher), Die Trying, Without Fail (Jack Reacher), Nothing to Lose, and Persuader.