Lee Child
How Do You Create Suspense? - And Other Bad Questions
Lee Child, Instructor
It's easier than you think to keep the reader turning the pages.
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.
Killing Floor
was an immediate success and launched the
series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment.
Lee has three
homes--an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and
whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In
the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane
plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare
time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or
Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim,
despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
ThrillerFest
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