Grant saw his friends sacked, TV shows canceled, his career going pear-shaped. New management, led by Charles Allen - “an ugly, twisted little man,” Child says - came in to break Granada’s union. But as the ’90s began, Granada found itself a target of the Thatcherites who ran Britain. Grant, a presentation director, made sure the right shows got on air at the right time.
“That was my first working lunch.”įor a decade, the studio cranked out classic middlebrow fare: Sherlock Holmes, Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown. “Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson,” he remembers. On his first day, Jim Grant sat down to a picnic with four actors. Viewers flocked to the studio to see the replica of Sherlock Holmes’s 221B Baker Street home and the public house from the long-running soap Coronation Street. Back in the 1980s, Granada Television in Manchester was a dreamland. And how the newly minted Child became - as the mystery writer Michael Connelly calls him - “distinctly American.” It’s an odd thing when a British writer, powered by British rage, creates the ultimate Tom Cruise vehicle.īut first, Jim Grant’s boss. The mystery we’re here to solve is how Jim Grant, angry employee, turned into Lee Child, revenge novelist. “You’re working out all this narrative,” Child says, “and it’s great training.” So how would you have it done? Where could you find the kind of people to do it for you? How would you pay them? How would you pay them in an untraceable way? “But obviously you can’t break the guy’s leg. “I’d have these horrendous meetings and want to break the guy’s leg,” Child says. And every day, Jim Grant went to battle against his boss at a TV station.
Child was Jim Grant, a 40-year-old British union man. Child - the pseudonymous writer who has created Jack Reacher, sold 50 million books, and inspired the new Tom Cruise movie (which opens Friday) - didn’t exist yet. A puzzle fiend named Dan Brown wanted to solve the mother (and Holy Father) of all riddles. An insurance agent named Tom Clancy wanted to kick commie ass. Part I The Adventure of the Angry EmployeeĮvery thriller novel starts with a dream.
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