Grant’s exercise in wish-fulfilment fantasy now stands as an exemplary case of the dream come true. “To give people what they don’t get in real life.” “What is the purpose of fiction?” he asked in his non-fiction book, The Hero (2019). The phenomenal success of the Jack Reacher books – the 20-plus bestsellers, the 100 million copies sold, the admirers ranging from Margaret Drabble to Bill Clinton – have done nothing to disturb Child’s basic tenet. The proximity of writer and reader, or the writer’s status as proxy-reader, was intensified by his decision to proceed without a plan, so that the story was decided, almost one sentence at a time, by what Grant himself wanted to see happen. Grant’s plan was to write a thriller offering what he variously called “a surrogate, vicarious, escapist mood”, an “escapist feeling”, and a sense of “escapist identification” for those who could only imagine living without a job or beating up their boss. Union-busting had radically altered the industry. He was 39, married with one daughter, and working as a transmission controller at Granada Television, in Manchester. “Must be action, adventure, ingenuity, unbeatable self-defence,” Jim Grant wrote in 1994, on his way to becoming Lee Child.
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