Lee Child

Lee Child (born 1954) is the pen name of James Dover Grant, a British thriller writer who created Jack Reacher, a former US military policeman who wanders the United States, in Killing Floor (1997).

He was born in Coventry on 29 October 1954, educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and studied law at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 1977. He then worked at Granada Television until 1995, when he was made redundant; he had begun his first novel the year before. Killing Floor was published by Bantam Press in Britain on 25 March 1997 and by G. P. Putnam's Sons in the United States, and won the Anthony and Barry awards for best first novel. Die Trying followed in 1998, the year he moved to the United States; he returned to the UK in 2025.

Tom Cruise played Reacher in the films Jack Reacher (2012) and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), and Amazon's series Reacher began in 2022. In 2020 he announced that his brother, Andrew Grant, would take over the series, writing as Andrew Child. He received the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2013 and was appointed CBE in 2019.

For collectors. Killing Floor is the book that started the series; the Bantam Press edition came out in Britain on 25 March 1997, with Putnam publishing in the United States. Wikipedia's bibliography identifies each novel by the ISBN of the Bantam Press first printing in hardback, a useful check when confirming a British first edition.