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LARAMIE, Wyo. — Lee Child had two ideas for how Jack Reacher, the toweringly popular hero of his long-running series of thrillers, might die. First he thought Reacher would get into one last fight and bleed out on the bathroom floor of a filthy motel. But when he said so at book events, fans seemed viscerally disturbed by the idea, truly distressed, in a way that made him think that to follow through on it would be “gratuitously nasty.”

So: a metaphorical death. Every book ends with Reacher emptying his pockets and skipping town. In the last one, he’d almost be at the bus depot when he’d realize: I like it here. He’d settle down and get a dog. But this seemed only marginally kinder.

Child had also imagined how his career would end: honorably. Growing up, he’d felt such intense, bewildered betrayal when a beloved series went slack. He vowed never to let that happen. He thought he’d write 21 books, like John D. MacDonald did with his private eye Travis McGee. Twenty-one came and went, and Child kept at it.

While writing Book 24, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3tDq9wa" target=_blank>Blue Moon</a>,” he suddenly thought: I don’t want to do this anymore. Of course, people all over, on any given day, don’t want to go to work. It could’ve been just the briefest, passing feeling. “But it happened two times,” he said. “And I thought, don’t try and bulldoze through it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t make excuses for yourself. This is what you worried about.”

Later it occurred to him: What if he asked his brother Andrew to keep the series going? What if it didn’t have to end?

Maybe it’s not so surprising that Reacher, a cartoonishly American figure, is powered by the imaginations of two British brothers. More surprising is that those brothers lit out West — way West — where they now live in a cartoonishly American setting, a part of rural Wyoming that looks like a billboard for clean living. (Andrew, 53, is even a volunteer firefighter: “We’ve had to respond to a lot of traffic accidents,” he explained.)

Stretched out on his couch, Lee, 68, wearing denim-on-denim and cowboy boots, described poring over picture books about America growing up. “I thought, Why am I here? I should be there. So that was my absolute ambition.” Now, in nearly neighboring houses, he and Andrew have been collaborating on the Reacher novels as part of a four-book contract — the last of which, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3tAlF9r" target=_blank>The Secret</a>,” is out Oct. 24. From now on, it will be Andrew’s show.

Jimena Peck

What is it about Jack Reacher? He is not, like Batman, defined by golden rules (no killing, no guns) nor, like Bond, by his pleasures (shaken, not stirred). Reacher is defined by freedom, or at least a slightly goofy macho daydream of freedom, in which it’s made possible only by a man’s physical presence (massive) and habits (monastic). Reacher, honorably discharged from the military police, doesn’t have a job or much family. He has a folding toothbrush and, post-9/11, a government-issued ID. He sleeps in motels, eats in diners, pays cash. Roving America carless, he takes the Greyhound to wherever. And in wherever, trouble always finds him.

Book to book, the series toggles freely between storytelling modes. You can take your pick between first-person and third-person; military missions and personal vendettas; gritty local crime rings and slick international conspiracies. Their titles — things like “<a href="https://amzn.to/3ZZmZyI" target=_blank>The Enemy</a>” and “<a href="https://amzn.to/3Q1KOBt" target=_blank>The Hard Way</a>” — slide immediately off the brain, so you identify them by the action: The one where Reacher stops a plot to assassinate the vice president. The one where Reacher gets stuck in a tunnel. The one where Reacher learns what a QR code is.

The whole big-guy-hits-bad-guy thing scans politically <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-vigilante-finds-himself-in-the-crosshairs-of-the-war-on-drugs/2017/11/09/28b958d0-a5fc-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html" target="_blank">conservative to some</a>, landing somewhere on the cultural spectrum between Clint Eastwood movies and bro-country. Others find the Reacher books “pretty politically progressive,” including writer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/11/matt-yglesias-slow-boring-in-bidens-washington/" target="_blank">Matt Yglesias</a>, who pointed out via email: “In the debut, he squares off against racist small town elites and in the second he’s fighting secessionist militia guys.”

Mainly, Reacher is competence porn. By the end, you’re convinced you really do know something about human musculature or IEDs. The fight scenes work like simple machines — a lever, a wheel, a screw — with a physics that feels clean and irreducible. Villain acts, hero responds — each plot turn is narrated with the total pragmatism of someone telling you the right way to load the dishwasher. (Malcolm Gladwell: also a fan.)

The prose is bone lean. Laid end to end, the sentences stretch so far and straight and clear, you cognitively floor the gas pedal. There are no semicolons, the author points out, no em dashes. It takes velocity to draw a truly mass audience, including those  Reacher’s creator calls “marginal readers” — people who come up to him and say: “I enjoyed your book. I actually finished it.”

“It’s very hard to talk about this without sounding patronizing,” Lee said. “But when you’re selling millions of books, you’re by definition including people who are not habitual readers or, to be honest, skilled readers. You’ve got people who maybe read only that book that year. So the stakes are really high.”

And when you’re selling millions of books, it might seem statistically inevitable that some will end up on the bedside tables of figures from Haruki Murakami to heads of state. (And Lee knows which have read his work: Bill Clinton yes, Barack Obama and King Charles, no.) But when’s the last time you heard a celebrity gush about Colleen Hoover? Lee Child writes “guilty pleasures” that no one actually feels guilty about.

“He’s the best,” declared Janet Maslin, who regularly reviewed the Reacher novels while a staff critic for the New York Times, over the phone. “To me, the absolute best guy at this is [Dennis] Lehane. But Lehane is a novelist who happens to be writing about crimes. And Tana French, too, is a novelist who happens to be writing about crimes.” In the kingdom of pulp, though, there’s no one better.

Like Reacher, I can drive, just not happily or well, so the Childs gallantly offered to bring me to and from their homes in the foothills of the Rockies. For the fun of it, a few years back, the brothers bought the whole town of Tie Siding, Wyo. — really a lone clump of buildings, painted with ads for fireworks and flea market antiques.

On the way up the dirt road, Andrew, in his yellow electric pickup (pristine), pointed out the pronghorns — playful animals, he noted, that sometimes try to race passersby. On the way down, Lee, in his Chevy (not pristine), pointed out a long green warehouse where the brothers store their cars. “I’ve sort of gotten to the point where the bureaucracy of them and the maintenance of them takes the pleasure out of it,” Lee said. “But Andrew’s still in the first flush.”

Andrew got here first. In 2016, he and his wife, the historical-mystery writer Tasha Alexander, decided to move out of their cramped Chicago apartment. They road-tripped to Wyoming, and he was struck by its emptiness. “I’ve never experienced that,” he said, “growing up in a small, crowded island.” The clouds looked like they’d been painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. And land was cheap: A ways outside of Laramie, the couple found a handsome wooden house up against a nature reserve, looking out onto a vast carpet of pine forest and gold clumps of aspen. Moose sometimes peer through their front windows or stand athwart their driveway (“the Reacher of animals,” Andrew says fondly).

Soon after visiting, Lee and his wife, Jane, bought a property out there, too — though unlike his brother, Lee isn’t much for kayaking or camping. “I love the outdoors. I’m not a huge participant in it. I mean, I’ll take a stroll, I like to be out amongst it. And I certainly like to look at it,” he said. “It gets you over your suburban or urban perfectionism.” A set of binoculars, perched atop a tripod by one living room window, is for watching not the wildlife, he explained, but the road.

The similarities between Andrew and Lee are obvious, even apart from their shared vocation: both tall, both married to American Anglophiles, both risk-taking, both heavy coffee drinkers, each claiming the other has the worse addiction. (Their first- and third-born brothers also happened to come out as a matched pair of sorts: physically smaller, scientifically minded and extremely practical.) Andrew’s birth came as a surprise, the age gap precluding any sibling rivalry. “I always used to feel like I was an only child with five parents,” Andrew said. When Lee was a baby, he had a ration card; by the time Andrew was growing up, Margaret Thatcher had been elected, and their parents were more prosperous but no less dour or repressed or desperate to belong to the middle class.

Lee started out working in commercial television and did so happily for nearly two decades. Then came a new boss, who downsized and union-busted, putting the word out that the next shop steward would be fired within a week. So Lee ran for shop steward. He used every tool at his disposal against management, recruiting cleaning crews to check the waste bins and Xerox machines for documents, and engineers to unscrew the hard drives and hack them at home. “For a couple of years it was really fun, but it was also just miserable because this was a glorious institution that was being utterly trashed.” When he finally was fired a couple of years later, he sat down at his dining room table and started “<a href="https://amzn.to/46Bzsv3" target=_blank>The Killing Floor</a>,” Reacher’s first adventure.

Andrew started out in theater before — sick of the hole in his bank account — he applied for a telecommunications job because the newspaper listing mentioned use of a company car. Years passed; the daydream of returning to theater became a daydream about writing fiction. When that company started downsizing, he tried to make himself enough of a nuisance that they’d give him severance just to get rid of him. Instead, the higher-ups were impressed by his out-of-the-box thinking. “I wound up with stock options,” he laughs. Finally, the company shrank enough and offered him enough of a buyout that he had time — a little over a year — to concentrate on writing a book.

From the start, he knew he wanted to write stories set in America. “The scale of the United States is so much greater, and it seemed to me that there was more energy,” Andrew said. He didn’t have luck making a series protagonist stick, moving through a Royal Navy officer, a cop in Alabama and an intelligence agent who goes undercover as a courthouse janitor. With the last one, he felt he was gaining creative momentum, “like I was able to really let the handbrake off.” And it was then that Lee popped the question.

Lee always wrote “entirely spontaneously,” making up the mystery line by line — but also with a journeyman’s committed reliability. He’d start a draft on Sept. 1 each year and finish it in 90 days. He made sure to clock in at about 100,000 words, to give readers their money’s worth. At airports, he’d watch people weigh — literally, in their hands — which book to buy: What would be light enough to pack in a carry-on? What would last them those five days on the beach?

He has this idea, borrowed from G.K. Chesterton: Charles Dickens didn’t pander to what the people wanted; he wanted what the people wanted. He thinks of himself the same way, as “an absolutely normal person,” other than his facility with words and absolute self-confidence.

But at some point, he lost his purchase on the culture. “The world is sort of slipping away from me,” he said. “I don’t quite get it as easily as I used to. The nuance of response and the nuance of desire. What people want, what people think, how people react.” Some readers detected the strain on the page: “People get outlandish when they’re tired,” Maslin said.

It was January 2019, and Andrew was driving them back from an event in Denver. They were in the middle of a ground blizzard, the snow blowing horizontally. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, “concentrating on not killing both of us,” he said. This struck Lee as the perfect opportunity to ask if his brother would want to take over the series, because Andrew would not be able to immediately respond.

But the answer was obvious. Andrew was too stubborn to pass up a challenge. When he was a child, the easiest way to get him to do anything was to say, within earshot, “Andrew could never do that.” More than that, though, he didn’t want to be the reason the series ended. “Who would want to be responsible for Reacher’s death? Not me.” He set about rereading all of the books, logging key details into a “ridiculous” spreadsheet. “I thought, ‘Who’s going to remember?’ But I wanted to make sure we’re not going back to the same venue. We’re not using the same gun or the same car.”

They got together that fall to start work. Lee would come over to Andrew’s, walking straight into his office. Their first effort, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3S1keLl" target=_blank>The Sentinel</a>,” was unusual, in that the authors had a specific objective for the story. “Reacher had become really a little bit too out of touch with technology over the years,” Andrew said. “We needed to nudge him forward.” They figured out a scenario that would yank him into the present day: a ransomware attack.

The brothers would talk through bits of Andrew’s prose over email or the phone, but for the most part, Lee kept away. “I was anxious not to be debating it, line by line,” he said. “If I wasn’t hearing from him for two, three days, I was happy about that. It meant he was on a roll.”

For the follow-up, “<a href="https://amzn.to/46WUJz2" target=_blank>Better Off Dead</a>,” Andrew surprised his brother by showing up that September with the first chapter already written. It made it appear as though Reacher had died. (“Your agent in particular was freaking out,” he said to Lee.) Lee was delighted: “The engine had started, it was all cranked up, it was revving smoothly — we were off to the races.” Then came “<a href="https://amzn.to/3Q3ppI1" target=_blank>No Plan B</a>” — the one where Reacher is minding his business, trying to visit a Civil War museum, and then witnesses a murder — and now, “The Secret.” Its twist on the series’ roster of villains — two lethally competent sisters on a personal vendetta — reads a little like a parting hat-tip to Lee.

Lee’s involvement has tapered over time, such that he describes his role at this point as more “supervising producer” than co-author. But he hasn’t stopped working. When we met, he was a few thousand words into a Reacher short story for the Spectator, a British magazine. He’s also an executive producer and consultant on the Jack Reacher series streaming on Prime Video — partly courtesy titles, partly an accounting gimmick to move his remuneration to another part of the balance sheet. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and the newspaper’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.) Lee still fields phone calls seeking his wisdom. “The last one I got was, ‘Would he sleep with a married woman?’ I said, probably not. But yes, you know, if the husband was in a coma, or was bad or abusive.” He claims it’s all wholly unnecessary, but the fact is that he might never fully retire from being called on, as the oracle of the essence of Reacher.

The day after the visit to Tie Siding, we met up for lunch at a deli in downtown Laramie, all Pride flags and cowboy-themed bars. The brothers were early: Lee again in his Canadian tuxedo, Andrew shrugging off the most sumptuous shearling-edged coat I’d ever seen in person.

Once the co-writing deal wrapped up, Andrew signed a contract to write another four Reacher books — this time, solo. Per tradition, he started work on the next one on Sept. 1. I asked whether he’d caught himself wanting to call his brother, to talk through the material.

“That’ll be the thing, won’t it?” he mused. “I’ll have to stop.” He admitted, with a laugh, “I did send it, actually.”

“I’m still on all the email lists,” Lee explained.

The brothers say it doesn’t matter whose name is on the jacket of these novels or even who’s written them. The character carries on. The ultimate goal is for the reader — clicking “Preorder” or tossing the hardcover in the cart while on a Target run — to not notice the difference. You never have to feel scarcity with Reacher. Once you’re done, a new one will be on its way, fall after fall.

Andrew will write more Reachers as long as readers still want them (“for forever, I hope”).  His other projects can wait: a high-concept meta-thriller involving documents and discovery; the courthouse janitor’s next good deed. It’s reassuring, in a way, to have these ideas rattling around in his head, like imaginative backstock.

He has this fantasy: that the new Reacher would come out, and there’d be a die-hard fan, desperate to get it on launch day. But the fan gets held up at work, so by the time he gets to the bookstore, there’s only one copy left, and it’s damaged, cover torn off, front and back pages gone. He buys it anyway. He stays up all night reading. And at the end, he thinks to himself: It’s just as good as it’s ever been.

“Or,” Andrew said, “even better than it’s ever been.”

Yale University, BA

Sophia Nguyen is the news and features writer for the Books section at The Washington Post. She previously served as assistant editor on the National Politics desk and as an assistant editor for Outlook and PostEverything.

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Lee Child leaves Jack Reacher in his brother’s hands