Stav Sherez

Anatomy of a bestseller

Andy Martin describes the many months he spent observing Lee Child — fuelled by coffee and Camels — complete his 20th Reacher novel

issue 16 January 2016

Every four seconds, somewhere in the world, a Lee Child book is sold. This phenomenal statistic places Child alongside Stephen King, James Patterson and J.K. Rowling as one of the world’s bestselling novelists. But what makes the Jack Reacher books so successful? This is one of the questions Andy Martin, a lecturer in French and Philosophy at Cambridge, sets out to answer in this intriguing and uniquely unclassifiable book.

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