Talk of the Titans: Lee Child in Conversation with Stephen King at Harvard

Despite the thunderous applause, high-strung Q&A session, and gravitas of any such meeting of two immensely successful people, the conversation between Stephen King and Lee Child was a relaxed, low-volume meeting between friends. The two came together at Sanders Theatre on Wednesday night to discuss Child’s “Make Me,” the 20th book in his lucrative Jack Reacher action thriller series. The event was sponsored by the Harvard Book Store. King, the iconic suspense novelist, stopped through Cambridge on his way to Washington, D.C., where he received the National Medal of Arts on Thursday, and New York, where he appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” on Friday. A self-professed Reacher groupie who even included a laudatory reference to the character in his 2010 novel “Under the Dome,” King asked most of the questions while still leaving space for his trademark wit and a few surreal stories. By leaving space for Child, King helped the British author to reveal both his varied biography and his secrets to keeping fresh the continuing travails of Reacher’s messy world.

King didn’t take long before establishing the light mood of the evening. “Just a couple of white guys, sitting around talking,” he said, chuckling. King’s self-effacement underlies the surreal reality that both he and Child have become the elder statesmen of their respective genres. Ten of the 20 Reacher books, which concern a renegade ex-Army Policeman, have reached #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. To summarize King’s accolades and accomplishments in horror, suspense, and fantasy writing in a short article would be a Herculean task. Instead of getting bogged down in their own significance, the two quickly turned to humor, offering jokes about Tom Cruise—who plays the supposedly 6 foot 5 inch Reacher in the film adaptation—and their own youths.

In a particularly salient bit, Child offered a surprisingly personal response to King’s questioning of how the British author knew so much of America. “I met this American girl at college in Britain,” Child said casually. “It was 1974. So we went to a party together on a Friday night,” he said. Momentarily, Child appeared to veer into crude territory. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try this one and the other one next. This could be a couple of weeks of good fun. That couple of weeks just last month turned into 40 years,” Child said. The author finally made the move across the pond with his wife Jane in 1998, a year after the first Reacher novel appeared.

King also asked Child how he amassed such broad-based knowledge of the military. Child revealed that he has been developing a team of FBI and Army consultants who help him check the realism of his plots. “There was a book called ‘A Wanted Man’ where I invented a kind of motel…it was for quarantining inconvenient witnesses, like an involuntary witness protection,” Child said. “So I wrote my friend.”

While King mostly took a backseat to Child’s clever storytelling, he stepped in when the audience began booing Tom Cruise’s casting as Jack Reacher. King offered a maxim from the 1999 film “The Green Mile,” based on his 1996 serial novel of the same name. “They cast a relatively unknown actor named Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey. In the book John Coffey is supposed to be an African-American preacher who is a very, very big man,” King said. “Michael Clarke Duncan, God rest his soul—he was the gentlest, sweetest man you could ever want to meet—he was amazingly buffed up…but he was short. And you don’t know that he’s short in the film because he’s shot from up angles and because he’s standing on an apple box, or Tom Hanks sometimes was actually standing in a hole.” Both King and Child offered defenses of Cruise’s casting in the role, arguing that he had the charisma to make up for his lack of physical stature. “I think there’s been a conflation when it comes to Tom Cruise between his acting and some of his personal beliefs…he is a tremendously able physical actor,” King said.

While most topics of conversation stayed squarely within the realm of accessible pop culture or Late Night fodder, King offered a technical topic near the end of the discourse: “I have a more writerly question. In the early books, they’re all third person, and then there are a number of books where Reacher narrates, and now we’re back in the third person. Was that a conscious decision?” King asked, before adding, “probably nobody gives a shit about this but me!” “A writer can be stereotyped much as an actor can—I thought I’d do the second book as different as possible as the first while keeping the same character,” Child replied. It didn’t take Child saying this to recognize the staggeringly prolific careers of the two “white guys” on the stage, but the seriousness and vulnerability with which he acknowledged his desire to stay fresh was a powerful reminder.

—Staff writer David J. Kurlander can be reached at david.kurlander@thecrimson.com.