Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury,
that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons,
the music's shorter than on the original broadcast but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My cast away this week is the author Lee Child.
His fictional creation, Jack Reacher, is a giant, literally and figuratively.
Six feet five of pure muscle with book sales to match.
Apparently everyone stopped counting once they shot past a hundred million.
For 30 years, Reacher has travelled across America from town to town and book to book,
uncovering dirty secrets and meeting out rough justice before disappearing off into the sunset.
The man behind the enigma may have been born a world away from his hero in 1950s commentary to be precise,
and grown up in Birmingham, but they do share a few qualities.
There's their height, which inspired Reach's name, and their initial motivation, revenge.
Lee Child was born Jim Grant, the son of a tax inspector and a housewife.
His buttoned-up childhood led him to escape into books,
and after winning a prestigious scholarship, he studied law and found a career in television.
His Reacher moment came when Costcutters arrived at the company he'd been with for 20 years and began instigating rafts of redundancies.