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We caught up with Andrew via Zoom in his wood wall-lined home library in Wyoming to talk short stories, streaming series and what���ӽ紫ý next for Reacher.

But also … the real truth behind why he is taking over the writing of the series from his brother (hint, he was a fan before Reacher had any fans). The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Your new Reacher story in “Bat Out of Hell” marks your third solo take on the character in short fiction. How did this particular story come about?

Andrew Child: "Back in Black" is one of three short stories featuring Reacher that I've written, and they're all part of the of this series of anthologies that are edited by Don Bruns. Really, I got involved with it because Don's been a friend of mine for a long time. He's a fantastic author and a really talented musician as well. And he came up with this incredible idea for a way to have a series of short story anthologies — because everybody likes a series, but it's very hard to find something that unites different kinds of short stories.

So, the idea of having them linked to, or inspired by famous albums was brilliant because that way you can continue to keep going with other famous albums, and hopefully people who enjoy that album are going to be interested in reading the kind of stories that the songs on the album inspired.

So, I was fortunate enough to be involved in the first one, which was based on "Hotel California" ("New Kid In Town"). Then I was also in "Back in Black" ("You Shook Me All Night Long") by ACDC. And then finally, "Bat Out of Hell" (title story).

And you know, it's something incredibly satisfying as an author if you happen to also like the bands that the albums are inspiring the books. Because, I remember as a teenager listening to “Bat Out of Hell.” I remember listening to it at parties and at clubs and just really enjoying it. You know, they're kind of over-the-top, bombastic, exaggerated themes in the songs. But I never thought that at any point in my future I would get the opportunity to write some original fiction sort of stemming from that. And it was a fantastic experience. I really, really enjoyed it. Don deserves an awful lot of credit for both the idea and the execution. These anthologies are great and I'm really proud to be part of them.

Q: The title, “Bat Out of Hell,” obviously evokes Meat Loaf���ӽ紫ý iconic album. Did that influence the tone or shape of your title story at all?

Child: Absolutely, yeah, the music and also the lyrics. On all of the three that I've done, I tried to remain pretty close to what I sort of took as to be the sense and the emotion of the song. And so, yeah, the music, you know, it's just so iconic, and that particular song ("Bat Out of Hell"), it was playing in my head constantly as I was coming up with a story.

Q: I believe I caught a couple of lyrics interposed into the story …

Child: It's very fun in a novel or in a short story to throw in, what, you know, people call Easter eggs — little things there that if you don't recognize where they come from, it doesn't matter. You can still enjoy the reading just as much, but if you do recognize it, like you did, then, it gives it that little extra element of fun. Because, you know, it's like you're in on the secret.

Q: This story was written entirely on your own, without Lee. Did that affect your writing approach?

Child: Not really, and all three of the of the short stories I did were without him. So, it was the same approach as to the other ones, and I approached them the same regardless. I think the only difference is when we are starting to write a novel together, we would do the most enjoyable part, which is kind of sitting around daydreaming, saying, "Well, what if this, what if that, if what this happened then what would Reacher do? What would the bad guys do? That's the really fun part, when you're just allowing your imagination to run wild and just coming up with one scenario after the other. So, that's something that's more fun to do when we do it together. Getting to write stories for a living is absolutely wonderful, and if you can do that with your brother, it's even better still. So, we really, really enjoyed that part of it. But then once you've got that bit straight in your head, once you're ready to start getting the words down on the page, then the approach, it was just the same, whether he was involved or not.

Q: You’ve now contributed to three of Don Bruns’ anthologies. How much freedom do you have with Reacher in these collections?

Child: Don gave us fairly loose reign in terms of how we how we were inspired, how closely we wanted to stick to the kind of feel or mood of the songs. The anthology is full of, in my opinion, absolutely outstanding stories. One of the things that's really interesting about them is the different approaches that the other authors took. Some were trying to stick very close. Some were just using it as a jumping off point and riffing in a completely different direction. For me, that's one of the particularly enjoyable parts of reading these anthologies — looking at those different approaches and seeing how effective they can be. You know, whether they try to stay close or whether they zoom off into the horizon. Both ways work really, really well, and it just adds to the enjoyment.

Q: Speaking of both ways working, what are the main differences between writing Reacher in a short story and a full novel?

Child: Different authors would give you different answers, but for me, whether you're comparing Reacher short stories and novels or any other kind, I find short stories much more difficult to write than the novels. And that's not because you have a strict word limit.

Through the Mystery Writers of America, I've been involved with the Edgar Awards for short stories in the past, so we had to read an awful lot of them. And, there were a huge range of lengths, very short to almost novellas, so you're not necessarily restricted to a certain word count, but you do have fewer words than if you're writing a novel, and yet you really still need to deliver everything that a novel delivers. You have to establish the characters, you have to establish the location. You have to develop the plot. You have to have twists. Since these are thrillers, you have to have twists and surprises and reveals. So, you have to do everything so efficiently. It's like you're trying to present an entire menu at a restaurant, but all in one meal.

So, I find it a huge challenge. And a lot of people would think, oh, it must be much easier writing a short story, because if it's a tenth of the length (of a novel), it should take you about a tenth of a time. Well, no, not for me. Anyway, it takes a huge amount of time. And when you're finished, if you manage to get it right, you can feel really, really satisfied because it's like such a privilege, like a real precision instrument. It's like a beautiful Swiss watch with tiny little components all meshing together and all working the way that you want, of making that happen.

In a short story you have to leave some things out, some background and things, like that. With the full-length novel, there is just so much more room to roam and to put in layers. Especially when it comes to backstory because when you've got a recurring series character like Reacher, the amount of backstory you put into a novel is really critical. Because, of course, you're going to have people who have already found Reacher and love him and are going to be picking up the next new story, and some people who are going to be picking the book up for the first time. So, you need to have enough in there that the new readers understand what's going on, but not so much that the existing readers are thinking, "Oh no, not this again." It's a really delicate balance, and really one of the most difficult things to get right.

Q: You’ve co-written a number of Reacher stories with Lee — when will readers get your first completely solo Jack Reacher novel? “Exit Strategy,” the 30th Reacher novel, comes out in November and both of your names are on the cover.

Child: Well, I've really taken the lead on this one. Lee, of course, is always involved, and I always want to make sure that he's happy with what's going on with Reacher as well, but he's sort of giving me a little bit more freedom these days. The original idea was that we would do four (Reacher novels) together, which we did, and then he would increasingly step back and I would increasingly take the lead, and we've pretty much stuck to that plan.

Q: Was there a specific moment when you and Lee agreed it was time for Reacher to be yours alone?

Child: That was something that Lee wanted right from the outset, because the whole idea of me coming on board was to enable him to be able to step back and retire and spend more of his time reading and doing the things that he wanted to do. So, that was always the objective. Of course, when you've never done something before — you know, we'd never worked together before, we'd never had this experience of me joining and doing something together and then changing that balance as we went — we didn't know exactly how that would work. We thought four books seemed about right, and as we went along, I think that it is the way it worked out.

Q: On behalf of millions of fans, I’m glad it���ӽ紫ý worked out. I don’t want to envision a world without a new Reacher novel.

Child: Thank you for continuing to read it because I'm in the same boat as you. I was the original world's first Reacher fan. I read "Killing Floor" when it was written in pencil on paper. And the idea that one day there wouldn't be another Reacher novel coming out ... it's just awful. So, I know exactly how you feel, and that's really what motivated me to want to do it.

Q: Let���ӽ紫ý talk about the Reacher streaming series. How involved are you in choosing which novels get adapted?

Child: I'm not, but Lee has been quite heavily involved in it, and that works pretty well in two ways. One, because before he was writing he worked in television, and it was regular broadcast television in those days, because streaming hadn't been invented yet. And he really feels like he's back home with TV. I think completing the circle feels very, very natural. And on top of that, I think it works nicely with the two of us involved: If he takes the lead with TV now, I'll take the lead with the novels. So, it's a good kind of division of labor for us.

Q: On the subject of TV and streaming, what makes “Gone Tomorrow,” the 13th novel in the series, a strong pick for adaptation of the fourth, upcoming season of “Reacher.”

Child: It really depends on the sequence that they're doing the adaptations in. It made sense to do "Killing Floor" as the first one, since it was the first book. Then, there was a slight tightrope that they had to walk with the TV adaptations, in that the nature of the novels is that Reacher is a loner. He shows up, takes care of whatever problem there is and then leaves. And so, really, with the possible exception of (former sergeant Frances) Neagley, he's really the only character who shows up in all of the novels, and in TV, typically, you have much more of an ensemble cast. And so, the second season based on "Bad Luck and Trouble” involved Reacher kind of revisiting his old Army unit, and that was great because it naturally gave them the opportunity to bring in all those extra characters.

Then you move on in the (streaming) series to the one that was based on "Persuader." The great thing about that, one of the many great things about that novel, is the matchup between Reacher and Big Paulie, because you've got Reacher, who's notoriously big and strong and good at fighting, and in that novel you've finally got him really meeting someone that absolutely could be his match. So, that was a way to contrast what had happened in the previous two. And then we've got "Gone Tomorrow," and that's just a really great story. I don't want to give too much away if people are going to be watching it and haven't read the book, but I think there's something very interesting about some about the villains in this this book. They're very, very compelling. Their backstory kind of makes your blood run cold a little bit.

Q: Do you think screen audiences experience Reacher differently than readers?

Child: In the streaming season series, it's more similar to the books than it would have been for the movies. Because the key difference really, I mean, it's obvious to say it, but the key difference is the amount of time that you have available to you in the two different media. If you're looking at a feature film, by the time you've got the, you know, the beginning and the end taken away, you've got about 90 usable minutes, really. And the thing with Reacher novels, the thing that people say over and over, is what they really enjoy is getting to think along with Reacher, because Reacher is presented with some apparently insurmountable problem. They can't possibly see what the solution can be until Reacher peels away layer by layer by layer, until at the end the answer is kind of simultaneously obvious but also still a complete surprise because you couldn't have seen it even two or three steps back. And to do that, you need time. And time is something that you do get in the streaming medium that you just do not get in the feature film. From that point of view, the experience of watching the story unfold is much more similar in the series to the books.

The other thing that's really important that you can do in streaming TV is you can vary the pace, because when you're talking about thrillers, people always obsess over them being fast-paced. But something that we are really adamant about is that you actually cannot make a novel or a TV show based on a novel that is only fast-paced. If everything is fast, really nothing is fast. You need to have the slower moments. You need to have the downbeat moments. You need to have the more reflective passages in order so that when the pace kicks up to full speed again, the audience really feels that. And again, you need time. You need screen time to do that.

Q: You had a strong writing career of your own before joining the Reacher franchise. How has the process changed you as a storyteller?

Child: I mean, it's a fantastic opportunity as a storyteller, because if you get to tell your story to more people, that's more enjoyable and more satisfying. And in terms of the process of telling those stories, it has changed a little because Lee was famous for always saying that he didn't plan, he didn't outline, he didn't prepare, he would just start with it, come up with a first sentence and then when he was happy with that, move on to the second sentence. And I was never one of the really hardcore outliners. You know, how you get some people who almost write a novella that they sort of slightly expand; then you get other people who will have all kinds of Post-it notes on their walls. It looks a bit like a kind of murder board in a police station, you know, with the strings going everywhere. I've never, I was never quite that. I never went to that kind of detail. But I did like to have more of an idea about where the story was going, what was going to happen, who was going to be involved, what the bad guy was up to, how it was all going to get resolved. I did prefer to have that a little bit more fleshed out. I always used to think of it as if Lee and I were like general contractors, and somebody called us to say they had some building they wanted to be done; I at least wanted to know that they wanted a house, as opposed to a supermarket, whereas he was happy to just pick up a trowel and start sticking the bricks together and see what it ended up with at the end.

My goal, when I came along, came on board with him, was to try to make the books that I was involved with, and then finally, I was writing on my own as similar as possible to the ones that he had written on his own. The kind of thing where, if you imagine some strange fantasy where the covers have been torn off and all you've got left are the pages of the story, that you wouldn't necessarily know, was Andrew involved with this? Did he write it? Or was it just Lee? And so it seemed to me, I don't know if this actually makes sense or not, but it seems to me that if you want to come up with the same result, it makes sense to try to use the same process. So, I have deliberately restrained my kind of impulse to try to look ahead and try to plan as much as possible so that I'm really writing in the way that Lee did. And I think it is probably the right thing to do, because it makes you feel a little bit like you're walking a tightrope, and you don't have any safety net, and that kind of makes you have to be more confident, in a way. You know you can't have it in mind that it doesn't matter if you fall off because there's a safety net; you have to be absolutely convinced that you are going to get to the other side in one piece. And I think that certainly, if you look at Lee's books, you know they really do have that very strong writing style to them. And I think that the lack of outlining and forward planning is something that contributes to that. That's something that made the process feel very natural to us, because for 25 years we would get together with very, very similar people. We think the same way. We like the same things, we dislike the same things, we get annoyed by the same things. And so we would get together, we would respond to different scenarios exactly the same. We would, you know, bizarrely enough, we would sit around and talk about Reacher like he was an invisible extra brother. We had a lot of fun doing that for a lot of time. And really the thing that changed was that it switched to me having to start writing that down, as opposed to, just enjoy it and then go home. So, yeah, it's a sort of natural process. And I think that understanding Reacher's thought process and attitudes are absolutely, for both of us, second nature. The thing that was a challenge for me was adjusting the kind of prose style in order to make it sound, hopefully, exactly like his. Whereas for nine books before that, I had been, you know, deliberately trying to not sound like him, to carve out my own niche. So that kind of 180-degree turn was quite difficult, and that was probably the thing that took me the longest to really get anywhere close to being comfortable with.

Q: Do you have plans to return to original fiction or write outside the Reacher world again?

Child: I mean, it's too far out to put a definitive date on it, sure, but it's certainly something that I would like to do. The series I was working on before joining in with Reacher, you know, the Paul McGrath "Janitor" series, I was having just such a lot of fun with those. Those were the favorite, my favorite things to write. It was the thing I was having the most fun with. And you know, if Lee hadn't asked me to do this, then I would still be doing that, still be enjoying it. So, if I can ever get my time management to a point where I could manage to do work on two things, then I would absolutely love to, and my hope is that one day I will.

Q: That���ӽ紫ý great news for Andrew Grant fans. But with your current short fiction, could some of the ideas from your short stories — like the one in “Bat Out of Hell” — grow into full novels?

Child: Probably not from these short stories because these particular short stories were so closely linked to the songs on the albums that we were using as the jumping off point. I think it was kind of a little bit of fun from Don's point of view, to get me to do the "New Kid In Town" one when he did, because that was right when I was starting with Reacher. There was almost like an inside industry joke there. So that made a lot of sense. I tried to just get a sense of the kind of emotion from what the song was kind of aiming at, and then parlay that into a short story.

So, there are aspects to it that could be picked up on and enlarged. There were certain characters that I enjoyed. There was a character in there who claimed to be a private detective. Turned out that was a little bit different from things going on; things like that. You could take a character like that and make him very much a kind of central pillar or central plank of a novel. So, there are certain things, certainly things that could be taken out of it and expanded, but not quite in the form that it found for the short stories, purely because of the connection with the music.

Q: After years of writing Reacher, has your view of him changed or evolved?

Child: Not really. I mean, for me, the thing is, and Lee said this himself a few times as well: Our father was Irish. So, you know, the Irish can get away with saying certain things. And he had this expression that if you wanted to keep something, it needed to be the same, only different, and so that's what we try to do with Reacher, really, because we don't really do what a lot of people consider the sort of classic character development. Reacher doesn't change from book to book. You're not going to suddenly find Reacher going to therapy, or, you know, buying a lawn mower. These things are just never going to happen. But what we can do is, perhaps, show him from different angles, show him in different situations, see how he would react. And what we can also do, and we've done it a few times, is that we can, in terms of the chronology, do prequels where Reacher is still in the Army. And those are really fun to do, because not only do they show him in a whole different environment — because all of a sudden, he's not a drifter doing whatever he wants, he's somebody in a command structure having to do what he's told. So that's fun, and you could almost call it reverse character development, because you're bringing in a younger, less experienced, even slightly naive Reacher. And so we're going to be changing him into something different. But we can kind of, in a way, hint at the sort of things that made him who he is in the stories that we like now. Of course, when you do that, you mess with millions of fans. Because now that the camps are out there, should I read these in the order they were published, or the order that they actually show up in the timeline? But that's fun to see.

That's always a tough one, isn't it? As a reader, if you come across a new series, it's always a tough one. And you know, we do try to make it that you can pick them up in any order. But I know there are camps out there. Some people are absolutely adamant, no, it has to be the order of publication. Other people think that as long as you read them and as long as you enjoy them. ... I think, do whatever what works best for you.

Q: Finally, what should fans look forward most to next — whether on the page or the screen?

Child: For now, and I'm just basing this on my experience as a Reacher fan, I'm just looking forward to catching up with him after a year's lapse, seeing where he is, seeing what he's doing and looking forward to seeing him right the wrongs that he encounters. Because, you know, in a way, it's a little bit like watching a James Bond movie. It's never in doubt that Bond is going to is going to triumph, right? But what's interesting about it as well are what obstacles is he going to face? How is he going to overcome them, and how is he going to solve the problems? And so, I hope that the things that people look forward to are exactly those. And I hope that you know in the course of turning all those pages, that all of those issues are scratched and people come out at the end feeling good.

Q: Which brings our interview full circle. It seems to me that your short stories are just that … sort of examples of what Reacher is doing between novel storylines. Do you agree?

Child: Yeah, exactly. That's, that's kind of how I approach them. Because, again, you know, talking about the little Easter eggs, a couple of the novels kind of explain Reacher's physical journey, where has he been? Where is he going? That ties into how he gets embroiled in whatever the conspiracy is that he's going to have to untangle this time. And so, in a couple of them, I did hint at the fact that he was just coming from a place and when he got in, he got trapped into the next adventure. So, things like that. You're absolutely right. You can really kind of fill in a little bit of that time in between the annual visits.