"WE'VE had big names before, like Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Steve Cavanagh," says Armagh author Stuart Neville of the top-drawer writers who have previously appeared at his annual Crime Special event,"but Lee is almost his own genre all by himself."
That's 'Lee' as in 'Lee Child', creator of the internationally best-selling Jack Reacher thriller series: the Coventry-born author and his younger brother, Andrew, whom he has now teamed up with to co-author the most recent Reacher adventures, will be 'in conversation' with Neville at this year's Crime Special at the John Hewitt International Summer School on Monday July 24 at the Market Place Theatre.
"Lee is one of the biggest authors in the world in any field, really, so it's quite a thing to get him here," enthuses Neville (51), an award-winning crime thriller novelist who made an auspicious debut back in 2009 with his genre-bending novel The Twelve (AKA The Ghosts of Belfast) – a supernatural Belfast-set thriller about a former IRA killer, Gerry Fegan, literally haunted by a selection of his past victims.
Fegan also made a cameo in one of the tales included in Neville's 2020 shorts collection The Traveller & Other Stories, which found the Armagh author reclaiming his given name following a pair of stand-alone US-set books penned as Haylen Beck (a cheeky tribute to two of his rock music favourites, Van Halen and Jeff Beck), Here and Gone and Lost You.
Last year's The House of Ashes, a thriller/chiller centred on two women linked by the same creepy abode, was Neville's ninth novel to date: it's currently in the running for Genre-Busting Novel of The Year in this year's Fingerprint Awards at London's Capital Crime festival.
Lee Child (68), whose real name is James Grant, has praised Neville as "an exceptional talent", and the pair have previously collaborated on a short story collection, Belfast Noir, thanks to Child's local links.
"I don't know how many people really know that he has a connection to this part of the world," explains Neville, who is currently working on a new trilogy of US-set novels.
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"His father was from Belfast, I believe, and he has family here still. He contributed to a short story anthology I edited with with Adrian McKinty a few years back, called Belfast Noir, which was themed around Belfast.
"Lee did a story for us on the basis of those connections that he has. He's been over before and appeared in Belfast few times, at [top local crime fiction specialist] No Alibis and elsewhere."
According to Neville, he and the Wyoming-based Jack Reacher creator have crossed paths several times over the years at various book festivals and crime fiction events, and have a mutual respect for each other's work. In fact, the cover of the Armagh author's third novel, Stolen Souls, bore a prominent quote from Child, proclaiming that "crime fiction doesn't get much better".
"Lee is a very generous author," explains Neville, a passionate music fan who plays guitar in crime-themed covers outfit Fun Lovin' Crime Writers alongside the aforementioned Val McDermid (vocals) and Mark Billingham (guitar/vocals).
"He's very good to other writers, he's always been very willing to reach out to other authors that are further down the ladder and give them a hand. He's always been very good that way.
"He's always very willing to supply quotes for other people's books and do events with people. You know, he's always been very generous with his time."
Monday's Crime Special will find Neville delving deep beneath the covers of the Jack Reacher series, with a particular focus on the mechanics of the brothers' trio of Reacher collaborations: the partnership kicked off in style with 2020's The Sentinel, which saw Andrew (55) ditching his family name in favour of his elder sibling's more famous nom de plume.
"One thing we definitely want to look at is Andrew's career previous to becoming Andrew Child," says the Armagh man.
"He had already been published as Andrew Grant as an author, and in fact his first book actually came out around the same time as my own.
"So I want to cover some of that and also their connection to Belfast, and also the future of the Jack Reacher character now that Lee is kind of passing the torch to Andrew."
Indeed, the Childs' ongoing collaboration is based on the premise that Andrew will eventually take sole control of Reacher, allowing Lee to retire from authorship before there's any danger of him tainting the blockbuster book series – apparently, a Reacher novel is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds – through lack of inspiration.
At some point, the name 'Lee Child' will vanish from their covers, and it will be down to Andrew Child alone to dream up future adventures for the world's most famous ex-US Army military policeman.
However, for the moment they are still working together: their most recent collaborative effort, No Plan B, was published last year, while a brand new Reacher novel, The Secret, is due in October.
"That'll be something I'm very keen to explore with the both of them – how this actually works," explains Neville.
"I only know a few people who co-write books, one of whom is my friend Chris Brookmyre [another member of the Fun Lovin' Crime Writers], who has been co-writing a series of medical thrillers set in Victorian Edinburgh with his wife under the pen name Ambrose Parry.
"I'm always fascinated by how they managed not to strangle each other in the course of writing a novel. I find writing by myself hard enough – so dealing with somebody else strikes me as quite an undertaking.
"That is something I'll be looking to drill into: what are the actual mechanics of getting a book down together?"
Also up for discussion will be how Lee and Andrew keep finding new ground to cover with their quick-witted, light-travelling righter of wrongs to do after 27 books and counting – all of which are set to be adapted for the small screen via Prime Video's excellent TV series, Reacher, starring Alan Ritchson.
"From a writer's perspective, I'm always admiring of authors who can keep coming back to their character and finding something new to say with them," Neville tells me.
"That's something I struggle with, I've never managed any more than about three books with a single character before I feel like I've exhausted them.
"Whereas people like Lee and Andrew, John and Michael Connelly, Mark Billingham, Val McDermid – they can always keep coming back to a character over and over again and still find something. And it's not just a matter of finding a new story to tell, but also new things to find out about the character themselves.
"That's a skill in itself, and one that I wish I had – to be able to put that kind of a life into a character."
There's also the small matter of Lee (and now Andrew) Child's delicious, fat-free writing style, which keeps each Reacher book motoring along in page-turning manner while drawing the reader into whatever escapade the hulking hero is caught up in and deftly conjuring a tangible sense of each story's setting, be it a thrumming metropolis or dusty, one-horse desert town.
That's no mean feat, as Neville knows all too well from writing his own hugely acclaimed novels.
"On the face of it, Lee kind of steps out of the way and lets the story do the talking," he says, "but I think people miss what a huge amount of skill it requires as a writer to be able to do that.
"I mentioned [Belfast Noir]: I had to edit Lee's contribution to that, and I say 'edit' with quotes around it because I think I only had to change one thing, which was to do with a technicality – the rest of it was like a Swiss watch, not a comma or the dot of an 'i' was out of place. It was just perfect.
"His writing is incredibly slick and effortless to read – and there's nothing more difficult than making something seem effortless."
Find out more on Monday.
:: Stuart Neville in conversation with Lee and Andrew Child, Crime Fiction Special at the John Hewitt International Summer School, Monday July 24, Market Place Theatre, Armagh, 8.30pm. Tickets £14 via marketplacearmagh.ticketsolve.com
