My heartfelt thanks are due to all the teachers, friends and colleagues of Jim Grant who so generously contributed to this biography, many of whom appear in the book; likewise to friends and colleagues of Lee Child. I am especially grateful for the early encouragement of Harold Bloom, Gillian Beer, Dan O’Hara and Carl Cederström; to the Graduate Center at CUNY for supporting a year of research in New York; and to Joy Connolly, Giancarlo Lombardi and Brian Peterson for hosting the 2018 Lee Child Seminars. The staff at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia – in particular archivist Justine Mann – have given unstintingly of their expertise, as has Tamsin Rosewell of Kenilworth Books. I am indebted to my agent Sarah Such, to my publishers Andreas Campomar in the UK and Claiborne Hancock in the US, to Bernadette Marron, my editor, and to the rest of the terrific teams at Pegasus Books and Little, Brown UK.
Lee’s first readers were the members of his immediate family; the same is true for me, and their belief throughout has sustained me. But above all my lifelong thanks go to Lee himself, for his spellbinding stories, for giving so freely of his time and thoughts, and – despite his unwavering conviction that the writer remains subordinate to his characters – for agreeing to the idea in the first place.