president trump announces the total withdrawal of us troops from syria. the decision by the white house to pull out all of the remaining 2,000 american personnel is being criticised widely by republican leaders. the pentagon has also expressed its reservations. the us central bank, the federal reserve, has raised interest rates for a fourth time by 0.25%. the decision comes in in the face of warnings by donald trump that it would be a mistake. and this distinctive style of art might be familiar to you. it appeared on a garage in the welsh town of port talbot and has been confirmed as street art from banksy. worth more than the building it was painted on, it's now been fenced off to protect it. that's all. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news, stephen sackur speaks to writer lee child on hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur.

storytelling is one of the most basic human impulses, but few are the storytellers who can draw in millions of readers all over the world, fewer still those who can do it repeatedly. which puts my guest today, lee child, in a very exclusive club. his first thriller featuring former military policemanjack reacher was published 21 years ago. his latest is his 23rd and his book sales have topped 100 million. fans speculate endlessly about what drives jack reacher, but what drives lee child? lee child, welcome to hardtalk. thank you.

you have lived with this fictional characterjack reacher for the last 20—odd years of your life. where did he come from because he certainly didn't come from your own life experiences? not my own experiences but my life experiences were all in entertainment. and i learnt very early that you can never plan and you should never overanalyse something that might or might not work in entertainment. everything is an accident. and so i wrote jack reacher and i never wanted to know where he came from. i didn't want to burst the bubble or overthink anything so for years ijust wrote him. then when i became secure about it i started to think, all right, where does he come from? some of it is wish fulfilment for me, i would like to be this guy. would you really?

yeah, i would, and i suspect a lot of my readers would too in a vague sort of a way. in a literary sense, where he comes from, is hundreds and thousands of years ago, he's the knight errant, the mysterious stranger, the noble loner who shows up. we sort of last saw it mostly, i suppose, during the westerns in america 150 years ago, but they didn't invent it. before that he was in mediaeval sagas in europe. the knight errant literally a knight on a battered white horse that would show up in the nick of time, solve the problem and move on. probably borrowed from the scandinavian sagas or the anglo—saxon poems or the greek legends. you could trace at the same type of guy in religious myths, the saviour who shows up at the right time. is that an intellectualisation of jack reacher that you've come to over time as you have been asked this question time and time again. or is it something that was in your mind as you faced those blank sheets of paper when you were a0 years

old and had been laid off yourjob at granada television. in your mind, at that point, when you first started sketching out this character, were you clear you were drawing on myth and legend and all of those things? not clear, no. i only figured that out in retrospect. 0bviously he must have come from what i'd read previously in my life, what i had seen and what i had experienced in terms of myth and legend. yeah, i would say he is the 20th century version of the lone ranger or sir gawain or sir lancelot. but interestingly, he has a time and a place. it is the united states of america, pretty contemporary, and he is a former military policemen. now you are not american, you were born in the west midlands in england and had a pretty conventional upbringing with a dad who was a civil servant who i think wanted you to go into some kind of

white—collar profession. they were you, a lad growing up in provincial england. how do you feel so comfortable writing about this ‘i am strong' military man in the middle of america? the american part is because this character is always forced out toward the frontier. what worked in europe in the middle ages doesn't work any more because we are densely populated, settled, civilised and so on. so the character, no choice of his own, but that was pushed out to where there is still a frontier which explains america. and i know america well because in college i married an american woman and i first went to america 44 years ago. i've lived there for more than 20. so with an outsider‘s eye which i think is very much more acute than a native's eye, i know america well, i've seen it well and i can describe it to americans. i can explain and america to americans because i'm looking at it fresh and they admit that. a lot of people say about writing, particularly when you begin, write what you know.

you sure as heck don't know so much about the military life or the post—military life and frankly, you portray a bloke who is 6.5, 250 pounds, fights like a prized fighter, who knows everything there is to know about weaponry. is any of that close to any experience you've had? well, ifought a lot as a kid on the streets. have you had a fistfight at as an adult? as an adult, five years ago was the last time i had a fistfight as an adult, yeah. were you good? did you win? i was creaky because i'm old now but i did win and it surprised me, shocked me actually, how fast you revert to that feral streak. i'm intrigued. who were you fighting and why? it was late at night in new york city and i was walking home and a cab stopped on the other side of broadway and very tiny sikh driver was trying to get a drunken

frat boy out of the back of his cab because the kid was about to throw up and that's a disaster for a cab driver because then his night's work is gone. and the boy was being very abusive and i just thought, oh, this is a real—life reacher moment so i just walked across the street to help him out and pulled the guy out of the back of the cab and he was foolish enough to hit me in the eye brow. so that required a response so yeah, we had a fistfight right there. you channelled your inner reacher? i did, yeah, reacher comes from somewhere i think in all of us. this is the point that i think explains reacher‘s appeal. we are all, mostly, i mean the vast majority of us, are all decent, kind people full of goodwill who would help a stranger if possible. of course it's not possible most of the time, most people are intimidated or inhibited by fear or propriety or maybe the problem's at work and you can't make waves. so we all live with a low level buzz

of frustration that we can't do the right thing when we want to. that is why we love it in fiction. we turn to fiction for consolation. here is a guy who will do the right thing, no matter what the odds are and that gives us consolation and satisfaction and makes us feel better about the world. what about guns? guns feature prominently in a lot of the books and jack reacher is not adverse to shooting people in the front and indeed in the back, if necessary. i just wonder whether there is a danger that you fetishise, glamorise, i'm not sure what the right word is, but your relationship with violence and indeed gun violence is complex. it is. and i make reacher make the point many times, never tell soldier that guns are fun because that word you use, fetishisation, is the problem. gun ownership in america is huge. maybe 100 million people own a gun.

some of them are fine. i know people out west who, about this time of year, will shoot a couple of deer which then feeds their family through the winter. nobody could argue with that. 0n the other hand, the sort of person who fetishises a styled rifle that's dressed up to look military. somebody who fetishises that is a serious problem. but they're not all the same. you need to pick apart the mosaic there and look at the ones that are dangerous and the ones that aren't. and reacher tries to make the point that a gun is a tool. nobody fetishises a black & decker cordless electric drill. nobody fetishises a certain type of screwdriver. why is it that guns get so fetishised? that's the real issue and it is virtually a mental health issue. people getting turned on by inert machines. there is something wrong with the person rather than the machine. are you an advocate for much tougher gun control in the united states? i would like to see some kind

of sensible control, yeah. i mean, i don't want to take somebody‘s granddaddy‘s rifle away that's going to feed their family for a year, but i would certainly want to take away access to guns for people that are mentally unstable or really have no legitimate reason to have one other than fun. now, to me, a gun can never be fun and yet you meet people who enjoy guns. you say that but you write these books for entertainment and guns are a big feature of the book so in a certain sort of way you are using guns for entertainment. i see it as a very sophisticated response from the audience, that most book readers are more educated, more thoughtful, more sensitive people than non—book readers, that's just the name of the game. they know that vigilante justice like reacher

dispenses, is wrong. they know they shouldn't have it in real life, they know it can't exist in real life, they thoroughly agree that in real life, yes, of course, we need due process, we need fair trials, we need rules that respect the accused just as much as the victim. they're very comfortable with that. but they find it frustrating because it's a long drawn out process and sometimes the bad guy gets away on a technicality and in the back of everybody‘s brain is a kind of atavistic response, they want summary justice. because they are self—denying about that in real life, they love it in fiction. do you like the idea of summary justice. clear, absolute lines between right and wrong. a black and white view of the world which doesn't allow for much relativism and shilly—shallying around ? i get the impression that, while your books aren't overtly political, you are deeply fed up with some aspects of contemporary society in the western world and some of those are connected

to the role of institutions, to the intervention that comes with the state and yourjack reacher is a guy that won't be doing with any of that, has no truck with the rules and regulations of society. he is just so confident in himself to deliver his own form ofjustice. i'm a bit like that. for me, i'm tired of constantly re—debating the same questions. for instance, i saw online about some couple i think in this country, nazis who called their baby adolf and so on. we've been there and done that. that's a settled question. we don't have to argue about whether that is acceptable or tolerable any more. we've had that discussion 70 years ago. so summaryjustice for, i mean, if reacher met somebody dressed up in a nazi uniform, giving a nazi salute, sure, he'd punch him in the face because there's nothing more to be said. that to you is the solution to more problems than we actually allow for, is it? punching somebody in the face?

or maybe even shooting them? i think we should do that once in a while with certain sorts of people, yeah. i'm thinking to myself as i hear you say that, that donald trump might well be a fan of jack reacher. if he read it, which i doubt that he does. but does it trouble you that the message you're sending and you obviously set these books in the united states, is a message that does play in to that trumpian notion that we've had enough of rules and rules—based systems, you know, i'm just going to follow my instincts, i'm gonna do what i think is right and damn the consequences. what would you do? like, every year reopen a fresh inquiry about whether being a nazi is a good idea or not? or do we think we already know the answer to that? so you would utterly reject the notion that the spirit in your books might match the spirit of a trumpian age in the united states? i'm pretty sure it doesn't, i think there's a simplicity about the trumpian thinking which is not reflected really in any book because a book requires a certain amount of intellectual sophistication to complete on both the writer and the reader part and i think that's what's missing in the trump coalition. do you sometimes, although your

books aren't overtly political, plant storylines, notions, scenes, in books, that exhibit perhaps your deeper feelings about the way society should be? yeah and i also try and use them as a kind of subliminal or hidden message to the sort of person who might superficially liken on the right. give me an example. well, one of the books is about gays in the military and reacher who is clasped to the bosom of certain right—wing types, redneck types, they love him, i use reacher to give the message that there is nothing wrong with that. are you surprised that there are a gay people in the military? i mean, i remember my own father who was, i mean, not particularly homophobic butjust a very repressed and conventional man, i once asked him, he was in world war ii, i asked him if there were gay people in the military and he said of course, we had 14 million men in uniform,

of course plenty of them were gay. i asked if it bothered him and he said, why on earth would it bother me? if somebody brings me a can of ammunition in my vauxhall, what do i care what his sexual orientation is? the real world is utterly different to the ideology. —— foxhole. i don't know if you put labels on yourself and all. if people heard that and put the label of liberal on you, do you see yourself as that? is jack reacher a liberal? well, i am a writer, words mean something to me, so i'm a liberal, yes, based in liberty. completely believe in liberty and democracy, so i am a democrat. those labels have been misappropriated. liberal is a term of abuse? i think liberal is a gorgeous concept. let me talk to you about the business of writing.

you have been extraordinarily successful in commercial terms and i just wonder, having written that first book, seeing it take off in a way could not imagine, whether you, early on, felt that you had a formula here that you wanted, both wanted and needed, to replicate. you know, that's a good question, because formula can be imposed from one side or another, and i feel for me, in as much as there's a formula, it's imposed by the reader's desire. i feel i'm very much in partnership with the reader. that's interesting, because i wrote this down, because it struck me so much. at one point, iforget who was interviewing you, you said the writer is the servant of the reader. it almost conjures up in my mind servitude, where you are trapped, you are locked, you've done so well and the readers love it and goodness knows, 100 million books sold, you can't escape. well, no. it's not that i can't escape, it's almost like a function. imagine you have a fantasy

mediaeval court and the king has his own personal storyteller. that guy's job is to entertain the king. it's explicit. and i feel that a writer... that guy doesn't have liberty. he might have some other stories in his passion that he wants to tell but the king says, "no, i want another one like last week!" my readers say that as well and it's not the big sacrifice to a vague plans might otherwise have. the reverse may be true. people love these books and they look forward to the next one. it would be utterly perverse to me to say, "you know what, i know you are looking forward to the next one but you can't have it. you can have this completely different thing instead because of my own personal arrogant choice. you're stuck with it." it's not arrogant, it'sjust allowing the full lee child, or i was going to say, jim grant, because in the end, this is about who you are, you arejim grant, your writer's name is lee child, but if you look deep intojim grant, maybe he's got some other stuff you want to say.

the audience sees you as lee child. i could always say it and write it. i think it. the only person i really need to satisfy with my random thoughts is myself. it's like, suppose you were harry kane playing for spurs, the person that goes to — i was going to say white hart lane, but the new place. the person who goes to the ground knows they are going to be watching football, they know that up front. they are not walking along to the stadium thinking, "hm, is it going to be basketball today, is it going to be rugby, is it going to be hockey?" you need to have some kind of reliability and entertainment. the audience needs to be able to trust the writer. but you're constraining yourself notjust by saying, "well, i'm a writer, so i'm going to write," like harry kane would say, "i'm a footballer, i play football." you write these specific stories.

iam not i am not going to deviate from it. i guess what i'm asking is, are you truly, properly, deep down inside as fulfilled as you believe you can ever be by continually, if i may use the phrase "churning out jack reachers," rather than anything else? i can say that because i don't think of myself as a writer per se. i'm not trying to be albert camus, i didn't buy a black polo—neck and a leather jacket, i'm not obsessed with being a writer, i want to be an entertainer, and i think that people fall into a channel. you look all around the entertainment scene today, people do their thing. and i'm the guy that writes jack reacher. it's just that simple. yeah. and you have, in the past, said some interesting things about the snobbishness in the literary world. you pointed to some writers that you said you like. you know, you can think, martin amis, ian mcewan, and others. you said, they are good and i like some of their books but they couldn't

probably do what i do, whereas i am pretty darn sure i could do what they do. i think that's just the facts of the writing landscape. because, ask yourself the question, if they could do it, why don't they? because maybe for snobbish or other reasons, they don't value what you do. they see it as, in a sense, to use a metaphor, they see it as junk food as opposed to a proper gourmet meal. yeah, they do. but suppose you were a gourmet who loved great restaurants, wouldn't you one day go and eat at mcdonald's so your children could go to college, your grandchildren could have a house and so on? wouldn't you sacrifice one meal to ensure the security of yourfamily? so literary writers, i love what they do and respect it completely, but why don't you just take a year off, make a fortune and the family will be ok forever? is that not an irresistible proposition? if they are not doing it, they are either incredibly self—sacrificing on behalf of their children or grandchildren, or they can't do it.

we talked about your success, and your characterjack reacher made the leap, and he's very good at leaping, he made the leap from the page to the big screen. you were someone involved, not wholly involved. tom cruise playing jack reacher, you were never really satisfied, you were never really convinced about it. strictly speaking, i was rather detached from that decision. not that i wasn't involved. they were very generous with me at every step of the way. for me, the book is the ultimate product. there is nothing beyond the book. the book can't be improved. the book doesn't become better because it becomes a movie. the movie is peripheral. does it become worse? it's almost inevitably worse. i can think of only two movies that were better than the books that they have been based on, but, to me, it was not an important decision. i thought the book was the ultimate product. nothing could be brought to it.

but my readers over the years were very unhappy with tom cruise because of his size, which i thought ultimately was a little superficial. you said, and i quote, "tom cruise for all his talent didn't have the physicality." he didn't, for the reader. jack reacher is supposed to be 6'5" and he is 250lb. tom is half jack reacher‘s size. just as intense internally, but he doesn't have, for the reader, he lacked the physicality. could you not stop that casting and get somebody more appropriate? i couldn't at the time. did you try? i didn't. i took a very fast split—second decision that tom cruise would be fun to work with. and he was, i have nothing bad to say about him at all. but the readers convinced me they are not happy so we are moving it from future films. tom cruise will not be jack reacher any more, it will be somebody on long—form television, we don't know but hopefully the readers will participate in choosing the actor. this is important for a lot

of people who love the notion of more jack reacher on the screen but you say it will be, what, some sort of long—term tv series? yeah, not to use brand names, a 10— to 12—hour season that can be binge—watched and screened. when? hopefully we will get it out within the year. we've done a deal in the past couple of weeks and we will start recruiting writers. who have you done the deal with? it's with sky dance television in los angeles. it will be on which platform? they will sell it to whichever platform wants it most. it's another payday. hopefully. i'm struggling to believe you haven't thought hard about who will play jack reacher, because it will live and die by the credibility. part of that reason is sure anybody we know now is right. what i would love to happen is a complete unknown do it. jack reacher is a huge guy and he's not very good looking, he is fairly ugly,

at least battered—looking, and there aren't many who look like that, actors tend to be handsome, so with a bit of luck, we could find a character actor who's been around for a while or a completely unknown person in the same model using years ago sean connery becamejames bond. television is a little bit more star—driven than the movies, so we can afford to look around more. just a final thought, and i think i'm right in saying this one i've got here, which is the past tense, the latest, is the 23rd. it is, yeah. you are in your 60s and you've done fabulously well and we discussed all that. are you as committed to the next and the next and the next jack reacher as ever before? i will wait to see out bills when i am writing it. but in about a third of next year's and it's still feeling good, so that's fine. i will know when i don't want to do this, when i feel like that, that's the time to

stop, because the one thing i do not want to do is be that guy who sticks around a couple of years too long. i don't want to be remembered for two lousy books at the end of my career as opposed to the good ones. lee child, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much indeed. hello there. well, as you've probably already heard, the run—up to christmas is set to be a fairly mild one, with our air coming in off the atlantic. now, it's not going to be completely settled, though. there will be quite a bit of cloud and also some rain or showers at times. but a little bit of sunshine, too. now, for thursday, we've still got low pressure in charge of the weather.

it'll be anchored to the north—west of the uk. and we'll have a fair old breeze blowing in from the west, and that will continue to feed in showers, most of them across southern and western areas early on thursday, the odd heavy one, with many central and eastern parts seeing the longer dry spells to begin thursday. so we'll have a split in temperatures. where you get the showers, a bit more cloud. southern and western areas, temperatures around five to seven degrees. something a bit cooler, though, further north. around scotland, maybe a touch of frost around some of the glens, and maybe a little mist and fog, too. but, for thursday morning, it's going to be a largely dry and a bright one across many northern and eastern areas. showers, though, will get going across the west, and then maybe merge together to produce some longer spells of rain, some of them could be quite heavy. and, again, it's going to be fairly blustery, particularly near southern and western coasts. mild in the south, 10—11 degrees. further north, these are pretty typical temperatures, in fact, for this time of year. now, as we head through thursday night, it stays quite breezy and quite showery. for a time, the showers ease down and then we start to see some wetter and windier weather arriving across the south—west.

that's because this next frontal system will move into the southern half of the country during thursday night into friday morning. so it could be quite wet for some. but what it will do is import even milder air across the southern half of the country, as you can see, the yellow and orange colours there. so, although it's going to be a really drab start to friday, a lot of surface spray, standing water on the roads, that rain should eventually clear eastwards. although its northern extent may linger on across parts of northern ireland, northern england, maybe southern scotland. so a bit of a grey day here. bit of sunshine. to the north of here, again, quite cool with a little bit of sunshine. and sunshine will move in across england and wales. and very mild, 11—14 degrees. now, into the weekend, it looks like saturday will be the driest day with that right of high pressure. then the weather fronts moving on sunday. it is a bit of a tale of two halves. showers to begin in northern and eastern areas. 0therwise, with that ridge of high pressured building in, it should turn a little bit drier. the winds light, coming from the west, and a good deal

of sunshine particularly further south and east where you are. ten to 12 degrees, very mild in the south. about nine or ten in the north. sunday looks wetter and windier across the board as we head into monday, it looks like it could turn a little bit cooler in the north. welcome to newsday, live from singapore. the headlines: president trump is criticised by fellow republicans for ordering the immediate withdrawal of us troops from syria. there has been a sharp increase in violence in indian—administered kashmir. more than 500 people killed this year. we have a special report. indian armed forces are fighting what are believed to be two, perhaps three militants who are hiding in there. this gun exchange has just

intensified, but the operation has been going on all through the night, for the past 12 hours. i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: america's central bank raises interest rates for a fourth time, despite president trump saying it is a mistake.