Lee Child was born on October 29, 1954, in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV's "golden age." During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited , The Jewel in the Crown , Prime Suspect , and Cracker . But he was fired in 1995 at the age of forty as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars' worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor , the first in the Jack Reacher series. Otto Penzler , the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of The Mysterious Press (1975); MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City's Mysterious Bookshop (1979).

He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection , 1977, and The Lineup , 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine . He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.