If you're ever confronted by someone arguing that people from working-class backgrounds don't become successful writers, it may be useful to cite the example of Lee Child, aka James Grant from Birmingham.

Lee/James is one of the bestselling contemporary writers on the planet. His series of Jack Reacher novels has sold around 200 million copies (a figure often quoted is that one is sold somewhere in the world every nine to 13 seconds) and his books have been made into two movies starring Tom Cruise, and an Amazon Prime Video series.

The author grew up in a working-class family in Birmingham, and remains intensely loyal to his background. Learning to read aged three, Child felt like a class traitor due to his academic talents, which saw him get to university to study law, eventually switching to a career in television. Working for Granada TV for 18 years, he was famously a union shop steward. It was after being made redundant by Granada in 1995 that he began writing the Reacher novels, choosing the crime genre because he loved crime books. One wonders if the Reacher novels commonly recurring revenge themes may be not entirely coincidental.

Of course there is a common argument that says at the point of becoming a bestselling writer, Lee relinquished whatever working-class status was left after his parents had striven to enter the lower-middle ranks, and he had worked in telly. This is a matter of opinion and sociological metrics, but if you are open to the subtleties and nuances of class influence (which The Bee, like Lee, very much is) then you can see this is at the very least a complex issue.

"Having gone through the whole thing of having to have the net curtains the whitest on the street and the step donkey-stoned to perfection and all of that, we moved up into a semi-detached house in an undistinguished suburb, rather than a terrace in the inner city," he says below. "I was born in Coventry but grew up in Birmingham, entirely surrounded by a physical infrastructure and a cultural infrastructure that was created by the skilled working class. And yet, I was being forced to be middle class. That tension is really the key aspect of my life."

Jack Reacher is a former US Army officer and vigilante drifter who travels across America armed only with a toothbrush, righting wrongs and breaking up criminal gangs as he goes. On the surface he might appear to have little in common with everyday life in the UK, and yet, as his creator explains here, his life philosophy and modus operandi are rooted in British working-class ideas about crime and retribution.

Child sat down with Bee editor Richard Benson after recording an episode of our Working Class Library podcast, to talk about his life and career, and why he believes Britain needs to encourage more working-class writers.

You’ve spoken about being influenced by a solidarity you saw in the working-class community where you grew up in Birmingham. Was that a feeling you always had as a kid, or is it something that you thought more about later on in adulthood?

With childhood experiences, you don't truly understand what’s going on at the time, and you then analyse them later and see why things turned out the way they did. For me, it was a solidarity with individual people. What I took from that environment, at a DNA level of conception, was that you could make things. Ordinary people could make things.

All around me, raw materials were going in one door, and the finished products were coming out of the other door. So, the idea that you could make things and people worked all day doing that, that was important.

Do you think about your writing practice in those terms at all?

I do, yeah, I think I'm making a product, and I do it in a kind of Midlands way, a very Birmingham way. You do it as best as you can, but you don't make a big fuss or a drama about it, and you don't pat yourself on the back. There are a million people doing it, and you're only one of them.

Can we look at your writing journey? Killing Floor was published in 1997, introducing Jack Reacher to the world. Had you tried writing before? How did you begin, and how did you then get to publication?

No, I hadn’t tried to write before. I wrote letters and stuff, and I was aware that I was efficient. I was effective at putting down my thoughts on paper. So, I knew that, but I'd never attempted any fiction or anything like that.

I'd been an obsessive reader all my life, an obsessive reader, but with a peculiar blind spot – possibly because of the class thing – in that I had never imagined where the books came from. To me, they were just there on the library shelf. I had no concept at all that somebody must have written this, somebody must have published it, somebody must have distributed it.

Were there any particular books that inspired you?

The Travis McGee series by an American writer called John D MacDonald. It’s a fabulous series, 21 books long, high quality, terrific entertainment, and while I was reading them, it was suddenly like a blinding light. I could see what he was doing, and why and how and when. It was like suddenly seeing a blueprint. Maybe it was him, maybe it was just the time of my life, but I was ready for it.

And you had been working at Granada Television…

The rumblings at Granada about us all being fired went on for five years, and I thought, you know what, when shit hits the fan, maybe I'll try writing a book, because I could suddenly see how it was done. And so that's what I did.

I wrote the first book with my eyes closed, metaphorically speaking, because I'd been in the entertainment business a long time, and I'd learned that you can't plan a success, and you can't make somebody like a character. You can't sit there and think, "OK, I need to do this, this and this, and then it will be a success and a bestseller." So, you write from the heart. I self-consciously ignored everything that I thought I knew, and wrote from the heart.

What kind of things did you read as a child?

Reading for me was about absolute escape. I started with Enid Blyton, The Famous Five, especially. That was my first love. That was the first series I really got into. And of course, looking back, I could totally understand why. The Famous Five was a kind of orphan fantasy. There were no parents involved. I had these dull, strict parents and the idea of being able to roam free and do what I want, like those four kids and their dog, was just magical to me.

Many crime writers enjoy doing intensive research into the situations they write about. Do you?

Not really. I do it in reverse order, and I think that's very important for writing. I'm fascinated by process, I'm fascinated by how things work, insider information, nuggets of things. I consume it all the time. I read stuff and talk to people completely irrespective of whether I think I'm ever going to write about it.

It's an ongoing thing that I used to do when I wasn't a writer, and I will always do when I'm no longer a writer. It's just part of my life. Talking to people about how things work. You build up this giant database in the back of your head, and that’s there when you come to write a book.

I never take a notebook and a camera and research a location, I never go and talk to an expert about something for a specific book, because by that point it's too late. We work through a book-a-year pattern, and that means that it's really too late to do any specific research, and if you do, it will come out undigested. You've got to let it settle for years, until you see what's the really important part of it.

So, "research" is all stuff I've done before, out of natural interest, and I will undoubtedly be able to use it. I mean, sometimes I find the most ridiculous stuff. About 20 years ago, the Super Bowl in the US had this big, fancy half-time show and that particular year it was sponsored by Pepsi-Cola, and it featured Britney Spears. Somebody pointed out to me that the only anagram in the English language of Pepsi-Cola is Episcopal, and the only anagram in the English language of Britney Spears is Presbyterians. I'm never going to use that in a book, but I would rather have that information than a million dollars; I just love stuff like that.

I recall a scene in which Reacher cuts somebody’s throat, and he knows that the throat is actually a really hard thing to cut. So you wouldn't have researched that for the purposes of the book, it's something you'd have happened to come across somewhere?

I will have come across that, yeah. Probably some surgical thing. In the movies, they show throats being cut with elegant flicks, but it's absolutely not like that. In reality, you saw like mad, and you need a lot of physical strength. I've never cut anybody's throat, but I picked up that information somewhere and just used it.

Where do you see yourself sitting in the British class system?

I'm a product of the skilled working class. My ancestors, my mother's family, was the dominant family culturally for us. My father was from Northern Ireland. His family was very small and distant, and had very little impact on us. But we were the products of three or four generations of the skilled working class. They had been apprentices, mostly. They had a trade. Mostly, they were fitters rather than labourers, up in the north-east, in the shipyards on the Tyne or in the big heavy industry up there.

I think your mum and dad were quite aspirational…

Yes, they both were, and my mother, in particular, was desperate to become middle class. By and large, she achieved it. By the time I was a sentient kid, you would have called us lower-middle class.

Having gone through the whole thing of having to have the net curtains the whitest on the street and the step donkey-stoned to perfection and all of that, we moved up into a semi-detached house in an undistinguished suburb, rather than a terrace in the inner city. So that experience that I had was... I was born in Coventry but grew up in Birmingham, entirely surrounded by a physical infrastructure and a cultural infrastructure that was created by the skilled working class. And yet, I was being forced to be middle class. That tension is really the key aspect of my life.

Were your parents keen for you to have middle-class jobs?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. Literally, they would have given their right arms for us to be solicitors or doctors, you know, so that we could have a detached house and a two-year-old car instead of a five-year-old car.

Do you feel there were more working-class voices in the arts when you were growing up than now?

Yes, in my lifetime, there was John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, and a lot of northern stuff going on. There was a pretty solid stream of kitchen-sink drama and all of that. The working class were finding a voice. And so, I don't think the class thing was necessarily a negative.

But I think it was coming in from the outside. Big stars like Michael Caine started out in Billingsgate Fish Market and so on. So, at that time, it wasn't that we were trying to break into something that was previously inhabited only by hoity-toity people. There was already representation there.

Do you think coming from the working class gave you any advantages as a writer?

There are a lot of different working classes, based on who you are, where you are and when you were growing up. I don't know that it really gives you any advantages. I think that you can have a combination of events that give you an advantage, though. In my family situation, my parents were extremely scathing about anything that I wanted to do or was interested in. I had zero encouragement about anything. Zero. That toughens you up and makes you much more independent. You're sort of pre-accustomed to discouragement.

Nothing I wanted to do fit in that mould of upward mobility. I did not want to be a solicitor living in a detached house. I started writing because I'd lost my job in the reorganisation at Granada. A couple of months later, my parents dropped in, and I said: "By the way, I've lost my job." And they said: "Oh, what are you going to do now?" And I said: "I'm writing a book."

And my father said: "I'll bet you 10,000 to 1 it's a failure."

If someone said to you, "What class are you now?", how would you answer that question?

That’s a great question, because I think once you enter the creative world, class falls away to an extent that it doesn't in other professions. If I'd become a solicitor, like my mother wanted me to be, there are gradations of solicitors. At the bottom, there are the guys that do nothing but divorce and conveyancing, and then at the top, there are the people that do corporate stuff.

I think that as soon as you quit that sort of career path and go into the creative world, then it's a random hodgepodge of people. You meet people who are from every part of society, but you're all working in the same way towards the same goal. It seems not to matter so much.

What's your advice for aspiring writers?

Ignore my advice. That is my advice. Ignore me.

Ignore everybody else. Do what you want to do. If you want to do something on page three, do it.

Don't sit there thinking: "Oh, well, Stephen King does that much later. John Grisham doesn't do it at all. Lee Child does it differently."

If you do that, you're lost. If you want to do that thing on page three, do it. And then you end up with a book that you are 100% happy with.

You personally need to be 100% happy with this book. And, of course, you are a unique individual, but you're not that unique. People are not that different. Therefore, if you love it, lots of other people will too. The only luck involved is how many. Is your particular twisted mind appealing to hundreds of other people, thousands of other people or millions of other people? That's the luck.

But you don't even get to the starting line unless you personally are 100% happy with it. You cannot fake it.

A lot of the younger writers we work with seem like they might be getting somewhere, but then they'll try to adopt that "other" voice. What do you say to younger writers?

It's a horrible thing to have to talk to younger people about writing because there really is only one message. This happens so many times. You're invited to a school or a university, and all these people want to be writers. And the honest answer is: don't do it. Do not do it. Not now. Read for another 20 years. Then do it. That’s the best advice. I've seen undergraduates, you know, 20 or 21. And they're writing very slick pastiches of something else. And there is never a second novel or a third. It's a horrible message to have to give. You know, you've got a 20-year-old sitting there all keen, and you have to say: "Look, don't do it. Wait 20 years." They don't want to hear that.

I've heard people who worked in regional TV in the 1970s talk about how it was more open to working-class kids. Working-class people could get jobs in TV more easily than now, where it’s become a more middle-class profession. Do you look back at Granada and think that?

Yeah, pretty much. Granada's big thing was Manchester speaking to London, you know, telling truth to power and so on. It was the regionality of ITV that really counted for a lot, that you could have a distinctive regional voice rather than a distinctive class voice.

Granada was absolutely stuffed full of working-class people, because, you know, it's fundamentally a technical job. The writing and the acting are one thing, but then the huge background stuff, the crews, the technical stuff, there.

The technology was invented at the BBC historically, and the people operating it tended to be Manchester workers, I would say. The sort of people that might have been mending the equipment in the cotton mills, that level of foreman-type worker.

I feel like in my lifetime we’ve seen a decrease in working-class access to the arts. Coming from a more ordinary background, it feels like now you're going to have to fight a lot harder to get a job in, let's say, publishing, mass media or TV. It feels harder now than it was 25, 30 years ago. Did you see that as well?

Yeah, and I think that was a direct result of the decline of industrial employment. You know, I've worked in factories for holiday jobs and stuff like that, and my observation was that there are no unskilled jobs. Every job is skilled in its own way.

You had your parents and your neighbours and your friend's dad, and everybody, inevitably, was working at some level of skill with some level of diligence and discipline, with regular hours. All of this gave a shape to your picture of the world. And when that started to erode, with the decline of industrial jobs, I think it left the upcoming working-class generation completely unmoored. They didn't have a pattern to follow.

You know, Granada had the electricians' union — not my union, but the electricians were absolute working-class people whose kids followed them into the trade. So, when mass employment of a certain type disappeared for the older generation, it really screwed the younger generation.

Why do we need working-class writers?

It is about permanently placing, into the record, people's lives, people's views. You know, if you publish a book, it'll never be destroyed. There's always a copy of it somewhere. And the more variety and diversity that we can get there, the better.

And also, the audience, readers, are like an oil tanker. It takes forever to move it. But it is possible that it will move towards a different type of experience and develop an appetite for a different type of story, because it is all about escaping. Nobody really wants to read about their own life because you're already living your life and you're sick of it. You want to experience somebody else's life. And there's no reason why that shouldn't be a working-class life.

A middle-class person should... Well, they read George Orwell and stuff like that, but they need to do it in the present day.

And men also need to read women, which is something that’s almost like the last frontier.

Because there is no sense of any option that you could just go to the police to sort it out. It's got to be sorted out in the community, for better or worse, right?

Yeah, which is, generally speaking, a part of the working-class experience, in my recollection, that you don't expect help. You don't expect justice. And in a funny way, it informed the Reacher books, you know, because there was no recourse to anything other than fighting.

There was no legal help you could get. It was very emotionally inarticulate. Any problem at all was a fight.

And so Reacher is a legendary brawler. And really, that's me, aged nine. It was the only way to do anything.