Every 13 seconds, someone, somewhere, buys a Jack Reacher novel.

As his creator, Lee Child retires from his billion dollar enterprise, this 500 page biography provides exhaustive detail of his childhood, his schooldays, his friendships, his career in television, and how he achieved his ambition to become a bestselling author.

Lee Child (or James Grant, as Child is his pseudonym) is a fascinating and rather elusive character; ambitious, confident and determined, and also one for embellishing events for the sake of a good story. Certainly in the first half of the book, it felt to me that the biographer Heather Martin, though a great fan, wasn't entirely sure of her subject and the style of her writing was obtrusive and ponderous.

However, the pace changes when we meet Lee Child, the writer.

There were boxes upon boxes of archive material to explore, she says, revealing all the early workings, showing how the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first book was meticulously crafted.

His work ethic is evident throughout. There's no such thing as writer's block - you wouldn't accept that a trucker couldn't turn up for work one day because he'd had 'trucker's block', Child says. And he quotes Henry James in that 'easy reading is hard writing'.

He always writes longhand because it encourages you to think through each sentence before you start writing, and he'll only write one draft. Once written, that account becomes an irrefutable reality. Child won't change events for his editors, because 'that is what happened' to his characters.

This is a fascinating dissection of the work of a great storyteller.