by Andy Martin
Copyright © 2015 by Andy Martin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Martin, Andy
Title: Reacher said nothing : Lee Child and the making of Make Me / Andy Martin.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bantam Books, 2015.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038231 | ISBN 9781101965450 (acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781101965467 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Child, Lee. | Authors and readers. | Fiction—Authorship. | Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)
Classification: LCC PS3553.H4838 Z75 2015 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038231
eBook ISBN 9781101965467
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for eBook
Cover design: Carlos Beltrán
Cover photograph: Sigrid Estrada
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
E-Face
Chapter 1: The End
Chapter 2: Chapter 1
Chapter 3: That John Lennon Moment
Chapter 4: Chapter 1 (Continued)
Chapter 5: Finally, Chapter 1
Chapter 6: Exit Keever
Chapter 7: Enter Reacher
Chapter 8: Fuck You, Lee Child!
Chapter 9: The Song of Reacher
Chapter 10: The Launch (Barnes & Noble, Union Square, September 3)
Chapter 11: Then Reacher Stepped Off the Train
Chapter 12: Mother’s Rest
Chapter 13: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Chapter 14: On the Money
Chapter 15: The Quixotic Matador
Chapter 16: An Objective Report Concerning the Relative Standing of Dr. Lee Child and Dr. Andy Martin
Chapter 17: A Child Is Born
Chapter 18: The Story of the Blind Woman
Chapter 19: Long Beach
Chapter 20: Underworld
Chapter 21: The Stony Limit
Chapter 22: No X, No Y
Chapter 23: At Last, the Whole Point of Reacher
Chapter 24: The Great Coffee Contest
Chapter 25: One Thousand Words
Chapter 26: Christmas Goodwill
Chapter 27: Lee Child’s New Year’s Resolution
Chapter 28: Half a Bottle of Bourbon
Chapter 29: The Stitch-Up
Chapter 30: Never Go Back
Chapter 31: My Life of Crime
Chapter 32: Shane: A Footnote
Chapter 33: The Thaw
Chapter 34: Only a Matter of Time
Chapter 35: Reacher in Translation
Chapter 36: A Theory of Everything
Chapter 37: Morpheus
Chapter 38: Biographeme
Chapter 39: Metamorphosis
Chapter 40: The Big Reveal
Chapter 41: The Naming of Names
Chapter 42: The Quiller Memorandum
Chapter 43: On the Couch
Chapter 44: On the Couch (II)
Chapter 45: Why the Works of Lee Child Are Really Quite Useful
Chapter 46: A Deal’s a Deal
Chapter 47: End of the Third Movement
Chapter 48: Quoth He
Chapter 49: The Old Cemetery
Chapter 50: Home Invasion
Chapter 51: Knowledge by Description
Chapter 52: They Think It’s All Over
Chapter 53: Also Sprach Lee Child
Chapter 54: Two for the Price of One
Chapter 55: Allegory
Chapter 56: Reacher Visits a Bookstore
Chapter 57: Thursday, March 26, 2015
Chapter 58: Has Lee Child Done His Research?
Chapter 59: Maigret et Moi
Chapter 60: Napoleonic
Chapter 61: Gardening Tips
Chapter 62: Wittgenstein on Sixth Avenue
Chapter 63: The Proposal of a Romantic Novelist
Chapter 64: Where Is the Pipe?
Chapter 65: Stairway to Heaven
Chapter 66: Risen Again
Chapter 67: The Baldacci Program
Chapter 68: On the Sofa
Chapter 69: The End Is Nigh
Chapter 70: What’s It All About, Then?
Chapter 71: No Exit
Chapter 72: The Opposite of the Cern Large Hadron Collider Approach
Chapter 73: Time-Lapse Photography of the Penultimate Chapter
Chapter 74: Bombshell
Chapter 75: Cliffhanger
E-Log
Author’s Note
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I love his knowledge, his diffusion, his affluence of conversation.
Samuel Johnson
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page—as when I read Rider Haggard, the Odyssey, Conan Doyle and the German author of Wild West stories, Karl May. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
E-FACE
Aug 22 [2014]
andymartinink to LeeChild
subject: wild idea?
Hi Lee
How would you feel about a “making of” story about your next book?
Thinking about some of the questions that get bowled at you at public events, I reckon most of them concern the process of creation. (Apart from actual marriage proposals.) I was thinking that a genesis-and-what-happened-next type approach could be of wide interest as regards one of your books. i.e. a sort of work-in-progress approach.
Obviously you would have to be up for it, which is why I ask now, so you can blow the idea out of the water entirely if you want.
There are about 10 different ways of doing it, could be more or less systematic and focused, depending. But I guess the minimum is—depending on how it was done—I would need feedback from you on what you are actually getting up to as the story rolls along.
I’m not sure this has been done before—a kind of literary criticism but in the moment, in real time, rather than picking it up afterwards. How This Book Was Written, but actually trying to capture the very moment of creation. I think it could be exciting, but as I say, you would have to really be in the mood for it. You have to admit, it would be different—so instead of the old cutting-yourself-off-in-a-log-cabin approach (or the urban equivalent), you would have someone (i.e. me) looking over your shoulder as you are typing the words.
Not exactly Boswell to your Johnson but something along those lines. Or Ishmael to your Captain Ahab. (Keith Richards to your Mick Jagger?)
Kind of crazy I know and you might say “yes, and TOTAL BLOODY NON-STARTER TOO!” On the other hand, you might feel that it could be a different angle on the whole Jack Reacher adventure. And it would definitely save you having to answer a lot of those questions!
all the best, Andy
Aug 23
LeeChild to andymartinink
Very interesting idea.
Much to discuss. Detailed answer Tuesday from New York. Lee
Sent from my iPhone
Aug 24
andymartinink to LeeChild
great!
beginning: where did that idea come from? (one of the great mysteries)
end: getting it out there, reviews etc
writing Reacher could be as strong a narrative as the Reacher adventure (possibly with fewer actual punch-ups, but you never know)
Aug 26
LeeChild to andymartinink
Andy
I’m totally up for this, but we better figure out the how/where/when, because the process is about to start.
Tomorrow I start on the concentrated launch promo for “Personal,” and then early next week I’ll start writing the 2015 book. So really coverage should start now, to show how writing and promoting are inevitably combined.
So far I have no title, no real plot idea, but I have the opening pages in mind. I hope to get them down soon, and see what emerges after that.
Aug 26
Are you going to be in New York or what? I love the “no title no plot” thing—this is like the genesis moment. Void and without form. A
Aug 26
Yes, in NYC now, doing media etc, then on the road in Savannah, Georgia, Ireland and the UK between September 11th and 20th.
Aug 26
ok if I am going to do this SERIOUSLY (obviously a must), I’d better get right over there and talk it over asap. On the other hand I don’t want to get in the way if you are right in the middle of big media hoopla. On yet another hand, big media hoopla is a good part of the story. We start not at the beginning of this one, but at the end of the previous one…Basically, I don’t want you to start writing before I get there! Sounds as though you’re already writing it in your head. I feel I’ve got to be perched on your shoulder like some kind of pirate’s parrot for the first line…obviously could catch up with you readily here but I reckon I need to start looking for flights…how soon, from your point of view, could I pop up in nyc for purpose of prelim conversation? Am cancelling dinner with the PM of course, Andy
Aug 27
Get here any time, sooner the better…but seriously, Monday or Tuesday next week wouldn’t be too late.
Aug 27
Sorted. In NYC Sunday. See you Monday? Say where and when and I’ll be there.
Aug 28
Excellent. Could start (early) on Monday—CBS TV in the morning, a Simon Mayo phoner to the UK in the afternoon, for a flavor of how it goes…plus Monday is 20 years to the day since I bought the paper to write Killing Floor.
Let me know how you feel about that and I’ll give you the details.
Aug 28
ha! so you actually had to go out specifically to buy the paper—wow—the next best thing to cuneiform and clay tablets, right way back to the very beginning. Sounds perfect. If you don’t mind me being a fly on the wall it would be great to tag along on the publicity train for a while. I was having lunch with Bronwen Maddox the other day—I bought her a copy of The Enemy!—and she was saying how she had known loads of guys who were dreaming (in vain of course) of doing exactly what you did (the re-naissance thing). So the funny thing is although this is a unique one-off kind of phenom, at the same time there is definitely a universal factor here.
Aug 28
Cool. Be there at 7:30a.m. Monday and we’ll head to the breakfast show. (Note Monday is Labor Day—subways will be running a Sunday schedule, but there should be cabs about and the streets will be quiet.)
Aug 28
see you 7:30 Monday - good early start!
THE END
IT ENDED the way it was always going to have to end. With a burial.
Lee stubbed out a final Camel filter cigarette (except it was anything but final) and breathed out a cloud of New York Times no. 1 bestseller smoke. Leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the last sentence of Personal:
O’Day was to be awarded three more medals posthumously, and a bridge was to be named after him, on a North Carolina state route, over a narrow stream that most of the year was dry.
Always good to end with a death, of course. Posthumously…it was like hammering a last nail into the coffin. Or more, planting a gravestone. There was a finality to it. A valediction. But then it was a pointlessly inadequate memorial. He liked anything to do with bridges and routes (so much sheer hard labor had gone into them), but he particularly liked the dried-up stream. So the bridge was pointless too.
And his own stream, the great flow of inspiration that had kept the novel afloat for the last eight months—hadn’t that about dried up now too? “A narrow stream that most of the year was dry.” Could that be…me?
What the hell, it was all like a diary anyway, only masquerading as an adventure.
“THE END.” He didn’t write it down. Didn’t need to. He knew he was supposed to put it in for the benefit of the typesetters, but he didn’t see the necessity. That great sense of an ending—the release, the relief, the closure, that satisfying last expulsion of smoke—it all had to be contained in the rhythm and feel of the last sentence. The End had to be nailed right there. Those concluding lines, like the final notes of a Beethoven symphony, a coda, had to have some kind of dying cadence to them, a falling away, an elegiac cessation that said, “I’ve said everything I needed to say.” So you really didn’t need to write “THE END” too. It offended his sense of economy. Two words too many. If it was the right sentence, the sentence would say it for him.
He couldn’t hit SEND just yet though. He would have to wait a couple of days, let it percolate in his head, see what subliminal second thoughts might bubble up. But all the loose ends had been tied up with a bow. Personal, his nineteenth Jack Reacher novel—done.
Word count: 107,000. Substantially across the crucial one hundred thousand line. That’s what it said on the contract. Anything shorter and it would be too short. Still, 107,000 was relatively short for him. The Enemy, for example, was a full 140k. But it was enough. His books had been getting shorter and tighter. He loved the beginning, that gorgeous feeling when nothing has been screwed up yet. Loved the ending too, that great rush towards the finale, when it was all downhill. But the middle—the middle was always a struggle—by around page 2 it was like rolling the rock up the hill again day after day. He’d developed a cunning strategy for Personal though, had pretty much outwitted the middle—he just left it out, fast-forwarded straight from the beginning right through to the end, without a pause, nonstop. Problem solved.
Anyway, it had been a blast, the whole way—Paris, London, Romford—so fuck it, it would have to do. He wasn’t going to change it now.
He glanced at the time on the computer screen: 10:26, Tuesday night. April 15, 2014. (Reacher, he considered, would know what time it was automatically, without having to check with a mere machine—but of course, he—Lee—was not Reacher, he had to keep reminding himself. There was so much Reacher could do—about the one thing he couldn’t do was write a novel about his own experience. Which was why Reacher still needed him.) He’d written the first line on September 1, 2013. It had to be September 1. Every year. Without fail. Now it was over.
—
Lee turned his head away from the screen and looked out of the big window to his left. Tonight the Empire State Building was lit up orange and green—pistachio, like some dumb giant ice-cream cone. It didn’t used to look that way. Once it had had only clean vapor lights, white light or maybe yellow, so it was like looking up at heaven. Now, with the coming of LED, it could look like anything anybody wanted—it could be red, white, and blue on July 4, for example. But mostly it looked like a bad 1970s disco light show. It used to be an immense, stately edifice, he thought. Now it’s ice cream. Like dressing Jack Reacher up like a disco dancer. It was this view that had convinced him to come and live here, on 22nd Street, on the twenty-fifth floor of a building across from the Flatiron Building. Now—cheapened, stupid, gaudy—the view made it less of a wrench to leave. Farewell, Emp
ire State; I loved you once. Or maybe twice.
He still remembered that feeling he’d had when he first came here. The romance. With the Empire State framed in the window, it would be like living in the offices of the Daily Planet in Metropolis: oh look, isn’t that mild-mannered, neatly suited Clark Kent up there in the clouds, looking out masterfully on the world (with lovely Lois Lane by his side)? And wouldn’t his superhuman powers extend to writing too? It was logical. Wouldn’t a writer from Krypton be all-powerful, all-conquering—a Superman among writers?
My Home in America. That other great work of literature that always sprang back to mind—was never really out of his mind. His genesis and exodus. The book of commandments that had guided him here in the first place. He had come across it, aged five, in the old Elmwood Public Library, in Birmingham. It was just lying there on the floor. He’d picked it up. A stiff, cardboard sort of book, mostly illustrations with just a few words. With pictures of children in their faraway homes—he remembered a new England colonial “saltbox,” an isolated farmhouse on the prairies, and a Californian beach house with surfboards and palm trees. But the picture he always went back to (he borrowed the book and took it home and eventually returned it, much thumbed, but he had carried it around with him in his head ever since, pristine and perfect, a portable Garden of Eden) was the one of the apple-cheeked boy who lived in New York. He lived on the nth floor of some lofty Manhattan apartment block, reaching right up into the sky, with a bird flying by. And he was looking out of his window at the Empire State Building. Lee Child was that boy, half a century later. He had always wanted to be him, had just temporarily been trapped in the wrong country or the wrong body.