by Andy Martin
It was like a brain transplant—or metempsychosis—or déjà vu, he must have been that New York boy in a previous life, and somehow he had contrived to get back to what he always had been. A kid in a skyscraper.
And yet now he was leaving.
The apartment he called his “office” had been emptied out. Hoovered clean. The white walls were a blank. It was not just the end of one novel, it was the end of a whole string of novels, the end of an era that would forever be identified with this place. Another time, he might have stood up and picked up the red Fender he kept in the corner for celebratory moments like this one. Plugged it in and switched on the amp. Turned the volume up high. Put the strap over his head and hoisted up the mast of the guitar, stared out into the night and tightened the fingers of his left hand over the frets and wound up his right arm and unleashed the plectrum over the strings. And some mighty earth-shattering chord would rip out into the darkness, accompanied by obscene pelvic thrusting.
Except all the guitars had been shipped back to England. And…oh yeah, he couldn’t play a note. He was no musician. The guitars were just there for inspiration. Maybe he’d come back as a rock star. (Or maybe a soccer player? Georgie Best or Lionel Messi would do.)
Even his desk had been taken: he was perched on an old dining table, white, circular, sitting on a black dining chair. Not even a decent ashtray (the saucer was full of butts—where was he supposed to empty it? The wastebasket had gone too). He felt like a refugee crouched in the corner of an abandoned building. Squatting. Like the last man left alive, staring out at the abyss, the ruined deserted city that was once New York. Just him and a few postapocalyptic rats. And a coffee machine.
He took the phone out of his pocket and switched it back on. It pinged with a text from his daughter, Ruth.
“Hey, Doof!” it began (short for dufus).
Lee smiled. Okay, not quite all alone. She was the one who had started it, all the talk about moving. Maybe she was right though, maybe he had been vaguely dissatisfied. And now he was really dissatisfied.
He’d had to finish by April. Moving date was the 24th. Most of the furniture had already gone. The books had all gone. They’d left him the computer, the old Mac desktop. Now it was doomed. He wasn’t going to take it with him. He shut it down for the night. It didn’t know it was junk just yet. Shhh.
Lee lived upstairs—same building, different apartment. That was stripped nearly bare too. Just a bed. And a coffee machine. He didn’t go back to the office all the next day, the 16th. Just wandered around. Sat in cafés or diners, drank coffee, smoked more cigarettes. Came back to it on the 17th. Looked at it one more time. Then hit SEND.
Then he started looking for his hammer. The big claw hammer. That would do the job.
Of course his hammer wasn’t in his office. Where the hell was his toolbox? So he popped out the hard disc and put it in his pocket. Went to the hardware store in Union Square. Then he hopped on an uptown C train at 23rd Street, got out at 86th, and went up to the new apartment. Put the disc down on the kitchen table, then he opened up his bag from the hardware store.
It didn’t have to be a very big hammer, he knew that. It was just a modest claw hammer, this one, but it would do the job. A hard disc consisted mainly of glass, toughened up with some kind of aluminum or ceramic. He gave it a gentle whack and it shattered into a dozen pieces straight off. Was that all it took? He was kind of disappointed. So much for the hard disc. Fragile disc more like. Mission: Impossible–style: this disc will self-destruct in…about two seconds.
If anyone asked, it was a security thing. Really. He had the new Apple desktop set up in the new apartment, in the office at the back. So the old one was surplus. He wasn’t too worried about identity theft. If someone wanted his identity they were welcome to it. There was no such thing as privacy anymore. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy people poking about in his old emails. Seeing little phrases popping up on social media. Embarrassing. Potentially.
And really it would be a betrayal of his entire life’s work if he wasn’t just a little bit paranoid.
But then again: hard disc, hard man…Reacher was all over the old computer. He didn’t exist as far as the new one was concerned. He loved Reacher, naturally. Reacher was Lee Child on steroids, after all, a surgically enhanced, superhumanly calm hooligan. A Zen caveman. But at the same time, it would be good to have a vacation from Reacher. Reacher had been pounding his brain for the last eight months. Now Reacher lay in pieces over the table. Shattered into little shards. Dust. Random pixels. Stray molecules.
But if there was one thing he had learned about the recurring hero series business, it was this:
YOU CAN’T KILL THE BUGGER OFF!
It would be like killing off the golden goose. You can expose him to mortal danger of every kind. You HAVE to expose him to mortal danger. Bury him. Blow him up. Cuff him to a train. Put him up against an entire army. Put an angry sniper on his trail. But he has to get out of those ridiculously tight situations. Somehow survive, no matter what. Otherwise how could he recur? He couldn’t see a metaphysical, ghostly Reacher working. Reacher v. Vampires. Reacher v. Zombies. That was never going to fly.
He wasn’t Dracula, but maybe he was a little bit Frankenstein. A monster on the loose. Which he, the mad Dr. Lee Child, had created and unleashed upon the world.
“Predictable.” That is what Reacher had said about himself in Personal. Predictable that he would live anyway. It was a constraint. Look at the trouble Conan Doyle had gotten into when he bumped off Sherlock Holmes, shoving him over the Reichenbach Falls. The fans had forced him to bring the great detective back again. He’d had to turn the tables on Professor Moriarty after all.
The number of times he’d thought about killing him off. He’d have to go out with a bang, that was his first theory. Shot to pieces while in some way saving the day. He still remembered a cartoon story in Valiant so many years ago (or was it Victor? or Hotspur?). It’s the Second World War and a very big guy is given the job of guiding a couple of young kids to safety across enemy territory. They are holed up in a bomb shelter and then some passing Nazi lobs in a grenade. It’s about to go off, they are all doomed. And then the big guy hurls himself on top of the grenade in a final, heroic gesture, buries it beneath his massive, muscular chest. He, naturally, is blown to smithereens, but the two kids are saved. He is their savior. A sublime father figure. But dead. It was simple and beautiful, something like that would work.
And then he had thought—wouldn’t it be better just to have him arrive at the bus station, at the end of the book, all the bad guys are dead, he’s about to hop on the bus, and then he says to himself, “I like it here, I think I’ll stay.” And he gets off the bus. (Maybe he becomes an upstanding citizen—or a writer? Gets married, settles down, buys a house.) There would be an emotional resolution. He could have ended Personal that way. But he hadn’t. Medals, bridge, stream. Reacher lives! He had a contract—a three-book contract!—that said he would have to.
All the same he would enjoy having a Reacher-free vacation. Reacher, unreachable.
All May and June he was setting up the new apartment. Stacking the shelves. Putting up the Renoir and the Warhol. Ruth was right, it was a great place, she’d found it, a classy-looking turn-of-the-century building north of the Dakota, and extolled its virtues; he’d bought it on the basis of the floor plan alone, the geometry, he knew it could accommodate all the shelves. He’d have somewhere for everything. So long as he kept on reading he would always need more shelving.
Jack Reacher—huge footloose wanderer, armed only with a toothbrush. Lee Child—tall guy with shelves! Paintings! First editions! Apartment overlooking Central Park. House in France. Farm in the south of England (two farms, to be exact). On the one hand, nomadic hunter-gatherer, on the other…farmer? It was easy for Reacher, he didn’t have to do any writing. His job was straightforward enough—go about killing people who got in his way, and also not die. Easy. Whereas writing about that…it for
sure needed more than a toothbrush. He’d still be the boy in the tall Manhattan building.
Sometimes Reacher felt like a reproach. It was like writing about Jesus. The gospel according to Saint Jack. How could you live up to those standards—or down to them?
July, he wrote a TV pilot with his daughter. She was into forensic linguistics. The pilot was CSI but with words, not DNA. It suited Lee. The job was to track down villains on the basis of what they actually say. Everybody leaves verbal fingerprints. There was the case of the guy who murdered his girlfriend—and then texted afterwards using her phone but pretending to be her. The forensic linguists were able to demonstrate that it was really him not her, on the basis of his distinctive punctuation—or lack of it. Lee loved that idea—that you could be sunk by a comma or a hyphen. It all mattered, linguistically. Nothing was too trivial. The best clues were like that—subtle and insubstantial—not a big fat muddy boot print by the garden window.
Most of August he spent in France and England. Eating and drinking. Reading. Smoking. Putting his feet up in the sun.
But now it was nearly the end of August and he was back in New York.
People would often say to him: “How come Reacher is always getting into trouble? Always finding some new drama to poke his nose into? Doesn’t he ever take a break?”
“I write about him when he’s doing nothing,” he would reply. “When he’s on holiday and not smashing up bad guys. But they don’t publish those ones. They’re too boring.”
Now it was time for Reacher to get real again. Reacher was back from vacation. Reaching out to him. Again.
CHAPTER 1
WHICH IS WHEN I BLEW into town. To watch it happen. To bear witness to Lee Child writing the next installment of Jack Reacher’s continuing adventures. I first picked up a Reacher, purely by chance, in a little bookstore in Pasadena, down the road from Caltech. I knew exactly how Malcolm Gladwell felt when he plotted his incremental curve of addition: you start out reading Lee Child in paperback; then you realize you can’t wait that long and start buying his books in hardcover; your next step is to call around to your publishing friends and ask them to send you the galleys. Ultimately, he reckoned, you would have no option but to “break into Lee Child’s house and watch over his shoulder while he types.”
I had read all the books. I’d reviewed a few of them. I’d interviewed the guy. Twice (once in the U.K., again in the U.S.). Now I was finally breaking in. I had to know what happened next. Before it happened. I was doing what Gladwell had only dreamed of.
There was a date Lee couldn’t miss.
September 1, 2014. Labor Day in the U.S. A public holiday. But not for Reacher. It was twenty years to the day since, on the verge of being fired from his job with Granada Television, Lee, nearly forty years old, had gone out and bought the paper to start writing Killing Floor, the first of the series. And a pencil (he still had the pencil, much reduced in size). Every year, ever since then, he’d started a new one on the very same day. It was a ritual with him. One he couldn’t mess with.
Lee didn’t have to become a writer. He had a couple of options after he dropped (or had been pushed) out of television. After being fired, he had taken the trouble to go along to his local “Employment Exchange,” as it was then known. More like an Unemployment Exchange. This was the height—or depth—of the post-Thatcher golden age in the north of England. Manufacturing jobs in the north of England were being slashed—and not that he would necessarily have gotten one even if they had been numerous. There was only one job going, that he was really qualified for. Warehouseman. He had given it some serious consideration. Then he had gone out to buy the paper. “We were only just making enough to get by. Then I lost my job. It was fairly desperate.”
He wrote the first chapter. Killing Floor, Chapter 1. Then showed it to his wife. Everything depended on what she said. He could keep on with Killing Floor. Chapter 2. Or he could go and apply for that warehouseman job. She read what he had written and then put it down.
“What do you think? Shall I keep going?”
“Keep going,” she said.
He went back to work. The choice had been made. Maybe he would never have made a decent warehouseman anyway.
At 7:30 that morning, September 1, we got in the car to drive to the TV studio. CBS This Morning. With Lee Child. There were more people in the car, Lee and his publicist and his editor and his assistant and one or two others—his crew—and me, than on the streets outside. “Everyone’s off today and we’re working,” his apartment doorman had said. As we glided through empty streets, New York on Labor Day reminded me of Lee’s description of a backwoods smallville in Montana:
There were no people on the sidewalks. No vehicle noise, no activity, no nothing. The place was a ghost. It looked like an abandoned cowboy town from the Old West.
“Today we begin!” said Lee, like a kid going to a birthday party, not thinking about the TV interview at all. “I want to get ahead this time, take the pressure off.”
“Do you have it in the diary?” I said.
“No, that would be too obvious,” he said. “But it is in my head. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
“Around 1:15. My lunch break, because I was still working even though I knew it was nearly over. WHSmith in the Arndale Centre, in Manchester—the one that got bombed by the IRA. I was working all weekend. Then I started writing on the Monday. I had no real time off at all.”
“So it has to be today.”
“I need ritual. My life needs a shape. It doesn’t matter that I’m doing interviews, I have to start today.”
“That was a great opening [to Killing Floor],” I said. “I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.”
“The first day is always the best,” Lee said. “Because you haven’t screwed anything up yet. It’s a gorgeous feeling. I try to put it off as long as possible because when it’s gone it’s gone.”
“Do you have any kind of strategy for writing or rules or whatever?”
“I only really have one. You should write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast. I picked that up from TV. Think about how they shoot breaking waves—it’s always in slow motion. Same thing. You can spend pages on pulling the trigger.”
“Die Trying. All the mechanics and chemistry of firing a shot. Like calculus.”
“And what happens to the bullet afterwards. That’s the thing most writers forget—they think it’s just pull the trigger and wham. But in reality there is a lot of physics. Stuff happens afterwards. Think of The Day of the Jackal. The sniper assembles his weapon, fires his shot, but then de Gaulle bends forward to kiss the guy he’s pinning the medal on. There can be a lot of time between firing and hitting the target.”
This was the day on which Lee would pull the trigger on his new book. The funny thing was that he was having to talk about the old book. Although everyone thought it was new. It was just out—Personal. Reacher 19. This was what the interview was all about.
He was wearing denims, a charcoal Brooks Brothers jacket, and shoes with the laces taken out. He has this thing about laces. “Yeah, I got rid of all the shoelaces,” he said. “They’re a pain when you’re traveling.”
The studio was great. Some kind of old warehouse in Midtown. We were in the Green Room. Lee went off into makeup. The snacks were great, piles of fresh fruit—pineapple, melon, kiwi, banana, all neatly sliced up—gallons of coffee and tons of croissants. And there were any number of fabulous-looking women just sitting around looking fabulous. Don’t know what they were doing there exactly. One was called Whitney. She had “temporary tattooed jewelry.”
“I want it to be the same but different.” Lee was doing his thing with the TV interviewer. A couple in fact—a man and a woman. His “new” book. Told them the story about his old father and how he had once asked him, when he was peering at a whole stack of books, how do you choose a book to read? And his dad had replied, “I want it to be the same
but different.” And Lee says, “I applied it to writing this one. It had to be the same—it’s the same old Reacher again, love him or hate him—but instead of roaming around America for a change, I have him getting on a plane to Paris, France, and London, England.”
I thought he didn’t really need to say “France” or “England,” but then again maybe he did. He liked to spell things out. It’s a salient characteristic of his writing. What time is it? What road is this? Whereabouts are we? Don’t skim over the details. So that was the same.
“In pursuit of a sniper who is threatening world leaders. He arrested him once, now he has to nail him all over again.”
“So it’s ‘personal’?”
“Yes, but it’s also because his old army general tracks him down using an ad in the Personal column of the Army Times.”
The thing I liked about Personal was that the bad guys were known as the “Romford Boys.” Reacher ends up not in the middle of London, at Buckingham Palace, but in the suburbs to the east, in Essex. Romford is where I grew up, so I naturally took this swerve in the narrative as a homage to me. That was probably mad, but every act of reading is also an act of madness, because you have to assume that the writer is writing for me, specifically. I have this relationship thing going on with the author. So I was no more nuts than anyone else. Well, maybe a little more.