Reacher Said Nothing

by Andy Martin

  Lee admitted, when we were sitting about in the café later, that he was probably a little nuts himself. Although he began by denying it. (Obviously, he was still putting off making a start on the new book. He was enjoying the gorgeous feeling too much.) “I’m not a weirdo,” he said, knocking back a cup of black coffee. “I know I’m making this all up. I invented Jack Reacher. He is nothing but a fictional character through and through. He is imaginary.”

  He has this way of emphasizing particular words that I can only capture with italics.

  “On the other hand, with another part of my brain, I’m thinking—I am reporting on the latest antics of Jack Reacher. ‘Hold on,’ ” and here he cupped his hand around one ear, as if listening intently. “ ‘What’s that? Let me note that down right now!’ The novels are really reportage.”

  When he writes, he goes into a “zone” in which he really believes that the nonexistent Jack Reacher is temporarily existent. “I know I’m making it up, but it doesn’t feel that way. Okay, so maybe I am a bit of a weirdo.”

  —

  I discover, as we’re driving back, that Reacher is very popular in prison. Lee gets fan mail from a lot of prisoners. He once paid a visit to a prison in New Zealand. The prison governor was worried about security. He needn’t have worried. Hardened jailbirds love Lee. “I grew up in Birmingham,” says Lee. “I’ve seen worse. And I was in television, therefore I’ve worked with worse.”

  Later—okay, let me be more specific, it was around twelve—we’re back at his apartment, and Maggie Griffin is explaining how Killing Floor took off in the States. Maggie was one of the first readers of his first novel in galley proofs in New York, back in 1997. And now she is still with him, as “independent PR advisor.” She is probably his number one fan too. Back then she worked on Wall Street and was a partner in an independent bookstore, Partners in Crime. They made Killing Floor a “Partners Pick.” She would phone people up saying, “Buy three copies! It’s going to be collectible.” She was right of course. “One to read, another to share, and one to keep pristine. It’s going to be worth a lot of money.” And it had a great and memorable cover (the white background with the red handprint over it).

  She was the one who persuaded him to come to New York, on his own dime (as they say here). “Yes,” she would say in her phone calls, lying her head off, “Putnam is flying him over.”

  They sold a few thousand in the first weekend.

  “Yeah, I was a ‘cult hit,’ ” said Lee. “A blip on the radar. I guess it’s been incremental since then. The odds against me being in this position are huge. But at the time we were just making it up as we went along. I never had a breakthrough moment really. Just a hard relentless slog in the middle years. Which is why I always have Reacher doing a lot of hard work.”

  “As in, for example,” says I, “The Hard Way. ‘Yes, we are going to have to do this the hard way,’ Reacher says, being deeply put upon and overworked by his tyrannical author.”

  “I never like to make it too easy for him—why should he have it easy?”

  And then two or three books in, his agent says to him, “Have you heard about this Internet thing?” Dinner at the Langham, next to the BBC. And Lee persuaded Maggie to build him what would become the poster boy of author websites. Streets ahead. Leaving everyone else trying to catch up.

  “It probably helped,” Maggie said, “when Bill Clinton came out as a fan. Clinton—that was like Kennedy reading the James Bond books.”

  Maggie said that at the beginning the publishers had “misjudged” the appeal to women readers.

  “They like the same things guys do,” she said. “Violent retribution. They want blood on the page.”

  We were just sitting around talking, still delaying the beginning. It was a day of postponement. Lee was pondering Amazon’s influence. Amazon has this thing of showing you 10 percent of a book to suck you in. “Some writers,” Lee was saying, with a degree of scorn, “some writers have started writing the first episode in their books to fit the 10 percent and kick the book off. They’re actually calculating exactly how long their chapters should be.” Lee didn’t want to be one of those writers. He didn’t want Amazon telling him how to write a book. He didn’t want anyone telling him.

  I knew things went wrong in publishing. Sometimes embarrassing. A friend of mine had her book printed with someone else’s cover on it. “They go wrong all the time,” Lee said. “This is an industrial process with hundreds of millions of manufactured items.” He’d done an industry event recently where the publishers had a big pile of books. A reader came up to him with one of them which had a perfectly fine cover—but was completely blank inside. Lee apologized. Signed the book as normal. But this time he wrote in it: “Reacher said nothing.” It was one of his recurrent phrases, almost a catchphrase, if saying nothing could be a catchphrase.

  “Reacher often says nothing,” Lee said. “He shouldn’t have to be wisecracking all the time. He’s not into witty repartee. He is supposed to do things.” Basically, Reacher made Lee Child sound like Oscar Wilde. Not that he was an idiot (Reacher, I mean). More of a particularly taciturn, very muscular philosopher. Lapidary. Succinct. More at the Clint Eastwood end of the spectrum. With just a dash of Nietzsche and Marcuse.

  Then we went to the radio studio a few blocks away (Lee would write about how we turned left, going north on Central Park West, as we came out of his building). Which is when we had the JOHN LENNON MOMENT. (Somewhere between 86th and 87th.)

  THAT JOHN LENNON MOMENT

  LEE LIVES NORTH of the building where John Lennon used to live and Yoko Ono still lives (I think). Just across from the Strawberry Fields monument to Lennon. I had forgotten all about this until the moment when a fanboy comes running up to us in the street. We had just come out of Lee’s building. It was a nice sunny day. Not too hot. We were walking along and suddenly out of nowhere—I think he popped up from the other side of Central Park West. White guy. He had on a black baseball cap, pulled down over his forehead. T-shirt and jeans, I think. Glasses. An intense look. “Hey, Mr. Child,” he says, “I’m a great fan of yours.”

  The whole Lennon story flashed back to mind, the shooting in the street outside his building, by a fan. Mark David Chapman probably said to Lennon, “I’m a great fan of yours.”

  So naturally I thought, Uh-oh, here we go, when is he going to pull the gun out?

  “I’m grateful to you for your novels, of course,” the guy in the baseball cap said, getting into time with us as we walked north, highly respectfully, “but I also admire everything you’ve written about the art of writing.”

  “Really?” said Lee. Calm and composed.

  “Yes, your work has been a great inspiration to me.” Turned out he was an up-and-coming thriller writer. “I really liked that point you made about not giving away too much information—dosing it out. Slow disclosure. I try to keep it in mind while I’m writing.”

  “Who do you publish with?” Lee said.

  “St. Martin’s Press,” says the guy.

  “Good publisher,” says Lee. “Well, good luck with the next one!”

  The guy thanked him again and backed off (no doubt at the same time loosening the pressure of his finger on the trigger of the handy little weapon he had stowed away in his pocket). Lee has this habit of seeing the other person’s point of view. I was seeing a threat to life and limb—an assassin, in short. He was seeing a budding fellow writer. (Really, how much difference was there?) And in his parting words I felt a sense that he was wishing himself good luck for his next one too—given that it barely existed.

  It wasn’t his own life he was worrying about, it was the life of the unborn book.

  I mentioned my John Lennon scenario to Lee as we went on. He laughed it off. “Anyway,” he said, “that was on the way back to the Dakota. It was outside the building, but he was coming home, not going out. He signs a record for the fan. Then the fan pulls out a gun and shoots him.” It was a fine distinction. But i
t was clear he had given the episode some thought. Had seen himself as a possible target. Then dismissed it.

  “A writer is never going to be in the same league as a rock star—or an actor, for example. Not even remotely. Writing is show business for shy people. Or invisible people. It’s the book that’s out there, not the person. We just don’t have that kind of visibility—or directness. So I guess, by the same token, we’re less of a target.” He thought this part of town was more literary than his old neighborhood. “I’m more recognized in this part of New York. The Upper West Side. I might have a couple of fans coming up to me if I walk through Central Park. Only one or two a week. No big deal.”

  CHAPTER 1 (CONTINUED)

  LEE IS A DISTINCTIVE GUY to look at. About six foot four. Tall and stringy-looking. Strong chin. Piercing blue eyes. Reddish-brown hair. Late fifties but well preserved. Verging on elegant. Longitudinal. Someone had said to him, “You should play Reacher!” (In the movie.) He had replied, “My body mass would just about fit into one of his arms.” (Reacher 220–250 pounds; Child 160.) Still, you can pick him out in a crowd. Or walking across Central Park. He has a long, lazy, loping stride. Half Robert Redford, half Jacques Tati. With a bit of Walter White thrown in for good measure.

  He was doing a down-the-line interview with a radio show in England. Now even Lee was starting to worry about putting off the writing. Maybe it was one show too many.

  “The book came out yesterday in the U.K. It’s already sold a phenomenal amount. So this is not strategic. But I love Simon Mayo—the guy actually reads the books. I’m doing this show because I want to be on it.”

  We went in. Bumped into an old guy in suspenders and baggy trousers hitched high. A producer or something.

  “So what is this book?” he says.

  “It’s a thriller. I hope.”

  “So it’s a movie, is it?”

  “Well [cue sound of Lee gritting his teeth], it might become one ultimately.”

  He hates the movie assumption. I have taken a vow to keep off the subject of Tom Cruise (who played Reacher in the Jack Reacher movie, based on One Shot). He has already received around one million emails from fans saying, “YOU SOLD US OUT, YOU BASTARD!” or words to that effect. He sends out a tweet about what he had for breakfast and they all tweet back to him, “But why Tom Cruise?” Some people said, What about Daniel Craig? “Well, what about Daniel Craig?” I said. “He’s even shorter!” Lee shot back. (He had actually met Daniel Craig and knew him well enough to call him “Danny.” Likewise Clint Eastwood: “They’re all shrimps!”)

  The producer in London is a fan, more well versed than the old guy. “If you ever want a character who’s a slightly stressed-out radio producer,” she says, rather seductively, “feel free to use me.”

  Simon Mayo, the presenter in London, says, “We’re doing Jack Reacher songs this afternoon. This one is, ‘I’m a Wanderer.’ ”

  And then: “Lee Child live from New York…The one and only Lee Child!”

  Everyone wanted to be a character in a Reacher book. Possibly have a romance with Reacher. Or even be on the receiving end of a crunching Reacher head butt. Mayo launched in with a story about how Lee has a character named Audrey Shaw in The Affair. The real Audrey Shaw’s son, aged fourteen, had written to him, telling him she was a total Reacher fan and would he mind using her name. So he did. “She was a fan,” Lee explained, “and it’s a great name. Perfect for the character.”

  A lot of people were wondering about Reacher getting older. I’d heard the question asked a few times—how old is he now? Is he over-the-hill or what? Lee reckoned he was around forty-eight now, maybe a bit older. “I used to be very specific, but now I just don’t mention it.” And they wanted to know if Lee was going to kill him off one of these days. They were expecting it all to come to an end. Twilight of an idol. “It’s my readers who are keeping him alive,” Lee says.

  We walked back to his place. Unmolested by fans or assassins. So far as I could work out, you either wanted to be Jack Reacher, make love to him, or kill him off for all time. Or possibly some combination of the above.

  The Lee Child apartment was like a very comfortable library. Hushed. Orderly. Lee had had white painted bookshelves installed all around and there was still space for more books. He had a lot more in boxes stashed away somewhere.

  “I’m paying for it with the advance on the next book,” he said. He looked around and grinned. “I haven’t earned it yet. I’m living in an apartment that was bought with a book that hasn’t been written.”

  “Nervous?” I said.

  “It’s more, I feel I have to really earn the apartment. It’s like it’s on a mortgage—I bought it with promises. Now I have to deliver.”

  Lee wanted to get down to work, but he thought we’d better have some lunch first. It was about two o’clock. He made us some toast. We had cheese (a choice of cheddar or Stilton—he had a big hunk of Stilton) and marmalade to go with it. And a smoothie (he had apricot, I had strawberry). We sat down in the dining room to eat our toast. It was a lovely old French farm table of some kind, chunky and rustic-looking.

  I started telling him about rotten jobs I’d done in the past, how I’d lasted less than an hour in one of them, at a metal factory. Lee had tried a few other jobs, in his youth. He didn’t like any of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the work, he didn’t like the workmanship. In the jam factory, for example. “It was all sugar paste, nothing but sugar paste. If you wanted apricot jam you threw in some orange color. Strawberry—throw in some red. It was like you were painting jam. What about raspberry with all those little pips? No problem—here, we’ll throw in some tiny wood chips.” He was really outraged by how bad it was. “Nothing was real. Nobody cared.” He felt responsible for people eating a load of rubbish only masquerading as jam. They were being conned. Lee wanted it to be good jam, whatever flavor it was.

  He once had a job in a dried pea factory. He couldn’t believe it: “Birds were perched up there on the rafters, way over our heads, and shitting into the peas. Nobody cared. That is how it was.” And another job in a bakery.

  It wasn’t a traditional bakery. He wasn’t kneading any dough. Or putting loaves in ovens. Everything was on an assembly line. His job was to take loaves off the horizontal belt and stack them on some kind of vertical system. But he couldn’t get the hang of it. “There were all these loaves coming off the line. I was supposed to clamp seven loaves together and transfer them from the belt to the stack. But I just couldn’t manage to do it. Seven loaves, at one time. They would allow you to drop one or two in an hour. But I kept on dropping them. I just couldn’t get my arms tight enough around the loaves to hold them all together.” He showed me how his physique was all wrong for the job. He was too stringy. His arms were too long. “I kept on dropping them. They were all over the place. They sacked me inside an hour. I deserved to be sacked. I was no good at it.” He really wanted to be good—to find something he could be good at. He thought he was good at television. Then he got sacked from that job too.

  We were about to go into his office. The novel factory. I think I was more nervous than he was. And I had a sense of quasi-religious awe too—I was about to bear witness to the genesis of a great work, the Big Bang moment. “Do you have anything in mind?” I said.

  Because this was the key thing about the way Lee Child writes. The thing that drew me to write to him and break into his apartment and watch him working. He really didn’t know what was going to happen next. “I don’t have a clue about what is going to happen,” he would say. He was a writer who thought like a reader. He had nothing planned. When he wrote to me he said, “I have no title and no plot.” But he said I could come anyway. He didn’t think I would put him off too much. He relied on inspiration to guide him. Like a muse. Or the Force or something. Something basic and mythic, without too much forethought. He liked his writing to be organic and spontaneous and authentic. He feared that thinking about it too much in advance would kill
it stone dead. But still he had a glimmering of what would be. He knew the feel of a book.

  “The opening is a third-party scene, I know that, right at the start. A bunch of other guys. So it has to be a third-person sort of book. Reacher doesn’t know what is happening. He’s not there yet.”

  “Do you see something in your mind or what? Is that what you mean by ‘scene’?”

  “It’s visual, yes,” he replied. “In the sense of seeing the words—I can almost see the paragraph in my mind. The physical look on the page. You have to nail the reader right there, on the first page. The uncommitted reader. And I can feel it. The rhythm. It’s got to be stumbly. It’s tough guys talking. I have to get a hint of their vernacular. But, at the same time, it has to trip ahead. A tripping rhythm. Forward momentum.”

  I think it was around then that Lee started talking about euthanasia. He was in favor. There is a lot of thanatos in his books, not so much of the eu. “I can die right now. I’m fine with that.” He dismissed the recommendation of a friend to go off to a mountain in Austria and chuck himself off (he thought you might change your mind by virtue of the fresh air and landscape). Turned out he had some plan, when the time came, involving a veterinary supplies store down in Mexico and a rather powerful cocktail of morphine and horse tranquilizer. Had it all worked out.

  “Come on, man,” I said, although I basically agreed with him. “Think of your readers! Anyway I’m stuffed if you die. I’ll have to finish your book for you. Pretend you’re still alive and steal all your earnings.”

  FINALLY, CHAPTER 1

  THAT GOT HIM GOING. We finished the toast and went into his office at the back of the apartment. No Central Park (couldn’t afford to spend all his time looking through the window like the boy in the Manhattan apartment). We sat down. Lee sat in front of his desk with the desktop computer on. It was there, waiting for him. It was already switched on. The desk is metal. Riveted. Silver. Huge. Solid. On a bunch of shelves to the right, mugs with pens. And a magnifying lens. On the left—a collection of his own books in hardcover.