by Andy Martin
“I DON’T WANT TO BREAK UP the party or anything, I was just passing.”
“Come on in, you bloody sociopathic loner, I’ve got some important news for you.” Lee ushered me in.
His daughter, Ruth, was there, and his brother, Andrew. A bit of a family reunion. They were going out somewhere fairly suave. Looked pretty dressy. It was a hot September day in New York and I was in cutoffs and flip-flops. Feeling underdressed as I sipped a cup of tea.
He and his brother (“younger brother,” Andrew stressed—by a decade and a half—married to historical novelist Tasha Alexander) were about to go and do a joint launch of their books in Chicago. Andrew had a stand-alone thriller, Run, coming out (amateur caught up in fiendish plot, or plots, a bit North by Northwest. Funny moment where the hero, under siege, toys with the idea of running out and killing a few bad guys, then escaping à la Jack Reacher—and then thinks better of it, and comes up with a techie solution involving a microwave and a can of Coke).
The vital news was this: Lee had come up with the name of the place Reacher had stopped at. “Mother’s Rest.” Which also explained why he had stopped there. Liked the sound of the name. Classic Reacher—purely whimsical. “He’s sentimental about it. Thinks it’s something to do with wagon trains having a break on the way west. So he gets off the train. It’ll probably turn out to be a corruption of some original Indian name meaning shit hole.”
He had also knocked off a short story the night before to meet a deadline. “The Picture of the Lonely Diner.” It had to be based on a place in New York. Lee chose the Flatiron District. Reacher turns up, it’s all cordoned off, DO NOT ENTER, so naturally he enters anyway. New York with no one in it (the word “nothing” comes up a lot), except a doomed spy and a sympathetic woman FBI agent (SHE: “Why were you born in Berlin?” REACHER: “I had no control over my mother’s movements. I was just a fetus at the time.”).
I’d noticed that Haruki Murakami, the great Japanese novelist, had come out as a Reacher fan in The Guardian (Murakami: “I like Lee Child….So far I have read ten of them.” Steven Poole: “What do you like about them?” Murakami: “Everything’s the same!”).
“Yeah, I love Murakami too,” said Lee. “You know they think he’s not literary enough in Japan. He’s sensitive about it. So it was brave to say he likes me. Fuel for the fire.”
Ruth wanted to know what they thought about her father in Cambridge. I told her that there was some git in the English department, Justin I think his name was, or Alex maybe, who had made some snooty, pompous remark about the Child oeuvre when I had suggested inviting him over to give a talk. I thought it was fairly typical of the academic mindset.
Ruth said, “Harold Pinter was pretty darn snooty too.”
“Then there was that guy in The Guardian,” Andrew chimed in. “About how every numbskull on the train was reading Reacher or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
“Whatever,” Lee said, taking it all on the chin.
Ruth kindly suggested that maybe I should be translating Lee’s books into French. Reacher wasn’t selling in France. Maybe the translation was at fault?
“I was doing a signing in Lyon last year,” Lee said. “I was with two other guys. They had queues going out of the door. I had three people.” He couldn’t understand it. “I even made his mother French! Reacher speaks French! What is wrong with them?”
I wondered if it could have something to do with the Napoleon syndrome. I had just been reading a couple of books by Pierre Lemaitre, whose detective hero is less than five feet tall. “So maybe Reacher is just too big for French taste?”
He said he was thinking of pulling his books out of France altogether, even though they had a house there. “It would be nice to have a country where I don’t have to do anything,” he said.
Lee was being honest, the way he always was. To the point of expressing vulnerability. He regularly claimed to have no feelings. “Feelings?” he snorted. “If I ever have one you’ll be the first to know!” But, right now, contrary to his ironic remarks, he was having a feeling. He was especially sensitive about his writing. In Die Trying he had written that “Nathan Rubin died because he got brave.” It was the first line. The editor had crossed out “got” and put in “became.” Lee was furious and had put it right back in again, but the editor, a guy called David, wouldn’t give up on the point until Lee finally exploded, “David, you are fucking with the wrong marine!”
“Every now and then I write something gemlike—and nobody notices. It’s not that I want to draw attention to technique or anything. But you’d think just once in a while a critic would take note. But no. I have a great sentence, a great paragraph—and it’s like it’s invisible!” He had been asked to write a short piece for someone on a political theme. So he wrote what he called “a bland defense of democracy”—“It probably still needs defending”—but the key thing was that he had written only five sentences, and each sentence had started with the following letters: O, B, A, M, A. The whole thing was a subtle acrostic.
“And nobody noticed!” he lamented. “In fact,” he said to me, “you’re about the only guy who does. You and Janet Maslin [a New York Times critic, one of his greatest fans]. I’ll never forget that line of yours: ‘Reacher is a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s.’ I liked that.”
He took me into the back room for a minute away from the rest of his crew. Showed me how Reacher had moved on, going further into Mother’s Rest. But he—Lee—had had to go back again. That one line had been nagging at him. The one about the hogs’ “steaming piles of shit and their steaming pools of piss.”
Now it read: “steaming piles and pools of waste.”
“One less steaming,” I said. “Pity. I liked the steaming.”
“It’s not that there is anything wrong with piss and shit as such,” Lee said. “But, I don’t know, I feel the groove is not there.”
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
(Lunch with Lee and Joel)
“I CAN SEE you’ve made an effort,” Lee said. “You’re wearing shoes.” His own outfit was only marginally above the sartorial standards set by Reacher.
We met at Mae Mae on Vandam, in the West Village. It had a bookish feel about it, mainly because it had actual books—as well as bottles of wine—on the shelves. So it seemed appropriate. The three of us had a table in a booth, tucked away at the back, known as “the library.” Which probably explains why we were talking baseball mostly. Turned out Reacher had been making progress in Mother’s Rest, but baseball came first.
Joel (big blue overshirt, John Lennon glasses, cloud of hair): “How the fuck did you get to throw a pitch at the Yankees?”
That was mainly what he wanted to know, having been a Yankees fan since he was a kid and his dad, who was a waiter, got a lot of free tickets to the games. He was asking Lee rather than me of course, since Lee was the one who got to throw a pitch at the Yankees.
It wasn’t the greatest of pitches, but it wasn’t the worst by a long distance. 50 Cent, for example (“And where the fuck did that dumb sonofabitch name come from anyhow?” says Joel), threw it high and wide. Lee wasn’t trying to impress anyone. And, although also a keen Yankees follower, had never played baseball as a kid in Birmingham. It wasn’t too fast, and it had a bit of a loop to it, but it was straight and not too high. The catcher caught it, so that was okay.
“Michael Connelly did it before me. So that provided a model. And Harlan Coben. And Karin Slaughter, but she has a genetic advantage. Her great-uncle was Enos Slaughter, one of the best baseball players of all time. Great name too,” Lee said.
The pitch was back on September 10. Lee had practiced over the summer in England. Probably not the optimal place for playing baseball, more into cricket. But he had it all worked out. Thought about it, mentally prepared. Come the day, scorned the chauffeur, took the subway to Yankee Stadium. Walked out onto the field, brimming with confidence. Cheers of the crowd. Then a Yankees guy leans over and whispers
to him, helpfully, “Hey, Mr. Child, remember you’re on a mound. You’re going to throw low. So pitch it up. Aim high.”
That threw him. It was one more thing to think about. One too many. He was okay till then. “I can’t pitch and think at the same time,” he said.
Anyway he was so tall it was like living permanently on a mound.
He’d once had a conversation with Joe Girardi, manager of the Yankees. “There are two kinds of people,” said Girardi. “Those who think two fifths of a second is a short time, and those who think it’s a long time.” If you are one of those rare few who think it’s really quite long, then you can play baseball, otherwise forget it. “Baseball is basically impossible,” says Lee. “The time between throwing the pitch and trying to hit it is so short. The ball is coming at you so fast. And the bat in your hands is so slim—and round!—there is no chance of hitting it. That’s what makes it so great.”
Lee was ordering. I remembered Reacher ordering coffee and eggs in the diner at the beginning of Killing Floor. I thought Reacher’s willingness to go into cheap eateries and have a pot of coffee was the link with Haruki Murakami (whose heroes love a good Dunkin’ Donuts). “I don’t have any sense of how good food is,” he said. “I like it, but I can’t really tell the difference.” He and Joel ordered some kind of meaty sandwiches or burgers; I had a salad.
Joel loved the fact that Lee had written Killing Floor in pencil. It was so not prima donna. Not even a typewriter. September 1, 1994. Three pads of A4, the kind with lines. One pencil. One pencil sharpener. And an eraser. That was what he had bought at the Arndale Centre. It cost £3.99 (he remembered precisely). He wrote the whole of the first draft in pencil; the second in pen; and the third on someone else’s laptop. It took a day and a half for the printer to print it all out. (He still has the pencil stashed away in Sussex. He tends to hold on to stuff like that.)
“I felt I had to make it clear to me—this is NOT a hobby. I had to earn the computer. Till then it was the pencil.” He’d been thinking for a few years he could probably write something, but doing television had stopped him. It was John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series that had first convinced him or inspired him. “He made me think it was possible. I could see how it could be done. I love to see how things work on a granular level. When I lost my job it was there in my mind. If you look carefully there is not a huge distance between Travis McGee (six foot four) and Jack Reacher (six foot five).” McGee’s job was “salvage.”
Lee doesn’t really think he has invented anything. It’s all borrowed. Partly from MacDonald, mainly from antiquity. He is preoccupied with what Reacher is doing right now, getting off the train in Mother’s Rest. But he also has a long nothing-new-under-the-sun view of everything that puts it all in perspective.
“We have a prehistory of around seven million years. We have been recognizably modern for only thirty thousand years.” We tossed different figures around, depending on what Ice Age exhibition we had been to. “Still, for every year we’ve been modern we’ve been premodern for five hundred.”
“Do you mean two hundred fifty?” I said, jotting numbers on my pad.
“Whatever.” We were still cavemen at heart, paleo-thinkers, filled with atavistic fears and tribal habits.
“But think what this does for storytelling,” says Lee. We’ve been telling stories for maybe 100,000 years. But only very recently have they appeared on the page. “When most writers talk about ‘voice’ they mean something rather obscure; when I say it I’m really thinking about talking to somebody, for me the voice is really a voice, it’s oral. Everything is oral. I’m sitting there trying to draw you in with my voice.” Lee was like the opposite of Derrida, who said there is nothing beyond the Text. For Lee there was nothing beyond the Voice. A pencil maybe.
His great-grandfather in Ireland had been illiterate. He was a miller. He and his wife had managed to make enough to send their kid to school. So his grandfather was the first to get an education. “Marks on the paper are secondary,” he said. “Everything comes out of syntax. But that was verbal. The difference is then it was narrowcast. If you were a storyteller in the past you could only impact on a few people at a time, maybe hundreds or a thousand over time. Now it’s millions.”
Joel muttered something about how he had only about nine people turn up to one of his book launches. “Sounds like one of my classes,” I said.
—
So these were the two types of story, according to Lee. He was strictly structuralist and binary about it. Reminded me a lot of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great French anthropologist, who also reckoned that all stories were an exercise in bricolage or recycling, picking up old bits and pieces and refashioning them into something new.
1. “There’s something out there!” You’re sitting around in the cave and there are noises outside. Scary noises. Coming from the world beyond the cave. “Half the stories in the world right there,” says Lee.
2. A guy leaves the cave. And then comes back. “That’s all the other stories.”
“Plato’s myth of the cave,” I said. “In The Republic. He comes back and then everyone else wants to kill him to shut him up. They don’t believe all those stories about the sun.”
JOEL: I was telling Andy about Elmore Leonard and his rule about writing.
LEE: Which one?
JOEL: If it sounds like writing, cut it.
LEE: Of course you could read his books and find every single one of those “rules” of his broken. I think he wrote that piece for The New York Times. Probably signed up to do it a few months before and then suddenly it was the deadline and he just shoved that down without enthusiasm and without thinking about it. I mean, “Don’t start with the weather.” You know, if the weather is important—think of Alistair MacLean—start with it. It all depends. Maybe you wouldn’t have “It was a dark and stormy night.”
ANDY: I still like “It was a dark and stormy night.”
LEE: And “Never use an adverb.” “Never” is an adverb!
ANDY: Was that an exclamation? He said you’re supposed to go easy on the exclamations!
LEE: It’s moved on.
ANDY AND JOEL: Whoa.
He was talking about the plot of Make Me. Joel and I were instantly enthralled. He would have been good around the campfire, Lee—he would definitely make you forget about the wolves or the saber-tooth.
“It’s all dialogue, remember, or monologue anyway, the voice of the narrator, or voices I suppose. But I felt the page needed breaking up. It was time for the next character. An encounter.”
ANDY AND JOEL: Who?
“It’s a woman. Has to be. She is looking for Keever. Sees Reacher coming towards her away from the train station.”
“What time is this?” says I. “Is it still dark?”
“Yes,” said Lee. “The train has only just pulled out. So it’s not long after midnight. Maybe there is a pool of light. Vapor lights. I felt I had to get right in there, not wait for morning. She is looking for Keever. Sees Reacher looming up. Thinks it’s him. She could be…another member of the same firm, maybe the same detective agency, something like that, maybe only half knows him or knows of him. Of course we know Keever is already dead, but she doesn’t know that. She thinks Reacher is Keever.”
“Reacher doesn’t care,” I said.
“Right,” said Lee. “He’s indifferent. He’s looking for a motel or a diner. Doesn’t want to know about Keever. Not interested.”
“He’ll get sucked in somehow though,” says Joel.
“Always does,” says Lee. “All he wants is coffee.”
“The Murakami thing,” I said. “Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“My problem here is…” Lee started.
“The punch-up,” said I.
“Random acts of extreme violence.” Joel.
“Readers are going to start to complain. You wouldn’t believe the number of messages I get. Amazon or wherever. ‘There weren’t enough fights so I put it down.’ ”
> JOEL: When’s it coming?
LEE: See what I mean? They demand a fight in the first ten pages. But we can’t just have a couple of hicks come up to him, challenge him, and get their asses kicked.
JOEL: Why not?
LEE: That is exactly what it’s like. Ten pages and where’s the fight scene? Readers are ruthless.
ANDY: Okay, Lee, listen, I have the solution, this is what you ought to do…
LEE: Come on, let’s go and have a cigarette.
JOEL: Good idea.
I followed the two of them out of Mae Mae onto Vandam. They were already puffing away. “Better give me one of those,” I said. Lee gave me one of his Camels. I thought I’d better check it out. I struggled a bit with the lighter, finally got a flame, lit it, took a drag. Managed not to cough. “I want the joint next time,” I said.
I wasn’t kidding. I really did. It was a matter of trying to get into the Lee Child mind. Because he is one for the substances. Recreational. Only “weed” though so far as I know. And, here is the thing, he is a firm believer. Evangelical in fact. “I don’t think weed should be made legal,” he said. “It should be compulsory!”
Another definite exclamation. Sorry, Elmore!
He had this theory about how it helped him “make connections.” He used to smoke one in the evening, now he’ll sometimes have one in the day too. I mentioned that the last time I’d smoked a joint was one dark and stormy night somewhere down south with Kiefer Sutherland. Lee easily topped that pathetic boast. Turned out Kiefer’s father, Donald Sutherland, had written to him saying he could have played Reacher back in the day. The world is full of Reacher fans.
Lee thanked cigarettes for suppressing his appetite and said that at least being into soft drugs had stopped him from becoming an alcoholic. “It was an economic thing,” he said. “You couldn’t smoke and drink too. You had to choose. I don’t drink much to this day. And I never got into cocaine or heroin—couldn’t afford it. Not without robbing somebody.”