by Andy Martin
It was while standing out in the sun on Vandam smoking a Camel that I learned the following about Lee Child. He was fourteen and a half when he lost his virginity. Twice. Kind of. Lucky bastard. His friend’s parents had gone away—this was in 1969, April—one weekend, there was a party of some kind. “A weekend bacchanal. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” He smoked his first ever joint.
“I benefited from how behind the times my parents were. They worried about me drinking. I could operate with impunity. They thought I’d been on some kind of study weekend. Or hiking in the hills.”
And he got lucky with a girl. His first. And then again, half an hour later, with her older sister. His second. They were all high.
In the middle of all that I managed to slip in that I had once taken a quarter of a tab of LSD, on Hampstead Heath, probably around the same time as Lee was having his first joint. But it was no match for the two sisters story.
I guess it was only after Lee had gone and Joel had gone back to his mighty artistic struggle and I was left alone ruminating that I worked it out. Of course! The punch-up has to happen with the bunch of guys who think they’ve buried Keever. It was obvious. They bury the big guy. The backhoe, the hole, the rooting hogs, cover it all up. Head off into town for a drink and…fuck me, it’s him again, the big bastard, I told you to bury him properly!!!
The specter of Keever, haunting Mother’s Rest.
Then I rushed back to the apartment and had half a grapefruit to get rid of the taste of the bloody cigarette.
ON THE MONEY
FOR SOME REASON Lee’s eyes looked a steelier kind of blue. And he had a lot of stubble. He was well into the “middle” phase of the book, rolling the stone right back up the hill again. We talked about my solution to the punch-up problem; he dismissed it and came up with something much better. (More nuanced: the locals don’t think Reacher is Keever, he is only similar, therefore…connected?)
Then we started talking numbers. That is what I was here for. The economics. He was giving me the lowdown on how much he got paid. No hazy euphemisms, no mystification, no nonsense. The raw figures, hard cash. He showed me a check he had just received. It was sitting on the desk in his office. He’d only just taken it out of the envelope. “There you go,” he said. “This is how much I’m worth.” The check was from Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. So I knew it was going to be big money—telephone numbers. I had a close look. “Wow!” I said, eyes wide open. “I can’t believe it.”
Paid to Lee Child (at his old office address) in the amount of:
$28.72
I took a photograph of it for posterity.
“That is serious money,” Lee said. “Acting residuals, from my cameo in the movie. DVD, and on-demand and so on. I really feel I earned that. Everything else is just…Monopoly money.”
The rest of the time we were talking about the Monopoly money. He was doing most of the talking. I was mainly just chipping in gasps of amazement. We went through to his living room, the one looking out over Central Park, a few muted traffic sounds floating up from twelve floors down. He lit a cigarette. We started where he started, with Killing Floor.
“I was laboring under a misapprehension,” Lee began. “I’d written the first half. I thought it would take months for an agent to get back to me. I’d heard that on the mythic grapevine. So I sent it off saying I’d finished the novel and here’s the first half, what do you think? I picked him out of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook—he was the only one who said he made money for his clients. The agent got back to me in a few days. He actually wrote me a letter, which shows how long ago this was. He read it straight off. Then he says, ‘I like this, send me the rest.’ So I had to reply something like, ‘Just fine-tuning the last chapter. Will send soon.’ Completely caught me out. Anyway, he agreed to represent me. So I go and see him in London.
“ ‘How much are you looking for?’ he says.
“ ‘I’m out of a job,’ I said. ‘I need to replace my salary. Aim high. How about the Prime Minister’s salary?’
“ ‘I can’t get you that,’ he says. ‘I can get you more or less. There is no middle ground.’
“ ‘Okay make it more, then,’ I said.”
The graph of his income from the Reacher series shot up, steeply, like a space rocket. I kept on adding zeroes. So much so that I actually ran out of notepad around here. I had only a thin little exercise book that I’d bought round at the old NYU store. Small one. Lightweight. Not big enough for those numbers. Lee noticed. “What kind of journalist are you? First you don’t have a pen, now you don’t have any paper!”
I think he liked the fact that I preferred a pen and paper to, say, a tape recorder. It was old-school. It was how he started with Killing Floor, after all. Paper and pencil. He got up and went into his office. I trailed along behind him. “People keep giving me notebooks. Here, have this one.” It was a serious black notebook, which appropriately enough had the words “SERIOUS NOTEBOOK” stamped in a fine red font on the front cover. In parentheses, it said, “To make it look as if I know what I am doing.” Strangely reassuring.
I filled a lot of that one too. Finally looked up.
“What do you do with all this money?”
“I don’t know what I do with it really. I give some of it away.” And it was true—he had given a lot of scholarships to a couple of British universities, and saved a lot of animals, and randomly bought things for people down on their luck. “Don’t know where the rest has gone. I feel a bit like George Best.” Lee was referring to the legendary Irish soccer player who played for Manchester United. “You know, I spent most of it on women and booze and fast cars. And the rest I squandered. It’s going to sound trite—but I am not that into money. I spend money on convenience. I’ll pay for the lunchtime flight rather than getting up in the middle of the night. But I’m not particularly interested in being rich.”
“It’s art for art’s sake, then, at some level?”
“Has to be. Art for art’s sake. It’s a joy and a pleasure. But it’s also a job. That pays for your family’s welfare.”
“So you’re a poet…and a ruthless bastard at the same time?”
“One does not impact on the other. They are parallel. The one is uncorrupted by the other.”
There was one word Lee kept coming back to. It was the difference between books and movies. The word was trust. “They trust you,” Lee was saying. “The publisher trusts you. The reader trusts you. In the movies it’s more, ‘Oh, he’s a good storyteller—and we are going to change it all anyway.’ I really enjoy writing screenplays—but really, why bother? You know it will either never be made or it will be unrecognizable. It’s an unreal feeling.”
“But when you’re writing books…?”
“When you’re writing books you take extra care. Because of the trust.”
Maybe that is why he could trust himself to do the job. I mentioned a friend of mine, a writer/director, who was forever worrying about some other great work out there—Hamlet, for example, or Boyhood. Feeling undermined or eclipsed by it all. Lee had some sound advice for him. “Name any author. He or she is the best in the world at writing his or her own book. No doubt about it. Me, for example. Lee Child is the best in the world at writing a Lee Child book. No one else could do it. Michael Connelly is the same. Could I write his books? No way. I’m always knocked out by other people’s work. But that is them and this is me!”
It was all in the voice. The voice was everything. But Lee still didn’t expect to write the perfect book. Make Me wasn’t going to be perfect either. “If Make Me was perfect, I would feel…what’s the point? It’s done. Theoretically, it would be disabling. But in practice you will never write the perfect book.”
“So how do you feel at the end?”
“It’s great,” he said. “You’re feeling great. But it’s not a hundred percent—somehow it never quite lives up to the hope.” Success was always tinted with the color of failure.
THE Q
UIXOTIC MATADOR
LEE CHILD ONCE MADE A BARGAIN with himself. It was on a Saturday, late in 1984, maybe. In his car on the way to Leicester. Aston Villa was playing an away game against Leicester City. At the time Leicester City was a top team, with an attack led by Gary Lineker, star center-forward for England. Lee vowed that he would forever give up smoking if only Aston Villa could be granted a victory. It was a pact with God, to forswear nicotine henceforth and for all eternity, if only…In the event, Aston Villa lost 5–0. They were slaughtered. So either there was no God or he was an evil bastard who took pleasure in tormenting his own children (and one Child in particular). He felt betrayed. Naturally, Lee took revenge by smoking even more on the way back to Manchester. And has loyally, implacably, continued to do so ever since.
Which sort of explains why he was in such a hurry to get off the plane and out of the terminal and light up. I had a puff to keep him company. But Itziar de Francisco was really smoking. She was the young, attractive, dark-haired, dark-eyed, multilingual woman the publishers had sent to act as his minder in Madrid. He gave her one of his Camels. He was there to pick up a literary prize. Following in the footsteps of Philip Kerr, Michael Connelly, and Harlan Coben, he had been awarded the VIII Premio RBA de Novela Negra 2014. It was worth some six-figure sum.
“I shouldn’t even be doing this,” he said, back in New York. “I should stay home. I have a book to write.”
“It’s a prize,” I said. “A literary prize. And there’s loadsamoney attached. And it’s Madrid. What is your problem? Are you going to do a Sartre and turn it down? I think he always regretted it.”
“This is not the Nobel for one thing. No one in their right mind is going to give me the Nobel Prize for literature.”
I’d always loved those stories of Sartre and Camus accepting or not accepting the Nobel, and Solzhenitsyn making his great speech about literature and human rights and the fate of the world. So I was envisaging something along those lines. Or like the scene from Star Wars in which Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia receive some kind of medal and are applauded by the masses on account of saving their planet from the dreaded Death Star.
It turned out Lee had sent along his foreign rights agent to accept the prize the month before, who gave some gracious acceptance speech on his behalf. All he was doing himself was a ton of interviews with the press and TV. And speaking—and then it was a little bit more Star Wars-y—at the Getafe Novela Negra literary festival on the outskirts of Madrid.
It was his first time in Madrid, he was telling Itziar. But he had a strong connection with Spain nevertheless. Just as Flaubert went off on his tour around Egypt and the Orient before returning to Normandy to get down to work on Madame Bovary, so too Lee (together with wife and daughter) went to Spain for a holiday shortly before he wrote Killing Floor. “We had a great time on the beach, somewhere down south, in Andalusia, on the Mediterranean,” said Lee. “Swimming, sunbathing, eating paella. Then I got back and found this message on the answering machine telling me I had been sacked. So Spain was a real high point for me.” It was the end of his previous life, the last act of Jim Grant, before he morphed into Lee Child. “So Spain is always linked to Reacher in my mind.”
Hace calor. I was reminded of my old Spanish lessons as we drove into town. It was a cloudless blue sky. El sol brilla. Shirt-sleeves at the end of October. Itziar was telling us about how some of her old ancestors had been shot somewhere around here by Franco. “What am I doing here?” Lee muttered. “I should be writing, not talking!”
—
Lee is like the sun—it takes him a while to warm up in the morning. Which is why he only gets started on writing in the afternoon, around two (about the time I am thinking of a siesta). Except all he was doing in Madrid was talking. We kicked off at the Prado. Somehow the newspaper had impossible-to-get permission to shoot in the museum. He was photographed in the midst of some vast gallery, surrounded by great works of art, looking huge. He particularly wanted to see The Colossus by Goya. There was a definite Reacheresque quality to this hairy giant looming over some little village. “It’s obviously not by Goya,” Lee said.
He was drawn to another one of some poor bugger getting his liver pecked out by vultures.
There was a reason, other than having to get up early to catch the plane, why he was grouchy though. He never got writer’s block, he said, but he admitted he was “stalled.” Or possibly “sidetracked.” In all his interviews he said, with total conviction, speaking of the new novel, “I don’t really have any idea just now what it’s about,” “not a clue.” He was “excited to find out,” just like the reader. At the Getafe festival, he said he was open to ideas, but he wouldn’t be paying for them. “Ideas are free,” he said. He still hadn’t worked out what the hell was going on in Mother’s Rest, why Keever had gone there in the first place, and why he had to die, and what exactly Reacher was supposed to do about it. In fact he was right up against a brick wall, going nowhere.
Also there was no way he could write while he was on the move, he said. Reacher was the nomad. Child was sedentary. The hunter-gatherer of old had to be holed up in his office in NYC. I, on the other hand, was writing in cafés, on planes and trains, or in airport lounges.
“Oh well, I’m done after this week,” he said, knocking back a glass of rioja.
We were sitting in some bar somewhere, the kind of “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” that Hemingway spoke of, where the characters are preoccupied with the intuition of nada (or nothingness).
“Then it’s your birthday.”
“Okay after that. When I’m back in New York.”
“Then there’s California in November.”
“You know what,” he said, lighting up another Camel. “Maybe I’ll never finish this one. Or it’ll be a real disaster. It’s possible.”
“I have faith,” I said.
“I just don’t know,” he said.
We had to go outside, even in Spain. He had a few puffs. “Do you ever think it’s fundamentally ludicrous to write eighteen or nineteen novels about the same character?”
“What about twenty?”
“Well,” he said, expelling a Camel-shaped cloud, “once you’ve done nineteen you might as well do twenty.”
Despite all of which, he was in a generous mood. He offered to pay for me at the Hotel de las Letras. You could tell it was a classy place. Four-star. Expensive. With poems by Pablo Neruda (“Oda a las cosas”) on the wall. Roof terrace (where he was doing the interviews). Cue momentary wrestling with my own conscience. I had to turn him down (reluctantly).
“Artistic integrity?”
“I’ll find a cheap dive in the back streets,” I said, with some notion of doing an Orwell.
In reality, I got talking to una chica muy linda working the desk and wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt (“Me gusta su camisa,” I said shamelessly), haggled them way down, and then got an upgrade thrown in. They took pity on my pathetic Spanish, which was better than nada. I ended up with a room better than Lee’s, with its own terrace, garden, and lounger in the sun. And I had no qualms about accepting free meals on the RBA tab. So my integrity was definitely compromised. I wanted to keep my independence, but (I reasoned) there was no point killing myself.
—
He was between interviews up on the roof, sipping a Coke with ice and lemon, as the sun went down. The photographer couldn’t get his lights to work. “It’s okay,” Lee said. “I look better in the dark anyway.”
Which is why he was happy to stick with writing. He could make it work. Lee knows how things work. He thinks of writing as a form of tekhne. Just fairly primitive. “Look at that pen you’re holding,” he said. “It’s an amazingly sophisticated piece of equipment. A masterpiece of technology. Do you know who invented it?”
“Mr. Bíró?”
“That’s right. Back in the 30s. Hungarian guy. László Bíró. He made pens so cheap it was the beginning of consumer culture. Stuff you could throw away. Did you eve
r buy a space pen?”
“I didn’t think I would need one on earth,” I said.
“You know it’s a myth, don’t you, about the Russian astronauts using pencils?”
“Like you, you mean, writing Killing Floor.”
“They couldn’t have used pencils. Think about it. The graphite dust would have killed their machines. You know they liked to use the old vacuum tubes in their fighter planes rather than transistors? Old technology, but they knew they would survive the electromagnetic pulse from a thermonuclear blast. Transistors would be fried. Sometimes old technology is smart.”
Of course Reacher speaks French, but, as we wandered about Madrid, or sat about elegant roof terraces, I kept wondering if the Child obra could have some secret Spanish literary genealogy. After all, Lee had said Reacher was “linked to Spain.” Maybe it was more than paella. Speeded-up, our intermittent, rambling conversation went roughly like this:
ME: Cervantes? Don Quixote. But tilting at real monsters rather than windmills.
LEE: No Sancho. Reacher mustn’t have a sidekick. Sidekicks are always stupid in the end. Like Tonto [the Lone Ranger’s loyal “native” companion, whose name means “stupid”]. His collaborators have to be his equals. Almost.
ME: Borges? (Of course Jorge Luis Borges is Argentine, but he writes in Spanish, so I allowed it.)
LEE: Not in Spanish.
Me: Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls?
Lee: Everyone owes something to Hemingway. But I’m not that into Hemingway.
Me: Machismo?
Lee: I don’t think of Reacher as particularly macho. Macho implies sexist. Which he isn’t. Or even having to overcompensate a bit. Reacher doesn’t have to compensate for anything.
Me: Matadors, then?
Lee: Death in the Afternoon. Yes. There is something of that. One man in an arena, up against some great force of nature. With the sun burning down. Gradually circling one another and closing in for the kill. Everything but the tight clothes. He has to be scruffy and not care.