Reacher Said Nothing

by Andy Martin

  He came up with two other answers (nothing to do with Spain). One was Goliath. “I always liked Goliath,” he said, as we were walking along some calle somewhere. “I never liked David. I think Goliath was actually ill when that fight took place. Some say that he was blind. So it was not a fair fight. I thought—what would it be like if Goliath was the good guy not the bad guy?”

  Another time we were having one of those charitable lunches at the Hotel de las Letras with Itziar. Big white plates, tiny nouvelle cuisine servings. It inspired reflectiveness. Maybe nostalgia, because we ended up talking about his childhood.

  “Did they call you ‘Lofty’ at school?” I said. It was what we called very tall kids.

  “They called me ‘Grievous,’ ” he said, happily.

  He was a great scrapper as a kid, just like Reacher. Always getting into fights. He came from a rough neighborhood but won a scholarship to the classy grammar school on the other side of town, King Edward’s. He had to wear a dark blue blazer with a complicated badge on. So he had enough trouble walking through his own neighborhood (where the blazer was abnormal). But when he got to school he assumed that, having arrived at a bigger school, the fights would be bigger too. So on the very first day he picked a fight with some passing kid. Didn’t just punch him to the ground but gave him a good kicking while he was lying there too. Really worked him over. The other kids were appalled. “I destroyed him. I thought that was what was needed. But I had the logic all wrong,” Lee said. “There was no real fight imperative. No need to pick on anyone. And especially no need to go in hard. They all thought I was a barbarian.” Which is how he got the nickname, on his very first day at school, short for “Grievous Bodily Harm” (in the U.K. legal lexicon, an extreme form of physical assault).

  “Basically,” Lee said, “Reacher is me, aged nine. I used to fight all the time.” And it was true, I checked: in Echo Burning, Chapter 7, Reacher recalls a parallel experience at a new school—everything but the nickname: “hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first.”

  And Lee was now pondering the first major fight scene in Make Me (Reacher versus Mother’s Rest).

  “Did you have a death wish when you were younger?” I said.

  “I still do,” he said. “I don’t want to die peacefully in bed.”

  Technically, Reacher is thirty-six in the era of Killing Floor. By the time of Make Me, given the itinerant chronology of the stories, he is perhaps another twelve years older. But he always retains something of the young boy. No responsibilities and no cares. No career. No house. No mortgage. Not even a suitcase. Only a folding toothbrush. He sometimes wonders about this when he compares himself with his peers (as in Bad Luck and Trouble, where he is reunited with his “Special Investigators” team). “Is there something wrong with me? Why don’t I plan for the future?” And the answer is, he is only a boy, after all (albeit a rather large one)—so why should he? He can live for today, not for tomorrow.

  The childlike quality of Child’s creation also explains why he tends towards short, declarative sentences. Reacher is no Proust—no labyrinth of subordinate clauses, nested like Russian dolls. Nothing is hidden, there are no secrets, no hidden depths. The Spanish newspapers used the word sencillo of the Reacher style, “simple,” “easy,” or “plain,” but a word that might be better translated as “degree zero,” thinking of the Roland Barthes book Writing Degree Zero. Barthes contrasts Albert Camus’ The Outsider—stylistically stripped down and minimalist—with the more ornate nineteenth-century novels of Balzac and Flaubert. It’s the difference between Bauhaus and Baroque. Lee Child is like Camus, only with more fighting. Reacher is like Meursault, living in the present, indifferent to marriage, speaking the truth, incapable of hypocrisy, but capable, by the same token, of an enhanced sense of physical well-being. The difference is that if he decides to kill anyone he is not going to allow himself to be caught, arrested, and put on trial.

  The beginning of Killing Floor is an echo of The Outsider: “I was arrested in Eno’s diner.” But the rest of the novel, swerving away from the old Camus narrative, is all about how to avoid getting executed and thereby return, at the end, to some level of existential freedom: “I didn’t want elections and mayors and votes and boards and committees…I wanted the open road and a new place every day. I wanted miles to travel and absolutely no idea where I was going.” Likewise, the author.

  At one point, Lee compared reading a book to driving a car to Barcelona from Madrid: “Do you want a fast, comfortable, exciting ride—or a slow and uncomfortable one?” Like Thomas Hood, he thought that easy reading was hard writing (and that the converse was also true—the more tangled, the more Proustian, the easier it was to write).

  An old friend had asked me, “What genre is Lee Child?” I said I didn’t know.

  “Genre is about retail,” Lee said. “Bookstores want to know what shelf to put the book on. But there are really only two types of book. There is the one that makes you miss your stop on the subway. And then there is the one that doesn’t.”

  It was our last afternoon in Madrid: he was going on to Barcelona, I was shoving off (I had a class to teach). Lee agreed that he liked Camus. “Especially the smoking. They all had cigarettes stuck to their lips in those days. Gauloises probably.” His interpreter, Helena, who used to live in Edinburgh, was pregnant with her first child and had given up smoking. Lee said when his daughter was born even the doctor who was looking after her was a smoker. “I was smoking in the delivery room. Everybody smoked.” Lee had even given a cigarette to President Obama one time, when they happened to be standing around together outside a hotel in New York, and he was on the campaign trail. “He had said he wouldn’t smoke during the campaign—but he really needed one. No smoker ever quits for sure.”

  Reacher used to smoke but doesn’t now. Not for health reasons, but because he doesn’t want to carry stuff.

  Lee still didn’t know what Reacher was supposed to be doing in “Mother’s Rest.” “I’m going to have to smoke a helluva lot of weed when I get back to New York. That’ll help.”

  During that time in Madrid, he must have been interviewed by about twenty different people, men and women, guys with pens and notebooks and TV guys with cameras rolling, heavy, muscular, bearded dudes and pencil-slim scholars in glasses. Skeptics and fans. And one Spanish critic who years before had come up with the nickname “Sherlock Homeless” (which even made it into the movie promotion). I said something vaguely sympathetic after yet one more Tom Cruise–related question. We were sitting in the white-upholstered hotel lounge. “Must be hard, all these interviews.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He looked out of the windows, across the street, at a guy propped up against a wall, sitting on cardboard, with a crumpled hat stuck out in front of him. “Only not quite as hard as being that guy over there.”

  AN OBJECTIVE REPORT CONCERNING THE RELATIVE STANDING OF DR. LEE CHILD AND DR. ANDY MARTIN

  LOCATION: Waterstones on Regent Street, London, just up from Piccadilly Circus.

  Date: 23 October 2014

  Time: The lead investigator entered the bookstore at 3:05 pm.

  Objective: Obtain copies of two books: (1) Lee Child, The Enemy; (2) Andy Martin, Stealing the Wave.

  DURATION:

  (1) It could be said that copies of Mr. Child’s most recent work, Personal, were spotted in less than zero seconds, since they were displayed in the window, in a significant pile. Finding his earlier work, The Enemy, took a little longer, approximately thirty seconds.

  (2) Dr. Martin’s work proved rather more elusive. Having climbed up several flights of stairs in pursuit, the investigator was then sent down into the basement. A prolonged search was conducted, in the end involving two employees. “I am sure I’ve seen it here somewhere,” said one. A phone call was made to an adjacent bookstore. Finally, a copy of said book was retrieved from an unexpected location. “Very sorry, love,” said the employee. “Hope it was worth the wait.” Time: approximately 25 minutes
.

  SUPPLEMENTARY DATA: a few weeks later, shortly before Christmas, the lead investigator attempted to find another copy of Dr. Martin’s work in Heffers, Trinity Street, Cambridge. The bearded, long-haired employee assisting the investigator made several pertinent remarks.

  (a) You want that one? It’s great. Bradshaw versus Foo. Battle of titans.

  (b) He works around here at one of the colleges, I think. Surfer, isn’t he? I heard a rumor he’d shoved off to Hawaii.

  (c) Bugger. I could have sworn I saw it here. Don’t worry, I can order it for you.

  A CHILD IS BORN

  HE HAD STARTED WRITING “Bad Luck and Trouble” (as it was then known—Killing Floor as it would become) in the first person. That way he didn’t have to name his protagonist. His name didn’t come up in the first chapter, while he was being arrested (“I was arrested in Eno’s diner…”). In the second chapter he was “a murdering outsider bastard,” or “this guy,” nothing more, until, finally, having been read his rights and now being interrogated, he is required to reveal his name. “Franklin”—Jim Grant’s first thought—was okay, but he wasn’t totally enamored of it.

  He thought for a day. Paced up and down. Sat and stared out of the window. Smoked a lot. Nothing.

  The next morning, still nothing.

  Then, the supermarket. Grocery shopping. Broke, out of work, watching the pennies. High stress. And as always, a little old lady asking the much taller fellow shopper to grab her a bargain can from the high shelf. And his wife, watching, then offering the kind of black humor she knew was sustaining him.

  “You could be a reacher in a supermarket,” she said. “You know, if this writing gig doesn’t work out.”

  The eureka moment, in the Kendal Asda.

  “My name is Jack Reacher,” he wrote that afternoon. “No middle name. No address.”

  That was it. Reacher. Simple. Perfect.

  There was only one remaining problem. His own name. Jim (or James) Grant was never going to fly. Grant. People didn’t really get it, the first time they heard it, especially over the phone. Brown? Brant? He was forever having to spell it out. And then, was it “Grænt” (like “ant”) or “Gra:nt” (to rhyme with “aren’t”)? “Jim” or “James”? The hero had a name, but now the author needed one too.

  He came up with the answer for that on one of his trips to the U.S. It had started when he was on that train out of New York, going to Westchester to visit his in-laws, before Ruth was born. The guy next to him had started the conversation when he heard Jim’s English accent. He was originally from Texas, it turned out, with a strong drawl. “I have a European car though,” he said, with a degree of pride. He wanted to stress that he was a man of the world as well as a Texan. It was a Renault 5, which was marketed in the U.S. as “Le Car,” to draw attention to its French origin. Its French style was its selling point. Très chic. But the Texan didn’t call it “Le Car”: he called it “Lee Car.” “I just love Lee Car,” he said. The “Lee” word stuck in the Grant household and soon they were saying, “Can you pass lee salt, please?” or “Shall we listen to lee Beatles?” and so on. When they had their daughter, Ruth, pretty soon she was being referred to as “lee baby” and then “lee child.” The “lee” was adopted, but the “child” was really theirs.

  Jim Grant screwed up the title page and threw it in the bin. He wrote it out again:

  BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE

  by

  LEE CHILD

  Again, simple, monosyllabic, strong. And the “C” was a gift. It would be right next to Agatha Christie on the bookshelves. And Raymond Chandler. Ideally placed for Western alphabetical left-to-right browsers. Of course, it could have been “Lee Carr” (or similar), but he liked Child better, because it was also a common noun, and one with positive connotations (for most people).

  And lo, a Child was born.

  His wife was a historian by instinct, currently studying Egyptology, and before that mostly Anglo-Saxon stuff. A lot of her long historical perspective rubbed off on him. It gets into Reacher, but it also inspired one of his earliest pieces of writing. “The Ruin” is one of the oldest extant pieces of Anglo-Saxon writing, a poem written by an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon gazing on the ruin of a colossal Roman villa or pool somewhere in England (possibly Bath). It was like an early “Ozymandias.” What gods or giants could have lived here? the writer wanted to know. It was an elegy, a melancholy evocation of lost splendor and old warriors. But there was a stanza missing, as a result of the manuscript being burned at the edge. Lee took on the challenge of writing the missing stanza. He had no difficulty identifying with an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon conjuring up lost gods and heroes.

  Reacher is like that too—a remnant of the lost warriors of yore. More myth than modern man. Walking amid ruins. Or a desert: “a bone-dry gulch scraped out a million years ago by a different climate, when there had been rain and ferns and rushing rivers” (Echo Burning, first paragraph).

  “They had no clear timeline back then,” Lee said. “They had no idea how many centuries had gone by. Everything was ‘a hundred generations’ before. It was all myth and legend. Do you know why there are so many ‘Devil’s Bridges’?”

  “Are there a lot of them?” I said.

  “They’re all over England,” he said. There was one back in Kirkby Lonsdale, for example, where he had once lived. “It was because they would build a great stone bridge—and then time would go by and within a generation or two they had forgotten who had built it and even how it was built. So it became the devil’s bridge, conjured up by some satanic architect of old.”

  They had not one but two farmhouses in England, one next door to the other. A small farmhouse empire. The second one was the equivalent of Lee’s shed at the bottom of the garden—it was where he went to work. There were box-loads of his old stuff kicking about. Over the door to one of the rooms upstairs Lee had stuck up a sign he’d swiped from Granada Television way back:

  CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM 2

  He liked the idea of control. That was his old job: “controller.” Like a flight control sort of guy who “had to juggle around lots of different programs and slot them all together. In the right order. Or there was chaos. It was all about the timing.”

  As I was leaving, I peeked through the window of the garage. There was an old Bentley, a green one, the size of a small ship, with a big letter “B” on the hood, just like the one Reacher drives in Killing Floor (having borrowed it from Hubble, the banker). And there was another car, a Range Rover. It had a distinctive license plate:

  LI KAR

  THE STORY OF THE BLIND WOMAN

  SHE HAD BIG BROWN EYES. Blond hair. She came right up to me. Nuzzled me. I was just sitting there, in Long Beach. And then she licked my hand. Her name was Eden and she was a golden Labrador. A guide dog to a woman named Terry.

  “Do you have kibble in your pocket?” said Terry.

  “I wanted to go up and stroke her. I think maybe she read my mind.”

  “She doesn’t normally do that.”

  “Excuse me for asking—but I assume you are visually impaired.” Her eyes were bright but dreamily unfocused.

  “I’m a blind woman,” she said. “But I can make out a few things. Big buildings and such. It makes life interesting.” She laughed, shaking her head, her wavy red hair flying around.

  Terry had read all the Reachers, it turned out. Except she hadn’t actually read them. More listened to them on audio. She didn’t like braille much. “It’s only six dots. But the books are hundreds of pages long—they are huge. And it’s hard as Chinese to learn.” She could read enough braille to work out public bathrooms and the different floors in elevators.

  She came at it late. Her eyesight only started deteriorating when she set out on a career in librarianship. “That’s pretty ironic, I guess. Maybe it was all the reading that killed my eyes, I don’t know.”

  She could still read a little, on a very big screen with the magnification ramped up to the ma
x. But still audio was easier. And the Reacher novels worked well on audio. “I can keep track of what Reacher is doing. He’s easy to follow.”

  There was only one problem as far as she was concerned. “They sure as hell picked the wrong guy to play Reacher.”

  “You don’t like him?” I was taken aback. I had thought for once I was going to have a conversation about Jack Reacher that didn’t automatically rustle up the name of Tom Cruise. I had done nothing to prompt her. It was just something she had to get off her chest. Maybe it was the proximity of Hollywood, just a few miles away to the north, that inspired her to think along these lines.

  “He’s so obviously the wrong guy!”

  She spoke in an exclamatory way. Emphatic. Confident. Not unlike Lee Child himself, but with a Southern accent, even though she lived just a few miles away in Fountain Valley, inland from Huntington Beach, to the south of Long Beach. She said “dawg” rather than “dog,” for example.

  I couldn’t just let it go. For once I thought Cruise would at least get the benefit of the doubt. Logically, if you can’t see him, you can’t object to him. But no. “Surely you, a blind woman, should be more forgiving of Tom Cruise? Does it make all that much difference to you who is playing the part of Reacher?”

  “Tom Cruise,” she said, “is not how I PICTURE Reacher. See” (she said “see” quite often), “Reacher has got to make you shit your pants when he walks in the room. He is intimidating. Tom Cruise isn’t like that at all. I can remember what he looks like. He’s too good-looking. Gotta be rougher as well as tougher.”

  “Isn’t it more important to you what he sounds like? He sounds pretty tough, doesn’t he?”

  “Nope. He sounds like a little guy!” And she added, just to emphasize the point, “Even my dawg knows that!” I’m not sure if Eden the dog was actually at the showing of the film or if she just somehow knew that anyhow. Or if that was just extra abuse on top, like marmalade.