by Andy Martin
Not all films were geared for audio commentary, as she explained to me. Apparently there is a conflict in the industry or the government over copyright. And of course not all books were available on audio. She said most of the Reacher books were. I mentioned to her how Jorge Luis Borges had a young Japanese woman reading books to him after he became blind. “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get the authors to come and read to me?” she said.
I promised to go and read my book to her in Fountain Valley after it was done. Even though it wouldn’t be Lee Child as such, but only me talking about Lee Child. “Next best thing,” she said. “And a damn sight better than that Tom Cruise!”
LONG BEACH
LEE CHILD WASN’T THAT EASY to find, even with his considerable height. There were about a hundred or a thousand other writers roaming around in Long Beach (California) too. We were all at Bouchercon—the annual jamboree of thriller and mystery writers from around the world (named after Anthony Boucher, who started the whole thing many moons ago). And their readers. It was a cynegetic paradise, headquarters of the hermeneutic code. Over three days, in November, I must have gone to dozens of panels, discussing “Belfast Noir,” “Jewish Noir,” “Murder Ancient and Modern,” “Tall Men Telling Tall Tales,” “Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane,” “From Page to Screen,” and “Kick-Ass Women.” I think Eden would have enjoyed the one on “Cadaver Dogs.” I listened to Jeffery Deaver (lifetime achievement award) and Michael Connelly (author of the Harry Bosch series, set in L.A.) and Eoin Colfer (“Where do your ideas come from?” asked someone; Colfer: “My audience is mostly nine-year-olds—I normally get asked whether I like snowmen”).
I was weighed down with free books, given to me in a bag sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America. Titles included The Catch, Dreaming Spies, A Dark Redemption, and The Deception at Lyme. I went to an “Author Speed-Dating Breakfast,” sponsored by Smith & Wesson, where a different couple of authors would spin up to your table every minute or so, in between mouthfuls of cereal, and deliver a rapid-fire pitch and hit you with leaflets and bookmarks and occasional trailers. Cindy Sample offered a series with titles like “Dying for a Dude” and “Dying for a Dance.” There had to be Dying for and a D. Someone suggested “Dying for a Donut.” Another woman was carrying a shoe in one hand, something to do with getting stabbed on a dance floor. Mike Befeler, who wore a straw boater for several days (the ribbon advertised one of his books), had written some stand-alone paranormals and vampire novels, but was a specialist in “geezer lit.” His senior citizen ’tec, who lives in a retirement home, struggles with short-term memory loss and keeps forgetting vital clues. “Maybe I should do one about an aging vampire,” he said.
I liked the sound of Horizon Drive, written by a Japanese American brother-and-sister team, who had adopted the joint moniker of J. M. Zen, and handed out an origami bird emblazoned with a review extract (“compelling noir entertainment with a sharp edge of modern relevance”). Kathy Bennett, a retired LAPD cop, and author of the Maddie Divine series, had tried to write a “romantic suspense,” but she kept postponing the romance because “I’ve gotta get the killing right!” Before I’d even gotten to my second cup of coffee, I had heard about a wave of surfing psychos, Dead Heat, set in San Antonio, the real Miami (a hardboiled-hitman-with-heart story), and someone who was a mix of Clive Cussler and Scooby-Doo. And an author of a casino plot had given me a handful of $250 chips (chocolate ones).
One line sticks in my mind, I just can’t remember the book or the author: “Two gravediggers walk into a police headquarters—then it gets weird.”
Margaret was sitting next to me. She had already piled up thirty-something free books. “That’s nothing,” she said—her record was 147 freebies at Comic-Con in San Diego. She might have passed for a rather serious and mature grad student, with her hair in a bun and her studious glasses, except that she was also wearing what appeared to be a tiara of rainbow-colored plastic flowers. “If I never read another FBI-profiler I’ll be happy,” she said. She was a member of the Goat Hill Literary Society, worked in the Newport bookstore, and basically read everything. Except romance. “I love Reacher,” she said. “There aren’t many series that are still as enthralling on the twentieth as on the first.” She asked me if I remembered what Michael Caine had said about the making of Jaws 4 (about a shark looking for revenge). I said I didn’t. “He said he couldn’t remember much about it, but he liked the house he bought with it.”
Another morning I witnessed “65 Men of Mystery,” all lined up as if in a Miss World contest (only with a lot less hair). They didn’t seem that mysterious. None of them was Lee Child. Lee didn’t appear at a single panel or breakfast or awards ceremony. He really was mysterious. Long Beach reminded me of a line of Bertrand Russell’s. Russell once asked how anyone could know that Sir Walter Scott was the author of Waverley (this was the “problem of denotation”). He reckoned that in order to demonstrate that Sir Walter Scott was the author of Waverley you would have to survey the universe and show that everyone in it either was Sir Walter Scott or was not the author of Waverley. Long Beach was my shorthand way of surveying the universe. Everyone else in it was not Lee Child.
Effortless, languid, Lee glided around the Hyatt Regency, surrounded by an entourage of attractive women, occasionally manifesting himself to sign books (long queues). He put me in mind of Ted Hughes, then Poet Laureate, in the days when I published with Faber & Faber: he was the star, treated like royalty, while everyone else was doffing the cap. In Long Beach Lee was the grand seigneur, the lord of all he surveyed, the leader of the pack. King of the underdogs. He was becoming the stuff of fiction. One writer had invented a character going under Lee’s original name, Jim Grant: “a rogue Yorkshire cop at large in America where culture clash and violence ensue.”
Since I was effectively stalking or maybe staking out Lee Child, it was useful that I got surveillance training, given by an ex-DEA guy called Mike with a droopy Mexican mustache. He taught us the “ABC method.” Which sounds simple enough. Only it wasn’t. Wandering the streets of Long Beach, I encountered a blonde; a woman in a trilby hat; a guy with tattoos up his arms and a sleeveless vest which showed them off; a woman with a limp; a fat guy in shorts; a Starbucks; a park; a bench. Maybe it was jet lag, but I had no idea what was going on, nor did they.
Another time, sharing a ride, I overheard a conversation between a couple of guys in the back of the cab that went something like this:
“He writes so well.”
“I loved the Scudder books.”
“Do you know Soho Press?”
“But he has such a sad life. Both his daughter and grandson offed themselves.”
“He wasn’t doing too well so he had to write some sex books.”
“Reacher? He’s the hero, right?”
“I don’t know his stuff very well but I hear he’s very good at conventions.”
“He’s like Harlan Coben, but in Minnesota.”
“Kaminsky was with them for a number of years.”
“When he was dying he needed a transplant.”
“He wrote so much you can’t read it all.”
“I teach this class in Bethesda. There was this kid, had a novel—he’d had a few stories published—couldn’t get it out there. I got him to send it to my editor. And she wouldn’t have it either. They’ve cut their list by a third.”
“I read all the Sara Paretskys.”
“Harlan Ellison has a background too.”
“You know, whatever brings you the money.”
“Were you at the St. Louis convention? It’s basically awards and a buffet, but there is camaraderie.”
“I’m not big on dinners.”
“Didn’t he do one of the Bond books?”
One woman I spoke to said she only ever read the first thirty pages of a book and the last thirty and skipped the middle entirely. Sometimes Long Beach felt like being somewhere in a dark intermediate incomprehensible labyrinth, a noir literary unde
rworld, desperately looking for the clue that would make sense of it all. For me it was not a whodunit (they all dun it), more a whydoit?
Having bumped into Vicki Doudera at a stoplight on my first day, I bought a copy of Deal Killer, involving her real estate agent/amateur sleuth heroine, Darby Farr (“medium-boiled”). She bought me a pizza in return. And she took me along to an interview with a writer she called “the bitch with the laugh.” It was a fair description. She (the other writer) had actually met a real-life serial killer and carried a loaded weapon just in case. I also went along to the “Cute and Sweet, but with a Twist” panel, since Vicki was speaking. I had a soft spot for her because (a) she occasionally went under the name of “Martin” on account of Doudera being too weird; (b) she spoke French and had studied at the Sorbonne; (c) her hair was a similar color to Eden’s; (d) when she asked her middle son if he would like a copy of her latest book, he replied, “Mom, I only read serious literature” (he was into Dostoyevsky); (e) she was planning to write a book about chickens.
I introduced her to Lee. “Darby Farr, meet Jack Reacher,” I said. Lee had just finished signing a hundred books. I was wearing my “Hard-Boiled” badge, picked up at the speed-dating breakfast.
“You’ve heard what he’s doing?” said Lee.
“Looking over your shoulder while you write?” Vicki said. She was polite but skeptical. “Isn’t it just a little like watching paint dry?”
“It depends on the painter, surely,” I said. “In this case it’s ‘Hey, Leonardo, love the smile,’ that sort of thing.”
“This is what he does,” said Lee. “Bullshitting—he’s quite good at it.”
“ ’Course it won’t be as good as one of yours,” I said.
Lee guffawed. “Impossible!”
“It has to be better.”
“Ridiculous!”
“They are already eating it up in Stockholm.”
For once I wasn’t bullshitting. I had just given a paper at the Stockholm Business School (entitled “Lee Child and the Making of His Next Bestseller”). “They say every author is going to want one of these from now on. No book without a meta-book to go with it. The boxed set.”
Turned out Lee and Vicki had a lot in common. She had actually sold a house in Maine to the guy who was producing the Reacher movies (she, like Darby Farr, was a real estate agent in her spare time).
“I’ve been goofing off,” said Lee. “A lot.” We had gone to the fairly swanky Tides restaurant by the pool to have lunch. Fans would keep coming up to him or waving as they went by. In the distance you could see the Queen Mary, in its final resting place. “Working this month would have needed a heroic effort. And I haven’t been feeling all that heroic.” Mother’s Rest had come to a complete halt.
But still he had gotten Reacher into the motel—and out of it again. Reacher takes a room. The motel guy makes a call. “She met a guy off the train.” So Reacher is labeled one of “them,” even though we don’t know who “they” are at this point. Even though he is poking around town in all innocence, looking for the origin of the name “Mother’s Rest.” In the latest development, the motel guy’s grandson is shadowing him. Reads too much into his random movements. “They think he knows much more than he actually does,” Lee said. “In fact he knows nothing. He doesn’t have a clue what is going on. Doesn’t even know anything is going on.” The woman—who may be a detective of some kind—knows there is something going on, and is still expecting to find Keever somewhere, but even she doesn’t really know either. So there is a haziness. Keever knew, presumably, but Keever is dead. “We don’t want to know too much too soon,” said Lee. The blankness of the landscape—the “nothingness”—is a metaphor of the information deficit. Lee liked it that way. He wanted the slow build. “You want it to feel fast but you have to write it slow.”
But it also reflected the fact that he didn’t know what was going on either. “I’m still waiting for illumination,” he said. “It’ll come.” Beyond trying to work out the plot, which at that moment did not exist, there was one other big problem looming. The title.
“They don’t like it,” he said.
I thought that was about the craziest thing I had heard all the time I was in Long Beach, right up there with a headline somebody quoted, “ELECTRIC CHAIR DEEMED DANGEROUS.” “Who is they exactly?”
“The organization.”
“What’s their problem?”
“They think Make Me will only appeal to guys.”
I remembered something he had said to me way back. “I have no title and no plot.” Sounded as if he was right back to square one. He was due to have a title showdown lunch when he got back to New York.
Another time I bumped into him outside the hotel, sitting on a bench, having a fag. As usual. “I’m going for total cardiac catastrophe,” he said. “I don’t want any resuscitating.” Turned out he had had a major bout of rheumatic fever around the age of seven—spending four weeks in hospital—and his heart valves and ventricles were all messed up. The episode had had a massive impact on his attitude. Up until that point he had considered himself immortal, like any normal kid. But afterwards, nobody expected him to live much beyond fourteen. Then it was twenty-one. His mother (“hypochondriac, touch of Munchausen’s by proxy”) used to really rub it in. “I had the clear idea that life was temporary. I’m impatient about waiting for stuff. I’m also irresponsible, because I think I’m doomed anyway, so what the hell.”
He became fatalistic, but at the same time incurably optimistic. “I never really worry about what will happen next year or further down the road.” He took another drag on his Camel. “Presumably I’ll come unstuck sooner or later.”
It was that time we were having breakfast back in Tides (he had bacon and eggs and pancakes; I had oatmeal and banana) that he explained what he was doing at Bouchercon. Other than nothing, that is. And goofing off. “I love this place. It gives me a much-needed boot up the backside. And a new burst of energy. With all the talent here all working away and producing good stuff, I’ve really got to keep on rolling and do my thing.”
As he spread maple syrup over his pancakes, he reminisced about the Bouchercon that took place shortly after 9/11. In Washington, D.C. Bethesda. The hero of the event was S. J. Rozan, a small but tough woman from the Bronx, who went on to write what Lee thought of as the best 9/11 book, Absent Friends. Lee, meanwhile, was reeling with a personal crisis. The twin towers were destroyed in September. The Yankees were competing in the World Series in October, only seven weeks later, against an Arizona team, the Diamondbacks. “The Yankees had to win,” he said. “Every fiber of my being told me that it just had to be that way. It would be a consolation. A reaffirmation of life after all the death and disaster.” The reality was they lost, three games to four. “The narrative failed for me. It didn’t happen.” Lee had effectively become a New Yorker, having lived there or thereabouts since the 90s. He was about an hour out of town, having only recently finished Without Fail (the one about assassinating the vice president), when the planes hit the World Trade Center. But in some odd way, the Yankees losing had more of an impact on him than 9/11 itself.
He more or less expected 9/11. It was the ultimate noir narrative sprung to life. An al Qaeda plot to destroy New York—what else do you expect? It was predictable, it was inevitable. New York in ruins. Of course. Isn’t it always? And then the Yankees have the opportunity to restore the morale of the city. But…they blow it. “It was a crisis for me,” Lee said. “I realized I’d spent my entire life coming up with happy endings. But it didn’t really work like that. Not in New York, anyway.”
Without Fail was published in May 2002 (while he was rolling on with the next one, Persuader). Reacher saves the VP. The plot gets turned on its head a couple of times, but ultimately there is no failure. It is without fail. Lee—and by extension everybody else at Bouchercon, all the men of mystery and the real estate sleuths of the world—were offering to fix things up, to compensate and console. “Ev
erything is doomed to failure,” as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote. Everything would fall apart; it was the second law of thermodynamics; it was entropy. The novel was a species of negentropy, a practically pointless protest against the fate of the universe. Fiction rectified the world in accordance with metaphysics. For one thing, a story, if it was good enough, would live on, even when we had long since turned back into cosmic dust. It would live so long as it had readers.
The noir writers of the world were its angels, its saviors and redeemers. Or they wanted to be. But they knew what it was like to fail. Technically, all their works were failed performatives. The performative is a statement that does what it says and makes something real: for example, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” That was a performative, delivered by a vicar. “I do,” another performative, uttered by the bride or groom. So too, delivered by a king or queen (or captain of industry?): “I name this ship Queen Mary. May God bless her and all who sail in her.” I name this man Jack Reacher had to be seen as a good try, but in the last analysis a failed (or “infelicitous”) performative. It took the form of a prayer or a promise. Reacher wouldn’t be coming to rescue and redeem anybody. But maybe somebody would. Maybe Reacher would inspire someone else to make good on the Reacher promise. Tom Cruise maybe.
UNDERWORLD
ROB, ONE OF LEE CHILD’S LEGION of readers (and one who had emailed him), had once seen a fellow passenger on a London Underground train reading a book. The guy was sitting opposite him. The book—Rob could clearly make out the title on the jacket—was Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a massive, sprawling complex novel spanning several decades, with a lot of critical heft to it. Definitely a serious book. A literary work.
The next day Rob was back on the train, heading off to work again, around the same time, and by chance the same guy was on the train too, still reading his book. But this time Rob had taken the only remaining seat on the car, right next to the guy reading the Don DeLillo book. Except it wasn’t Underworld at all.