by Andy Martin
Inside the Don DeLillo cover—as Rob could plainly see when he peeked over—was 61 Hours. Rob recognized it because he had been reading it himself only shortly before. So the guy was reading Lee Child and wrapping it up in a Don DeLillo cover.
Lee was undercover. Which I thought he ought to feel pretty pleased with—but he wasn’t, not really. He wanted to redeem the world but he stood in need of redemption himself. Even with the chauffeured car and the Brooks Brothers jacket, he remained an outsider, beyond the reach of respectability. Like an outlaw, a ronin, a surfer. Like Jack Reacher, in fact, wandering the world without a suitcase.
THE STONY LIMIT
THIS WAS THE TRIP WHEN just about everything went wrong. Catastrophically. Beginning with the airport. In fact even before the airport because Joel thought I was supposed to be arriving the day before. Which obviously I wasn’t. He assumed I was lying mugged and bleeding and left for dead somewhere in darkest Queens. Instead of which I ended up dead in Manhattan.
It all started with the bag. I carry this backpack straight onto planes and straight off again. No luggage in the hold. I take practically nothing. (I even forgot underwear and had to go and buy some from a bargain basement store around 33rd Street. Pure Reacher.) So the woman at the Norwegian desk at Gatwick says to me, “Seven kilos.” And then added, “To New York.” There could have been a question mark in there somewhere.
“Is that heavy or light, to your way of thinking?”
“Oh, that is light,” she said. “Very light. For New York.”
“That’s good, right?”
I mean, they’re always having a go at people with these giant overstuffed cases and they have to throw out their favorite socks and teddy bears and whatnot. You’d think they’d be grateful for the light guys. But no.
“Excuse me, sir, can I have a look at that?”
It was polite, but there was no please. I hate the “sir” routine anyway. This was a guy, sticking his oar in, suddenly. Backup. Popped up out of nowhere. Had been keeping an eye on me apparently. American. Suit of indeterminate color. But buttoned. And he had an earphone. Everything but the shades.
He was asking to see my old passport. The one with the visa. The thing is, I have this great visa, given to me by some surfer dude who happened to be working at the American embassy in London the day I went in, back in 2006. But it’s nothing but trouble because immigration guys can’t believe I have such a visa, which in theory entitles me to do anything I like, but in practice looks suspicious. I have to swear that I lead a life of pure pleasure and never do any work, ever.
So he hit me with a barrage of questions. What are you doing in New York? How long are you there for? Where are you staying? That sort of stuff. And we’re still at Gatwick.
“What is the problem?” I say, starting to lose it slightly.
“At the moment I have you down for working illegally in the United States.”
I was about to say, “You have got to be kidding me, man!” Except I didn’t want to sound too much like John McEnroe right then and there. “I notice you’re using the participle form,” says I. “But this is not the present tense. I used to work in the U.S. Past tense. Imperfect. But that was years ago. Anyway, how can I be working if no one is paying me?”
I thought that was a clincher. “I need to make some calls, sir. Wait here.”
He makes a ton of calls. I’m just standing there. Finally he comes back. Seems I checked out okay. He has a smile on his face, just a little bit. And a sort of twinkle in his eye. “I understand, sir. So you have this thing going on, do you, with a party in New York?”
“Just old friends,” I said. But I was thinking—does he know about Lee? Maybe I should have opened up to him and he would have understood. It still wasn’t “working” exactly. What I didn’t realize is that the honeymoon was over. Divorce was imminent.
—
“A major fucking existential crisis has blown up,” said Lee, opening the door of his apartment. “While you were in the air. Or I would have warned you.”
He sat me down, almost solicitously, and brought me coffee too. Black. He was wearing a black leather jacket, unzipped, some grungy old T-shirt, and blue jeans.
“They were on the phone to me yesterday. It’s brand management,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I understand it. You have to understand it too.”
“What are they panicking about?”
“Your work.” They had read a few chapters, apparently. “They think I should stop talking to you. They’re using the word toxic.”
“That’s interesting,” I said.
“Interesting! That is so academic.” I almost wrote, “he spluttered.” Truthfully, it was more that he had stood up and was stomping around throwing his hands in the air. There was no actual spittle. “This is the end of the world and you say it’s interesting?” He lit another cigarette and stared out of the window in the general direction of Strawberry Fields. “They’ve had some bad experiences recently. Wounding. They are hurt and bleeding.” He mentioned a couple of authors who were in his exalted bracket. Right at the top of the tree. And they had been virtually assassinated by social media. One tiny little unscripted remark to an interviewer and wham! The trolls were descending on you in their droves. And in a matter of minutes it’s oh my God it turns out that X is some kind of monster after all and it’s all over the Mail online too (or the New York Post or whatever). Then it’s apologies all round. White flag. We surrender.
“They are running scared,” he said. “They really fear social media. They are worried that the stuff you are writing is going to be picked up and turned into a thousand different ways of destroying me.”
“That would be bad,” I said.
“I wanted warts and all,” he said. “And they want to shut it down. You can see why, can’t you?”
“They want control.”
“And at the moment they don’t have control.”
“Napoleon felt the same way. Nous verrons! he said. But you know, nobody has control. Anybody can say anything.”
“And you’re giving them the ammunition. The business is shrinking to a handful of brands. I’m one of them. So they have to be protective. I mean, I can see their point. They’ve worked hard for twenty years. A lot of effort and money. They don’t want a wild card to come along and screw it up now.”
Lee has this problem with his legs. They are too long for most practical purposes. He doesn’t really know what to do with them, like most people don’t know what to do with their hands. He was wriggling around on the sofa (having sat down again), trying to get them out of the way somewhere, tucking them under or folding them up at the knees. There is a cartoon of the very tall General de Gaulle where the cartoonist has chopped him in two around the waist and stuck the legs next to him in a separate panel. Lee reminded me a lot of General de Gaulle right then.
“It’s apocalyptic is what it is,” he said. “It’s all going down the toilet.”
“How’s the work going by the way?”
“I’ve just written this four-word sentence. I’m pretty pleased with it. Nobody will even notice it.”
“I need to have a look at that.”
“See, now I want to say, it’s a bit like Shakespeare in that line of his. Not blank verse of course. But if I say that then you’re going to quote me and social media is going to start up, ‘LEE CHILD THINKS HE IS SHAKESPEARE. #PretentiousGit.’ Not good.”
“But obviously you are Shakespeare, in a way,” I said. He gave me a bit of a look. Skeptical. “So am I,” I added. “There is a continuum. Every writer is Shakespeare at some level. Just as Borges is Dante. It’s the ‘spirit of literature.’ ”
“You want to know the thing that kills me about this whole who-wrote-Shakespeare drivel—it’s a class thing. He couldn’t possibly have written Hamlet because he’s just a grammar school boy from the Midlands. Like me.”
“It has to be some dude from Oxford, right.”
“And an earl at that.
”
“The class struggle in literature.”
“He was from exactly the same sort of school I went to. It was set up around the time of Shakespeare. Probably hasn’t changed all that much.”
“What was that line you were thinking of?”
Lee has this great memory. Obviously he remembers the names of the two sisters he deflowered decades ago, anyone would. But he can even remember what day of the week it was. It’s some kind of weird memory syndrome with him. The opposite of amnesia. And he is also good at recalling poetry and theater. Could probably recite all of Waiting for Godot. “It’s in Romeo and Juliet. The balcony scene, I think. Act two, scene one. How the hell did Romeo get over the orchard walls? But Shakespeare doesn’t call them walls. He writes, ‘the stony limits.’ It’s staggering that he would write that.”
It was the Lee of old. Ranting on about Shakespeare, summoning up obscure lines of poetry. But, at the same time, it was like The End. This was the final chapter being written right there. The Shakespeare stuff was some kind of sign-off line. Tragedy. It all ends in tears. He wasn’t even supposed to be talking to me. They had told him not to. Or else. We had bumped up against the stony limit. I knocked back the coffee and stood up and looked out the window. He was still wrestling with the sofa. There was an icy blue sky over Central Park.
“I’d better have a look at it,” he said. “If they can see it, I can see it.”
“I didn’t want it to mess with your mind. Not, I mean, that your mind necessarily would be messed with, but, you know, the observer always changes the thing he is observing. Which would be you. I don’t want you to get all self-conscious on me. You’re okay the way you are. Nobody should be trying to sanitize you. Who is going to believe that stupid stuff?”
“Here, shove it on this memory stick. I’ve got to see for myself how ‘toxic’ this thing really is.”
“I guess you can just shut it all out. If you can shut out everybody bitching about you on Amazon, then you can shut this out.”
Just to be fair: not everybody is bitching about Lee on Amazon. But he got the point—they were a whole lot worse than anything I could come up with.
I went back to the apartment the following day. Not too early. His mood doesn’t really pick up till after the sixth cup of coffee. Around 10:30 or 11. “You fancy a walk over Central Park?” I said. It was freezing but sunny. I still had all my gear on, the flying jacket and the hat and the scarf, the works. December in Manhattan.
“Nah,” he said. “Soccer’s on.”
We went off to some room with a big screen. The sofa was bloody huge too. Too big for my legs really. I had to stick some cushions behind my back to even get my feet on the floor. General de Gaulle had his legs stretched out in front of him on a dedicated leg rest, a bench of sorts. Like the sofa had a separate mini-sofa in front of it just for his lower half. It was a kind of solution.
We were watching Chelsea versus Hull in the English Premiership. Every now and then we’d get the scores flash up of West Ham (my team) or Aston Villa (his). We were talking about some of the great names players had. I thought Mertesacker for Arsenal was pretty good. Intimidating defensive player. German.
“Ever hear of Beenhakker?” said Lee.
“Nope.”
“Coach now. Or manager. But his name means something like ‘Leg-biter’ in Dutch. Or ‘Butcher.’ I always thought that was a great name for a soccer player.” A very brief pause. “Did you know ‘poppycock’ is Dutch?”
“Really.”
“One of the very few Dutch words to make it into English. Pappekak. Means something like ‘soft shit.’ Hence, bullshit.” A beat. “So thinking about your book…” He’d read a few chapters overnight.
“Toxicity? On a scale of one to ten?”
“I sort of see what they are getting at. You’re going to have to cut that bit about [x]. And there’s that line about [y]. That is obviously illegal. Or impolitic. Or something. Is that against your ethics?”
“I don’t really have ethics. I have aesthetics.”
“But can you cut one or two of those things?”
“So long as the whole thing isn’t bent completely out of shape.”
“The whole thing is just fine,” he said.
“It was only a first draft. Your guys rushed me. We can make it a little more…economical. Slim, trim, tailor. So long as we don’t have to prettify.”
Lee really didn’t mind the project. “You’ve got the voice. And it definitely had me going. All that postponement. Is he ever going to start?”
Chelsea scored some stylish killer goal. Hull were goners.
“Is he ever going to finish?” I said.
“Yeah, all that. That’s exactly how it feels. The anxiety. It’s a suspense story. I get that.”
Now Arsenal was slaughtering Newcastle. “You know what I’m going to do?” Lee said. “Tell them to fuck off. What’s the point otherwise?”
I felt a little as Stendhal must have done, standing next to Napoleon (he was his catering manager or something like that), and listening to him issuing orders to the troops. Not in himself powerful, but adjacent to power. It was a buzz, I admit.
“Well, you know, I’ll probably put it a bit more diplomatically than that. Let’s think this through or something.”
I was putting my hat and coat back on by the front door. I was finally going for that walk across Central Park. “Hey, you know that title argument?”
“What?”
“They didn’t like Make Me. Wanted you to change it.”
“Oh yeah, they just didn’t get it. It’s a great title. I tried explaining to them. Went and had lunch and said, ‘Let’s think this through.’ ”
“Like trying to explain a joke. Still nobody laughs.”
“Here’s one thing they ought to know. A fact in my defense. Since Edward Heath in 1970 I have correctly predicted the outcome of every single election. On both sides of the Atlantic. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“You should be running the next Democratic electoral campaign?”
“I know what people want. What they are thinking and feeling. How they are going to react. Because I am one of them. I am people. They ought to trust me more. Instead of all this pointless pathetic pettifogging.” Pause. “Is that a verb or a noun?”
“Gerund,” I said. “It’s probably Dutch. Like poppycock.”
“I sort of see their point,” he said philosophically. “It’s like the cover, it’s all marketing. But I can’t back out of the title now. Too late. I’ve committed to it in my head.”
“You can’t back out anyway. You said, ‘This is not the first draft—it’s THE ONLY DRAFT.’ Nobody messes with…”
Pause.
“You really are fucking toxic, you know that?”
—
I was in some bar in Brooklyn later that night. Really small and really crowded. With some visceral rhythm throbbing in the background. Drinking Beyond the Pale Ale from the bottle. I was giving Steve Fishman the rough gist, half distorted by ambient noise. “Wow,” he says. “Your ass was actually saved by Jack Reacher. That is something.”
NO X, NO Y
IN THE MIDST OF all this drama, Lee was quietly plugging away, rolling his stone up the hill. He had finally stopped goofing off and was now well into his stride. Mid-December, three and a half months in. Chapter 16.
“I’m really enjoying it too,” he said. “It’s pure pleasure.” So long, that is, as he stopped at around a thousand words a day. He didn’t want to feel pressured into doing the second thousand, just because of the schedule. He had to shut out all the reasons to speed up. It’s coming out in September; you have to finish by March; we need more, more, more.
I admit: those reasons were partly my fault. I had spoken on the phone to his editor in London. “How is he getting on?” she asked. A definite note of anxiety. “Is he making progress?” She was already panicking. “The last time I saw him,” I said, “he was goofing off in Calif
ornia. Said he was still waiting for some kind of light to go on.” “I’m calling him right now,” she shrieked.
Now time had rolled on. I would have to answer, in all fairness: Yes, he really is making progress. But I really wanted to know about the four words. I liked the idea that it was four. Like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Sign of Four. $400. Four—as the omniscient narrator points out in Make Me—is “a number of moderate technical interest, and most famous for being the only number in the entire universe that matched the number of letters in its own word in English.” Also, it was like the opposite of Proust, whose sentences don’t really get started until around the four-hundred-word mark. Lee Child, the anti-Proust. At the top end of the spectrum, I had recently been reading (partly for the sake of counterpoint and in a spirit of scientific inquiry) Mathias Énard’s Zone: more than five hundred stream-of-consciousness pages, only one sentence (with a lot of commas). A 150,000-word sentence (approx.). In the case of the four-word sentence, the funny thing was, it was really more like three words, or maybe just one, repeated again and again.
Lee gave me context first. We were sitting in his office. “Reacher and this woman detective go back to Kansas City—to Keever’s house. In search of information.”
“Hold on. What is her name?”
“Stashower.”
“Stashower. Great name.”
Lee had taken the name from an author at Bouchercon: touting around his latest work of nonfiction, The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War. He’d known him well before that though, thought it was a great name, had intended to use it before but got sidetracked.
“Anyway. There is a poignancy to it. This [Keever] is a guy who has broken up with his wife. His kids haven’t visited—yet. Now they never will. Reacher and Stashower arrive at his house. They’re at the front. It’s daylight. The practical issue—how to break into a house in broad daylight? I had to have verisimilitude in mind. So I described the street. Here it is: