by Andy Martin
Reacher was doing what Lee Child was doing, trying to stitch disparate fragments together. But, having in mind that since the author was also all of the evil geniuses he had ever summoned up out of the darkness, perhaps it was not so surprising that one of the key themes of the book is the clandestine “deep web”—and all its connections that are invisible to the average search engine. If you want to find out what they are, you just need to build a better search engine, i.e., Reacher.
* * *
* We both listened to the song later. Gene Pitney, “24 Hours from Tulsa.” This is what Lee wrote to me: “…notice how it’s a very plain told story, all telling not showing, but genuinely suspenseful—and atmospheric. See what plain can do?”
QUOTH HE
I KNOW, it looks like slow progress here.
From here to here.
But, look, you can’t just write: AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. There is a subtle, seemingly self-determined momentum towards a new direction. In a naturalistic way.
You know what you said about the black hole. It’s like they’re circling a drain. The plughole. Mother’s Rest itself is inert. It’s at rest. We know they’re going back. They’re going to be sucked down it.
I’m building up to the home invasion. That’ll be two whole days’ work.
Without wanting to overshadow anything in the fourth movement.
We’ve got Reacher and Stashower in the house. They’re talking to Lydia. She’s interrupted. She comes back. Then we cut to the bad guys. The determination to nail Reacher and Stashower before it’s too late. And the sister, of course, who knows too much. While they have them all in their sights. “They could be talking right now.” Then we go back to the talking, precisely, in a nice domestic environment. The cubist thing. The first time we see anything of the bad guys is…their arrival. In the house.
This is going to sound pretentious, but it’s a bit like playing chess. You’re always looking several moves ahead, four or five. You have a feel for what is coming up, and you have to leave a space…into which it can fall.
Reacher has to have a premonition. It’s an observational thing, leading to mental leaps…Now we’re into the first stirrings of his premonition. He asks, “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
It’s an exercise in optimism. You want to use as few words as possible. The optimism is that it will be enough. You can’t go back. But then maybe it’s too few. So you have to. “Dr. Lair…paused a quizzical beat.” Yeah, it needed an adjective there. The optimism is that the meaning will cling to the word. But it doesn’t always. So you have to force it a little. It’s not so much sinister, although that might be in the reader’s mind, it’s just this social situation. Reacher is tentatively trying to prepare for something that could happen. Without wanting to panic everyone. “Do you keep a gun in the house?”
Sometimes it’s frustrating. You have this nice idea—and it will take up only three lines. But you can’t milk it too much. Keep it small.
On the other hand, the fight scene is going to be a monster.
THE OLD CEMETERY
HER NAME WAS CORRENA. She pronounced it with a long “e”: almost like Karina.
“Are you a novelist?” she said. She was sitting on the stool next to me one evening at Think Coffee. I was tapping at my laptop, writing up some notes. “Is that a novel? It looks like one.”
“Nope,” I said, looking up from the screen and swiveling to take her in. “Book about a novel. Not in itself a novel. At least I hope not. It’s supposed to be nonfiction.”
“What is the novel?”
“There’s this writer, Lee Child. I’ve been watching him write his latest book. It’s not out yet. Make Me.”
“Oh my God,” she said, looking at me with a degree of collateral respect. I can imagine Stendhal must occasionally have had, “Wow, you’re working with Napoleon. Mon Dieu, what is that like?” If I recall, he met Napoleon only three times and only once had a two-way conversation, but he must have been tempted to play it up. “Bonaparte? Oh he’s not a bad sort, you know, a bit driven, but really quite sympa when not actually in the midst of battle…” That sort of thing.
She was young (twenty-something), dressed mostly in black, with red lips. The red and the black. A winning combination. So naturally I would say, “Oh yeah, Lee, good friend of mine, nice guy in fact, etc., etc.” Bit of reflected glory.
Bollocks. No way was I succumbing to that sort of bullshit. “I’m just a spectator,” I said. “An academic.” There, that ought to kill any potential enthusiasm or surplus emotion of any kind. Guaranteed buzzkill. “Sort of taking notes while he does the serious writing. So I guess that would make this a meta-novel.”
“I have handled hundreds of his books,” she said.
“You are kidding me!” Now she really got my attention. “You’re a fan?”
“I work in the Cincinnati Public Library.” One of the biggest circulation libraries in the country, maybe the biggest.
“What are you doing in New York?”
I should have offered to get her a drink at this point. Obviously. It was the evening. The bar was open and we were sitting right in front of it, at the counter. I completely forgot to do that. I was impressed by her story. She was here on Spring Break. She was also taking creative writing classes at the University of Cincinnati. Said she found New York inspiring (which I guess is true of Lee too). Not that there was anything wrong with Cincinnati, she said, and she was really fond of her own neighborhood.
“Well, maybe there are a few things wrong with it. Dumb name, for example.”
“Yeah, Cincinnatus. What did an ancient Roman have to do with anything?”
“I much prefer ‘Losantiville’—the earlier name, even if it is a mishmash.”
She wrote poetry but was an aspiring novelist. She knew she had a novel in her, she just didn’t feel she had a big enough idea yet to sustain it. She said she was thinking of trying the coming-of-age novel but was anxious that maybe she hadn’t really come of age yet.
“What do you think of Jack Reacher?”
“I feel bad about it now, sitting next to you and all, but in fact I haven’t actually read any. Yet. Lee Child and James Patterson—we have so many of their books.” There was a kind of weariness in her voice. “People are always wanting them. I swear about half the people who come up to me in the library say, ‘Can you tell me where I can find the Lee Childs?’ Or the Pattersons, whichever. They are the two most popular. So…I don’t know, I didn’t bother.”
“Okay, here is the thing, I’m not in the least evangelical and I don’t want to twist your arm. But you might be inspired by Killing Floor. That’s the first one. Written when he was out of a job. Just a hopeful would-be writer, starting out. Like you.” So far as I could work out, he had no big idea either, maybe just an idea of bigness.
“Really? That sounds great, I definitely want to read it.”
“He has this technique. A way of getting started. Ask a question—and then don’t answer it.”
“Hold on.” She tapped that into her phone.
“And the other thing is: he is nothing like Patterson. Patterson is a franchise. The McDonald’s of writing. Lee Child is a serious writer, with a degree of artistic integrity, like him or like him not.”
The fact was, oddly enough, I had been having dinner with Lee and a woman writer and her husband in some Upper West Side French restaurant (in which the waitress really spoke French and in fact burst into song à la Edith Piaf) only a couple of nights before. When he was not gracefully signing napkins for the people at the neighboring table, Lee was saying he had nothing against what Patterson was doing. “He just figured out that there was this huge demand and he set out to satisfy it. Like a factory. The books come off an assembly line.” Lee, in contrast, had rejected any notion of trying to churn out more than one book a year. And had poured cold water on approaches from the James Bond estate to take over the Bond franchise. Turned them away not once
but twice. Lee had turned down Bond. “You can’t write a modern Bond,” he said. “It’s impossible. You want to know why? It’s because of Bond. Bond changed everything and now you can’t go back and write Bond again. Plus, they don’t pay you enough. They take half. It’s pitiful.”
When I relayed all this to Correna from Cincinnati I skipped the bit about not getting paid enough. “Lee exists and he writes his own books. I can testify to that much. He doesn’t have anyone to help him. And he eats garbage while he’s working at full tilt.” The end of the third movement. The Sugar Smacks phase.
She was impressed by this last detail in particular. He wasn’t looking after himself. Like a true artist. “He has some kind of death wish,” I added for good measure. “And he’s tormented, even though successful. Unhappy childhood probably. Lack of self-esteem on account of bad parenting.”
“Now I really want to read Killing Floor,” she said. She wasn’t a full-on Goth, so far as I could work out. No spiderweb tattoos and whatnot. But she respected the death wish anyway.
“If we have three ‘holds,’ ” she told me, “then we have to order one copy of the book. For Lee Child there are always hundreds of holds. So we buy a lot, believe me.” But she had realized now that, at least where Lee was concerned, it wasn’t all about the quantity.
She dropped me a line when she got back to Cincinnati. The weather was “lovely” there, she told me. She said she was feeling inspired by our conversation, and added, “I’m going to go to the old cemetery near my house and try to make a start on this novel.”
I guess that makes sense. Peaceful sort of place. Good for concentrating the mind. Maybe all the best writing is done when poised on the edge of the grave. When Keever—or anyone else for that matter—has been freshly buried.
HOME INVASION
“LYDIA IS STILL ALIVE,” Lee said. He knew I took a protective, almost paternal interest in her well-being. “So far,” he added, with a sadistic chuckle.
It was the day of the Home Invasion. Reacher had become increasingly absurd. Following his clumsy attempt to find out about the gun in the house, he invites everyone out to dinner. Anything to get them out of the house. But it’s too late. The bad guys get into the house instead. Three of them, armed with the same guns that Hackett had. Three Rugers, fitted with suppressors. Reacher has a gun, but he can’t use it because Stashower has been taken prisoner. So he poses as just another victim. At last this semi-autistic socially dysfunctional drifter is in his natural habitat. Surrounded by people who wish him harm.
It comes almost as a relief to Reacher. Hence he has time for the under-pressure bitter joke, which is also a gesture of provocation. The gunmen are trying to sort out who is who so they know which three to kill out of Reacher, Stashower, Lydia, her doctor husband, and Emily the daughter. “You got a sister, wise guy?” says one of them to Reacher. “Maybe you should tell me where she lives.” Reacher says: “If I had a sister, I would. Save me kicking your ass myself.”
“I’m building here,” says Lee. “In a way postponing. Most fights are over incredibly quickly. Reacher’s fights are typically over in a second. But at the same time we can crank it up some more. We’re unashamedly jacking up the testosterone.”
The murder threat goes off at an angle and becomes amalgamated with a rape threat. In a home invasion it’s always a strong possibility. “Help me out here!” says the gunman, ironically. In principle in command. “What could provide us with recompense?” (for having to kill a couple more people not originally on the menu). Oh I know…your wife, your daughter, or your lover.
“Obviously,” says Lee, “Reacher has got to do something about it. How exactly I don’t know yet. But I’ll figure it out. Maybe I need to go back and strengthen the beginning of the scene.”
Chin rubbing. “Now what word would a criminologist use here?”
“Sociopath?” I floated.
“Yes, that works,” says Lee. “And it segues nicely into the next word too…”
He didn’t mind me slipping in the occasional word. Not so much because he was totally in control. He wasn’t. Au contraire. He welcomed random input, as if it was some kind of extra grape in the fridge. All grist to the great mill of the bricoleur.
The housemaid was hoovering the apartment and shoving a bucket around and turning taps on and off in the background. The word “bucket” appeared in the text. To be exact, a “bucket of chicken.”
Somewhere in the distance, typical New York, a new building was going up, or a major revision to an old one. Muted, but still audible, sounds of hammering and drilling registered on the sense data horizon. Suddenly Reacher is uttering the word “nail”: verb, sexual connotation. It was like a dream in which alarm clocks inside the room or hooting owls outside would subtly edit and alter the oneiric discourse.
“We’re at 74,378,” Lee said. “It was four thousand words ago that Reacher had his premonition.”
But there was something bothering him. The spell checker. He’d bought the computer in the summer and he’d had to download Word. But the spell checker was faulty and ran so slowly, it might take an hour to scroll through a long text. “I might as well do it myself.”
He was fiddling around with the software. “Having had a traditional English school education, I’m a good speller, but I feel a little insecure.” Silhouette, for example, stumped him. Or, hold on, should it be silouhette? Where did the “h” go? He couldn’t make his mind up. He was okay on yoghurt though. “Yog-hurt,” he said confidently. “Except here, of course, where they drop the ‘h’ completely.” Weird was another one. “Ruth had to teach me: We are We-ird. Now I’ve got it. I used to get the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ the wrong way round.”
I suggested he flip on the spell checker so it corrected as he went along. “Okay,” says he, “let’s try that for a while.” He clicked on one of the options.
“Your only problem is going to be words it doesn’t recognize.”
“What happens then?”
“It changes them.”
“I hate that.”
Lee said he admired the immortal sticklers of the Académie française (forever issuing edicts about spellings and the mot juste and the correct use of the circumflex) mainly because they were “so tenacious. I’m more descriptive than prescriptive though: I don’t want to get too far away from what the majority [of people] think.”
This is the thing that struck me. Lee is 100 percent verbal. And he is 100 percent visual. At the same time. When he is describing the home invasion house he is setting up the stage so that his characters can enter and exit smoothly. He saw the room on an analogy with a baseball field, with the three runners on three bases. On a diamond.
He had been sitting there for a while in silence. Arms folded. Sneezed a couple of times. Finally he shoved his head forwards and shrugged, as if readying himself for action. He flipped up the lapels of his black leather jacket. “Time for Reacher to get going. We are doing the takedown.”
Typing. “The spell checker just corrected ‘funneling.’ Only one ‘l,’ according to the American style police. It’s always fascinated me—those halfhearted efforts to reform English—the ‘x’ for example in ‘connexion.’ American optimism—it’s something that can be fixed. Everything should be made better.”
Still typing, still talking. “Like illness. In Europe you just get ill. You accept. Here it’s like an affront—an injustice—not to be tolerated.”
Tap tap. “What is a four-letter word, anyway?” He had written: Their smart play at that point would have been to start blasting away, there and then, no hesitation, recognizing that the situation was turning to shit right in front of their eyes.
“You vetoed shit on page one.”
“Funnily enough it was the piss more than the shit that worried me….Here it’s clearly metaphorical. Whereas back on page one it was literal. The language can morph now. In the fight scene. It’s more no-holds-barred. We’re in combat mode.”
As I was leavi
ng, Lee nicely said he would like to do this again one day, the book and the meta-book. “Maybe on the fiftieth,” he added.
KNOWLEDGE BY DESCRIPTION
LEE WAS DOING ME out of a job. He had taken to commentating on himself. He was writing and commentating at the same time. “The Reacher seminar,” he said, announcing his next topic. “He bends down and picks up the weapon. So naturally it’s time for the scholarly digression. There were many factors that made a handgun either accurate or not accurate…blah blah blah all about the theory and history. But then he’ll always bring it back to the vernacular and the pragmatic. The human head was a big enough target, generally hard to miss at close quarters, and the man-on-first’s was no exception…He starts academic, but then he gets specific and hardcore.”
There were two things Lee talked about that afternoon, while writing. One was the influence of cinema, the other was Bertrand Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. But in some sense it was all one.