Reacher Said Nothing

by Andy Martin

  And finally that this was the kind of synchronicity that might come along only once in his lifetime. “Is that not awesome?” He stored it away without even thinking about it. Maybe Reacher would remember it one day.

  MAIGRET ET MOI

  Monday, March 30, 2015

  LEE WAS 5K AHEAD of where he expected to be, so he didn’t feel too bad about it. He was giving a talk at the 92nd Street Y that evening and it always threw him when he knew he had something coming up, even if he didn’t have to leave till six. So he spent the day working on a couple of smaller things, the introduction to an anthology for a diabetes charity, and a short piece about Simenon for a Mystery Writers of America banquet program.

  He had always been impressed by Georges Simenon. He seemed to Lee to exemplify a golden age of pulp productivity. They had one thing in common: they were the only two Europeans to have been elected president of the Mystery Writers of America (Simenon in 1955, Lee in 2008). Simenon had Maigret, Lee had Reacher. I thought twenty novels was a big deal and that number partly explained what I was doing there. “By current standards,” says Lee, “it’s worthy of note. I’m considered a veteran after twenty.” But Simenon was on a different plane altogether. He wrote two hundred novels. And he could write twenty thousand words in a day, which made Lee seem like a slouch even when at full steam ahead. Simenon still has 550 million books in print. “By those standards I’m pathetic.” The classic paperback writer had to be judged on sheer quantity, like a Brazilian bulldozer mowing down rainforest.

  And then there were the ten thousand women he is reputed to have slept with.

  “Do you believe that?” I said. I had tried reading his autobiography but got bored with it. “It’s a suspiciously round number. I mean when you compare with Warren Beatty, for example. On 12,775 at the last count.”

  “Journalists make a lot of stuff up.”

  “So do novelists.”

  “He clearly had a habit. The zipper-problem.”

  “Like Camus and Kennedy.”

  “And Clinton, of course.”

  “I always liked that phrase in Camus: un amour sans lendemain. A love without a next day. I suppose it’s just ‘one-night stand’ in translation.”

  “Pure Reacher. It’s what he does. Maybe more than one night, but not much more.”

  Simenon had once signed up to sit in a glass cage in a restaurant in Paris, exposed to the public gaze, just him and a typewriter on a table in front of him. And crank out the whole novel then and there. I asked Lee if he would have a go at that. He said he had no “artistic objection” at all. He could probably manage a few hours of productivity in a Manhattan bar. But…the age of Simenon was no more. He would be a little self-conscious, probably. Because it wasn’t just the people in the bar on that particular day. It was the whole massive audience on YouTube too, since it would inevitably be filmed on somebody’s phone, even if it wasn’t set up in advance. It was like a football match: every last move scrutinized and subjected to interrogation, rewound and watched again and again.

  It was when I went to Starbucks that I realized that most of the people there (me included) were doing a Simenon, tapping away in public. The whole thing was a glass cage.

  “You do the writing in private, and the promoting in public,” Lee said later. “And never the twain shall meet. That could be confusing. Same with the ten thousand, of course. Those numbers are so made up. I try to be honest about my figures.” He was thinking about sales figures suddenly. He had bumped into a fellow writer at a conference somewhere who was talking about his figures and asked the guy what model he followed, in case there was anything to learn. “Oh, we just make them up, my agent and I,” the writer had replied cheerfully.

  “These figures get bandied around and inflated. Ten thousand—that is one a day for…thirty years. Ridiculous! Think about it: you can’t get better than the teenage years surely. And if I extrapolate from that, I still wouldn’t get close.”

  “Even with two in the first thirty minutes?”

  “You can’t keep that up. It’s not humanly possible.”

  NAPOLEONIC

  HE HAD TWO more short scenes to complete that day:

  1. A bedroom scene.

  2. They go to collect weapons.

  Then it was all down to planning. The difficulty was that Mother’s Rest was like an island in an ocean. There was “nothingness” all around it. Any attack was easy to see coming from a long way off. They would be ready for them. Reacher, and therefore Lee Child, had to figure out how to get in there without being spotted. “It really is like a military campaign,” he said. I thought it was the closest he came to playing Napoleon.

  “It’s great,” said Lee, “I just sit around drinking coffee and working out how to kill people. This is the fun part of it all.”

  He reckoned that his skill in this domain went back to the period he called “the Great Unpleasantness,” when staff were being cut at Granada Television and, as union shop steward, he was trying to rally resistance. “You know what it’s like. Obviously you want to go out and break some guy’s leg. And you don’t. But I really thought about how. I wanted to know exactly how it would work. I planned it all out. Clearly I couldn’t do it myself—I was known to them. So I would go to a particular pub, find some thug willing to do the job. There was a question of timing and financing and so on. I was completely practical about it, not theoretical.”

  I mentioned my theory about the return to primitivism and savage thought. Lee said I was forgetting the obvious. Reacher, at the end of the novel, has to penetrate a lair. “There’s something subconscious about it,” Lee said. Even though he was now conscious of it. “I just have to have that going on.”

  So Lee would sit there and plan it out on Reacher’s behalf. But this was the twist he was thinking about. He wouldn’t show the planning. Hitherto we have been close to the inside of Reacher’s head all the way through, when not actually keeping track of his adversaries, with their backhoes and hogs and hired henchmen. But there was always a risk of information overload (making the plan and then executing it). So Lee was considering a completely different point of view that he hadn’t employed at all yet, at least in this book. He would switch to a more remote omniscient viewpoint. Completely disconnected from Reacher. That way you wouldn’t know what Reacher was planning, what he had in mind. You would only see him from afar: “through a telescope.”

  “Do you know how to get back to Mother’s Rest without being spotted?”

  “Haven’t got a clue. So yes it helps me, not showing the plan. Since I don’t really have one.”

  The next time I saw him, later that same day, he’d already started the read-through.

  “Did you do the bedroom scene?”

  “Done the…‘leaving dinner’ scene,” he offered tamely. He said he couldn’t go on because he knew that he had to set the tone with the next scene, but he didn’t know what the tone should be in the final sequence, so he had nothing to work back from. No “Ode to Joy.” So he could only work forwards. But in order to do that he would have to go back. Hence the read-through. His method was less teleological (closing in on an end or telos), more archaeological (springing out of the beginning, the archē).

  “It’s like climbing up the stairs of a ski jump,” he said. “A bit of a slog. But then you sail down, effortlessly. It launches the end.”

  GARDENING TIPS

  IT TOOK REACHER a long while to catch up with the Lee Child method. He should have realized sooner it was all there in the opening paragraph. The opening sentence.

  But at least Lee had finally answered one of the questions he posed way back in September: Did Reacher see anything from the train? The seven o’clock train that was delayed and goes through Mother’s Rest at midnight.

  Somewhere around page 250, it all starts to fall into place. Hey, what were they doing with that backhoe? Isn’t that a little strange, at midnight, even out here in the sticks? It’s like Reacher has had a prolonged concussion
(or “cerebral contusion”) throughout the novel. And, in the manner of a true Platonist, he at last remembers what he already knew right from the start. To be fair to Reacher, he didn’t know then that he was at the beginning of anything. From his point of view, it was pure flux.

  “Here is the thing about the first sentence,” Lee said. “There are no sentences preceding it.” Not strictly true, of course. When he wrote, “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy,” there were no preceding sentences—in Make Me. But since this was Reacher’s twentieth outing, there were approximately 200,000 preceding sentences to go on. Some of them involving burying people, some specifically using a backhoe.

  Reacher ought to have had suspicions. After all, had he not done something remarkably similar himself? Similarly on a remote farm, but in England.

  Consider The Hard Way. Reacher has just shot or stabbed to death the mercenary leader Lane and several of his henchmen. What to do with the bodies? And, moreover, all their vehicles and attendant hardware? Answer: dig a massive pit, using a backhoe, chuck them all in (preceded as they were by fellow corpses from the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, and English) and move the earth back again, plow it over, and plant wheat. Entirely reasonable. But surely when Reacher saw the backhoe at work in the first paragraph of Make Me it should have set off alarm bells?

  “Yeah, logically,” says Lee, sprawling on the sofa, wreathed in smoke, with (at last!) the window open. The fresh air from Central Park was fighting to get in. “I’m reprising a classic Reacher trope. But I hate Reacher having to refer back to his previous adventures. I like him to start with a clean slate.”

  “Tabula rasa.”

  “I got that from a true crime story in the U.S. Apparently some guy and his car had completely disappeared. No trace. Nothing could be proved. It was a totally cold case. And then one detective happens to notice that there is a patch of wild hyacinth that is bluer than the rest in a whole meadow of hyacinth. Approximately the size of a car. And he happens to be a keen gardener, who therefore knows that the addition of iron, or ferrous sulfate, will produce higher color in a lot of flowers. It perks them up. They can suffer from iron deficiency, did you know that? Anyway, so they dig down and voilà.”

  “Was the guy still in the car?”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Probably explains my dislike for farms. How many bodies in cars have they got down there? Nobody knows. It reminds me of digging up Roman coins in England. Those Romans must have been incredibly careless with their coins. They’re all over the place.”

  We kept coming back to the question of Keever. He is right there on the first page and it looked likely that he would still be there, one way or another, on the last too. I knew that Lee had been reading or rereading Stephen King’s Pet Sematary while he was writing Make Me. King imagines a cat and then a few humans coming back from the dead, rather deformed and lumpy and lumbering, and exerting their maleficent influence over pitiful nonzombie types. And there is almost a hint of that here. No actual Keever, somewhat the worse for wear, haunting the streets of Mother’s Rest, but it’s close.

  “Yes,” said Lee, “I’ve had Keever in my head all the time. The whole book revolves around him in a way. Reacher and Stashower are surrogate Keevers. They are doing what he was doing, following in his footsteps, potentially risking the same fate. They are him, essentially. And it echoes the structure of Killing Floor too, now that I think of it. Joe is dead at the very beginning of the novel. Just like Keever. The dead guy is the animating force of the novel.” Make Me as valediction and eulogy.

  And he had a soft spot for the backhoe too. The backhoe had never really gone away. Perhaps it would return at the end? The palindrome structure again. “It’s a logical but brutalist way of getting rid of evidence.” But what really drew Lee to the backhoe was the word itself. Backhoe. He loved the economy of the American (preferring it over King’s English digger or JCB). He said the vernacular was part of what drew him to the States in the first place, the elision and the explicitness.

  “They used to have this mortgage back in the day. Can’t get ’em anymore, of course. All you had to do was say what your income was. Didn’t have to provide any evidence as such. They called them liar-loans. That’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  WITTGENSTEIN ON SIXTH AVENUE

  ALL OF NEW YORK looked strangely familiar. Of course, I had lived there before. But there was something else. Eventually, I started to realize: I was living inside a Jack Reacher novel.

  My building was just around the corner from the guy with no hands and no feet. Hobart in The Hard Way. He and his sister lived on Hudson. Reacher walked along Charlton Street (where I was staying) to get there. Whenever I got on a subway train I inspected the other passengers carefully, conscious (like Reacher at the beginning of Gone Tomorrow) that one of them could be carrying a bomb or about to blow her brains out.

  I revisited Sixth Avenue with the beginning of The Hard Way in mind. In fact, to be honest, it was right there in my hand. I was rereading it as I walked along the street. Reacher is sitting outside a café on one side of the street (the western side), on the block between Houston and Bleecker, and a guy crosses the street and picks up a car (which turns out to have a ton of money in it, ransom money, but Reacher doesn’t know that yet). The car is parked next to a hydrant (or “fireplug”). Like Reacher with Keever, I retraced his steps.

  There were differences. In the book it was a warm summer’s evening, hence Reacher sitting outside. For me it was morning, the beginning of April, but sunny enough for me to sit outside too. And there really is a café right there, just where Lee Child says there is one. More remarkably still, it is called “JACK’S.” I went and got some of Jack’s cold-brew coffee. Obviously, I had to ask.

  “Is this place named after Jack Reacher by any chance?” I waved the book around.

  “Reacher? The big guy.”

  “He sits at this café right here.”

  The barista had neatly combed ginger hair and a neatly trimmed ginger beard. “Quelle coïncidence!” he said, brightly. “Our Jack actually lives on 10th Street. That’s where he opened his first café. We’re hoping to expand to the West Coast. L.A. That’s where we source most of our supplies.”

  “So…is your Jack anything like Jack Reacher?”

  “He’s a good-looking guy for sure,” said the barista. “But he’s more Tom Cruise than Jack Reacher.”

  And then there was the park near the Flatiron Building, in Gone Tomorrow, where the girl is walking her dog. The park reappeared in the short story Lee had written too, “The Picture of the Lonely Diner,” where Reacher pops up out of the subway and obstinately keeps on going, major incident or no major incident.

  It made me wonder if there really could be a place called Mother’s Rest too. Surely somewhere there would turn out to be such a town. But I was mainly thinking about Wittgenstein at this point. Lee had sent me a sentence or two in which Reacher is talking about Keever and is saying that he didn’t have to keep on going, he could have backed off: “He could have renamed himself Wittgenstein and chosen to live.”

  The Wittgenstein was, at one level, like the “bucket” and the “nail”: I had been talking about Wittgenstein only the day before and now, alchemically transformed, his name appeared again in Make Me. The novel, like the housekeeper, liked to hoover up stray particles.

  There is a line right at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (proposition 7) which anticipated “Reacher said nothing”: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, now retranslated as “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence,” ironing out the original grammatical quirkiness). Wittgenstein, so far as I can make out, changed his mind about his “picture” theory of language. He had gotten it, he said, from looking at the diagram of a car’s engine, when he was in the trenches in the First World War, where all the parts had arrows wi
th their names attached. Isn’t this just what language was doing generally? But in the later Philosophical Investigations he swerves around and says that there are many other kinds of “language game” you could be playing: there is ostensive definition, true, pointing and designating, but there is also (for example) asking a question, ordering, joking, praying, cursing, doing a crossword, making up a story, singing a hymn. But what happens to meaning then? Is that now lost? Is everything automatically hazy and impressionistic? With no clear labels and arrows anymore?

  Not entirely, says Wittgenstein, for we have the “forms of life” to bind us together. What these forms of life are exactly, he never really explains.

  Lee was having a decent shot at it though, at the New York Times Building. “If I use the word car, for example,” he was saying, revisiting the classic Wittgenstein analogy. “It’s a signifier. But everyone understands broadly what I mean by car. So I don’t need to go on about it. Four wheels and so forth. What is the point? Keep it economical.” There was, in other words, no need for infinite regress (so what is a wheel?). Equally there was no need for X (he named someone specific) to go running off to Tahiti under the heading of research. “That’s just a vacation!” he said. “Tax-deductible.”

  Consider the “morning star” and the “evening star” (as Frege suggested). There would be general consensus that it was the same celestial object (Venus). “Never stray too far from the consensus,” Lee had said. Aristotle called it anagnorisis, or recognition. Sometimes it’s a big drama: your husband goes off to war for years, finally returns—hurrah! (Penelope and Odysseus). The guy who killed his father and married his mother…that was me! (Oedipus). But it doesn’t have to be quite that dramatic. It could be a plain old car. These are the forms of life that we share in common and that a book serves to remind us of constantly.