was funny and well written and not even too heavy. Big on screwed-up relationships. With a few bad sex scenes that will stay with me, alas. ‘We could try an experiment – remove the spine, throw all the pages up in the air, let them land where they may, stick them back together again at random, and see if anyone can tell the difference. In fact, I have a feeling Franzen may have already done something like that.’
‘I told you to go and look over his shoulder,’ Lee said. ‘We need to know.’
‘He wouldn’t be doing this, would he? If he turns down Oprah …’
We were in a limo heading for the CBS studios on 57th. Breakfast TV show. Labor Day. 5 a.m. wake-up call. Sharon the publicist had a clipboard in her hand with lists of names. The big city was quiet, still slumbering.
‘You got the front page!’ I was referring to his review of Lagercrantz on the front page of the Book Review section of The New York Times. ‘Was that a subtle demolition job?’
‘I honestly don’t know how they let me get away with it!’ He was chuckling to himself like Professor Moriarty after hatching some fiendish plot. ‘They took out my umlauts. Took me bloody ages to work out how to do them. Then, “We don’t do umlauts.” Typical Times.’
I’d been rereading his review and would now like to delete my previous ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ remarks. It was scholarly, informed and informative, but overall a put-down. He’d even invoked a passing reference in the book to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary to suggest that too much time had gone by to resurrect Lisbeth Salander decently and that she should have been allowed to fade peacefully away. The reborn Salander, Lee implied, was a zombie, a freak, only half-alive, better off dead and buried.
‘They asked me if I knew Lagercrantz. They should have asked me if I had a book coming out the same week.’
The CBS studios are like a dream: everyone is perfect there, men and women, the coffee and the croissant and the bagel. The archetype of melon slices. The quintessence of pineapple. The excitable girl with the freckles on her nose. They would all look good in swimsuits.
One guy was prepping Lee in the green room. Maybe he, for one, got it slightly wrong. He’d overdone the make-up and come out looking orange. ‘You’re probably only here for a couple of weeks, right? That’s what most people think. On the Riviera the rest of the time?’
‘I only had two weeks off this year!’
There was no stopping the orange guy. ‘At every airport in the land, it’s just you and Patterson, right? It’s like – which one am I going to choose?’
I had to straighten him out. ‘The difference is, Lee actually wrote Make Me. On his own. I saw him do it. Patterson is just shuffling pieces of paper around. In a factory. Lee’s a serious writer. In the grand tradition.’
‘I guess thriller writers have all these filing cards on the wall. The plot is all carefully mapped out, like a movie script. I’ve seen how it’s done.’
Lee was being polite, sprawled on the sofa, coffee in hand. I happened to be just standing there, stuffing in a banana. Like his bodyguard or stunt double. Sent in to bat for Child. I’d often see myself as Stendhal to his Napoleon, Tonto to his Lone Ranger, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. Now I realized what I had truly become: henchman to his Don Corleone.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I just read a review in which the reviewer said by page 200 he still had no idea what was going on. Mystified. And the funny thing is Lee was just the same. By page 200 he still had no idea what was coming.’
Mr Orange was struck by that. ‘Really?’
‘I prefer it that way,’ said Lee. ‘It keeps me interested. I get bored otherwise. It’s just like being alive – you never quite know what is going to happen next.’
He goes in. Cameras all over him. He’s sitting coolly on the tail of his jacket. Charcoal with some kind of t-shirt underneath. No hunchback effect. Not too much hand movement. Make Me is different, he’s explaining: ‘Reacher really likes a woman. That makes him vulnerable. He gets hit in the head. He gets hit in the head a lot, but this time it really hurts.’
‘Why is Reacher so popular?’
‘You ever had a mortgage? He doesn’t. And he does the right thing. You can’t do it in real life any more. You’ll only get fired.’
But Tom Cruise was doing most of the hard work for him. Tom wasn’t there in person. The interview had turned into a trailer. Clips from Jack Reacher the movie, talk about the next one. A stream of free association. Book cover, Lee, Reacher, Tom – it was all a blur. CBS owned Paramount Studios, or Paramount owned CBS, or Hollywood owned Random House, one or all of the above, all complicit in some hallucinatory conspiracy, the literary-industrial complex, infiltrated, hacked, seduced, usurped, perverted, shrunk by Hollywood. Cruise-control.
‘I’m not an author. I think of myself as an entertainer.’
‘Thank you, Lee Child! Make Me goes on sale tomorrow.’
‘It’s Labor Day!’ he said, lighting up outside, defensively.
I was muttering something like, ‘Entertainer, huh!’ With a degree of why-do-I-even-bother bitterness.
‘Come on, you boring bastard, no one wants Franzen with their cornflakes, you said so yourself. The book has to feel like a vacation.’
Sharon shoved us back in the car. She had kids to go and take care of. And a husband, a journalist with integrity (she pointed out, for some reason).
The CBS people had quoted Forbes magazine, ‘The strongest brand in literature’, and a nice line from the Washington Post, the kind of line any writer would die for. ‘Reacher is the stuff of myth … One of this century’s most original tantalizing pop-fiction heroes.’ I couldn’t help wondering, on the road back, what was the worst thing anyone had ever said about his writing? I wasn’t trying to be mean or get my own back. I just wanted to know is all.
‘“Brain-dead”. The Kirkus Review. My second book. I thought that was pretty harsh.’
‘Mostly it’s that snooty Harold Pinter/Edward Docx line, “I say, old bean, one simply cannot understand what people see in this fellow Child.”’
Lee was regretful but philosophical about it. ‘So stupid. It’s a refusal to understand. It’s like a footballer saying, “I don’t really understand passing … I don’t understand this goal-scoring business.” I quite like something someone said. Online somewhere. “I hated this book so much, I wish I could unread it.” Nightmares. That is a real badge of honour. I think that was Persuader oddly enough. Can’t imagine what the objection was.’
‘It failed to persuade.’
He was flying to Boston the next day, going to the Red Sox game with Stephen King. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, getting out of the car, heading for a shower to take off all the make-up. Become an author again. ‘I’m pressing on with Night School.’ He knew it had to be as different as he could make it. Make Me was a hard act to follow, which is why he had had to come up with a prequel. He had worked out the second sentence, just hadn’t got it down yet. ‘I’ve got the first chapter in my head, though. The new cycle has started, the new season. The year. It’s
