So long as he kept on reading he would always need more shelving.
Jack Reacher – huge footloose wanderer, armed only with a toothbrush. Lee Child – tall guy with shelves! Paintings! First editions! Apartment overlooking Central Park. House in France. Farm in the south of England (two farms, to be exact). On the one hand, nomadic hunter-gatherer, on the other … farmer? It was easy for Reacher, he didn’t have to do any writing. His job was straightforward enough – go about killing bad guys, and also not die. Easy. Whereas writing about that … it for sure needed more than a toothbrush. He’d still be the boy in the tall Manhattan building.
Sometimes Reacher felt like a reproach. It was like writing about Jesus. The gospel according to Saint Jack. How could you live up to those standards – or down to them?
July, he wrote a TV pilot with his daughter. She was into forensic linguistics. The pilot was CSI but with words, not DNA. It suited Lee. The job was to track down villains on the basis of what they actually said. Everybody leaves verbal fingerprints. There was the case of the guy who murdered his girlfriend, and then texted afterwards using her phone but pretending to be her. The forensic linguists were able to demonstrate that it was really him not her, on the basis of his distinctive punctuation – or lack of it. Lee loved that idea – that you could be sunk by a comma or a hyphen. It all mattered, linguistically. Nothing was too trivial. The best clues were like that – subtle and insubstantial, not a big fat muddy boot print by the garden window.
Most of August he spent in France and England. Eating and drinking. Reading. Smoking. Putting his feet up in the sun.
But now it was nearly the end of August and he was back in New York.
People would often say to him: ‘How come Reacher is always getting into trouble? Always finding some new drama to poke his nose into? Doesn’t he ever take a break?’
‘I write about him when he’s doing nothing,’ he would reply. ‘When he’s on holiday and not smashing up bad guys. But they don’t publish those ones. They’re too boring.’
Now it was time for Reacher to get real again. Reacher was back from vacation. Reaching out to him. Again.
2 CHAPTER ONE
Which is when I blew into town. To watch it happen. To bear witness to Lee Child writing the next instalment of Jack Reacher’s continuing adventures. I first picked up a Reacher, purely by chance, in a little bookstore in Pasadena, down the road from Caltech. I knew exactly how Malcolm Gladwell felt when he plotted his incremental curve of addiction: you start out reading Lee Child in paperback; then you realize you can’t wait that long and start buying his books in hardcover; your next step is to call around your publishing friends and ask them to send you the galleys. Ultimately, he reckoned, you would have no option but to ‘break into Lee Child’s house and watch over his shoulder while he types’.
I had read all the books. I’d reviewed a few of them. I’d interviewed the guy. Twice (once in the UK, again in the US). Now I was finally breaking in. I had to know what happened next. Before it happened. I was doing what Gladwell had only dreamed of.
There was a date Lee couldn’t miss.
September 1, 2014. Labor Day in the US. A public holiday. But not for Reacher. It was twenty years to the day since, on the verge of leaving his job with Granada Television, Lee, nearly forty years old, had gone out and bought the paper to start writing Killing Floor, the first of the series. And a pencil (he still had the pencil, much reduced in size). Every year, ever since then, he’d started a new one on the very same day. It was a ritual with him. One he couldn’t mess with.
Lee didn’t have to become a writer. He had a couple of options after he dropped (or was pushed) out of television. After being fired, he had taken the trouble to go along to his local employment exchange, as it was then known. More like an unemployment exchange. This was the height – or depth – of the post-Thatcher golden age in the north of England. Manufacturing jobs were being slashed – not that he would necessarily have got one even if they had been numerous. There was only one job going that he was really qualified for: warehouseman. He had given it some serious consideration. Then he had gone out to buy the paper. ‘We were only just making enough to get by. Then I lost my job. It was fairly desperate.’
He wrote the first chapter. Killing Floor, chapter one. Then showed it to his wife. Everything depended on what she said. He could keep on with chapter two. Or he could go and apply for the warehouseman job. She read what he had written and then put it down.
‘What do you think? Shall I keep going?’
‘Keep going,’ she said.
He went back to work. The choice had been made. Maybe he would never have made a decent warehouseman anyway.
At seven-thirty that morning, September 1, we got in the car to drive to the TV studio. CBS This Morning. With Lee Child. There were more people in the car – Lee and his publicist and his editor and his assistant and one or two others (his crew) and me – than on the streets outside. ‘Everyone else is on holiday and we’re working,’ his apartment doorman had said. As we glided through empty streets, New York on Labor Day reminded me of Lee’s description of a backwoods smallville in Montana:
There were no people on the sidewalks. No vehicle noise, no activity, no nothing. The place was a ghost. It looked like an abandoned cowboy town from the Old West.
‘Today we begin!’ said Lee, like a kid going to a birthday party, not thinking about the TV interview at all. ‘I want to get ahead this time, take the pressure off.’
‘Do you have it in the diary?’ I said.
‘No, that would be too obvious,’ he said. ‘But it is in my head. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Twenty years ago. It was a Thursday. Around one fifteen. My lunch break, because I was still working even though I knew it was nearly over. W. H. Smith in the Arndale Centre, in Manchester – the one that got bombed by the IRA. I was working all weekend. Then I started writing on the Monday. I had no real time off at all.’
‘So it has to be today.’
‘I need ritual. My life needs a shape. It doesn’t matter that I’m doing interviews, I have to start today.’
‘That was a great opening [to Killing Floor],’ I said. ‘I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.’ ‘The first day is always the best,’ Lee said. ‘Because you haven’t screwed anything up yet. It’s a gorgeous feeling. I try to put it off as long as possible because when it’s gone it’s gone.’
‘Do you have any kind of strategy for writing, or rules or whatever?’
‘I only really have one. You should write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast. I picked that up from TV. Think about how they shoot breaking waves – it’s always in slow motion. Same thing. You can spend pages on pulling the trigger.’
‘Die Trying. All the mechanics and chemistry of firing a shot. Like calculus.’
‘And what happens to the bullet afterwards. That’s the thing most writers forget – they think it’s just pull the trigger and wham. But in reality there’s a lot of physics. Stuff happens afterwards. Think of The Day of the Jackal. The sniper assembles his weapon, fires his shot, but then de Gaulle bends forward to kiss the guy he’s pinning the medal on. There can be
