will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Andy Martin (left) with Child Photograph by Jessica Lehrman
Dedication
To all those loyal readers of Lee Child who may have bought this book by mistake
I love his knowledge, his diffusion, his affluence of conversation.
Samuel Johnson
quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page – as when I read Rider Haggard, the Odyssey, Conan Doyle and the German author of Wild West stories, Karl May. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the conversations in this book are real. Some of them got compressed. The names are real too (unless they are actually fictional). In the interests of authenticity, any modifications are minimal. The timeline is as faithful as I can make it. The quotations from Make Me are as I originally heard them or read them – they don’t always correspond exactly to the text as it finally appeared. But they have an archaeological value.
FOREWORD
Some authors don’t read their reviews, but I do. I like to get a sense of how my books are being received, and I like to map out the reviewer landscape, in terms of who responds to what, or doesn’t, and who is generous and who is mean … above all, I suppose, I like to see who gets it, and who doesn’t.
Years ago I was reviewed in the UK newspaper the Independent, by a guy named Andy Martin. It seemed to me he got it. He called Reacher ‘a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s’, which delighted me. He reviewed another book, and then the Independent sent him to New York to do a feature interview with me. He turned out to be a fun guy, into Sartre, Camus, Bardot, surfing, and a dozen other things. The interview came out well, and we remained friends.
That’s the good news. Then I got a message from him – it’s right here in the prologue – proposing a harebrained scheme, whereby he would write a book about me writing a book. Which would involve him physically watching me write it, for months and months, and discussing it as I went along. Normally (although this had never been done before, so really there was no ‘normally’) such a venture would be considered ahead of time and possibly agreed, in which case it might be booked in a year or so in advance.
But I got the message only days before I was due to start writing that year’s instalment. So I didn’t get time to mull it over. If I had, I might have said no. Instead I said, OK, but you better get here before Monday. And he did, and what you’re about to read is what came of it.
At first I found it irksome – writers are usually solitary, and the act of creation is intensely insecure and personal, and I didn’t like the idea of him seeing imperfect or half-finished sentences. But I got used to it, and eventually – Stockholm Syndrome, probably – I came to enjoy it. I felt that together we were placing something in the record. Not just about me, I hoped, but my peers and colleagues collectively. My genre is packed with talent and invention, and people in it work really hard, with passion and ferocious intelligence – as opposed to the lazy trope that we ‘churn it out’, as if mechanically or formulaically. I hope this account makes that point. I’m one of many working writers, and we all do it differently, but really we all do it the same – we start with a blank page, we fill it with words, then hundreds of pages more, and they have to be the right words in the right order. This is the story of some of those words. I don’t remember exactly how many there were, but I bet Andy does.
Lee Child
New York
2019
E-FACE
From:
|
andymartinink
|
Sent:
|
22 August 2014
|
To:
|
Lee Child
|
Subject:
|
Wild Idea
|
Hi LeeHow would you feel about a ‘making of’ story about your next book?Thinking about some of the questions that get bowled at you at public events, I reckon most of them concern the process of creation. (Apart from actual marriage proposals.) I was thinking that a genesis-and-what-happened-next type approach could be of wide interest as regards one of your books. i.e. a sort of work-in-progress approach.Obviously you would have to be up for it, which is why I ask now, so you can blow the idea out of the water entirely if you want.There are about 10 different ways of doing it, could be more or less systematic and focused, depending. But I guess the minimum is –depending on how it was done – I would need feedback from you on what you are actually getting up to as the story rolls along.I’m not sure this has been done before – a kind of literary criticism but in the moment, in real time, rather than picking it up afterwards. How This Book Was Written, but actually trying to capture the very moment of creation. I think it could be exciting, but as I say, you would have to really be in the mood for it. You have to admit, it would be different – so instead of the old cutting yourself off in a log cabin approach (or the urban equivalent), you would have someone (i.e. me) looking over your shoulder as you are typing the words. Not exactly Boswell to your Johnson but something along those lines. Or Ishmael to your Captain Ahab. (Keith Richards to your Mick Jagger?)Kind of crazy I know and you might say ‘yes, and TOTAL BLOODY NON-STARTER TOO!’ On the other hand, you might feel that it could be a different angle on the whole Jack Reacher adventure. And it would definitely save you having to answer a lot of those questions!all the best, Andy
From:
|
Lee Child
|
Sent:
|
23 August 2014
|
To:
|
andymartinink
|
Subject:
|
Wild Idea
|
