All that climbing, the pure air, the ruggedly beautiful landscape below: you’d want to live! You’d never finish yourself off that way, unless you just accidentally fell off, exhausted by all the unaccustomed exercise. But the principle was sound enough: to choose one’s own fate. With complete clarity of mind. And he knew the perfect little veterinary store down Mexico way with a more than adequate supply of horse tranquillizer, when the time was right. Pity about catalytic converters. Back in the day all you needed was a car exhaust and a hosepipe and it was off to dreamland. He loved the whiff of benzene.
But that time was not yet. There was at least one more novel to write. It said so in his three-book contract and he didn’t want to let anyone down. Anyway, he could feel one coming on, even though he had no clear idea, no plot, and no title. That was the way he liked it. Inspiration would come, at the right time, in the right place. He didn’t want to have to think about it too hard, in advance. Far better to relax and forget about it and let it happen. Just cruise … on the cruise. He barely left his deckchair (got more reading done that way). An occasional lap of the deck – enough exercise and fresh air! Feet up again.
Back to Winston Churchill. The Grand Alliance, volume III of his history of the Second World War. The Brits declared war on Japan faster than the Americans. Churchill only had to go through the cabinet; Roosevelt had to check it was OK with Congress. The British Prime Minister sent his letter to the Japanese ambassador, declaring war, the day after Pearl Harbor. Signed off with,
I have the honour to be, with high consideration,
Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Winston S. Churchill
‘Some people did not like this ceremonial style,’ he added in the history. ‘But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.’ Reacher had a line just like that in A Wanted Man (Reacher 17). You don’t have to be rude. Just do it. After you, No, after you, and then … pow! The courteous killer. The executioner’s etiquette. A gorilla with manners. He liked that, jotted the Churchill down on a scrap of paper and tucked it in his wallet. You never know when these things might come in handy. 90% of writing was reading anyway.
His muse had never been known to let him down before. She wouldn’t this time either – always providing, of course, that he had it all lined up, everything in place, for 1 September. He had the flight booked for Monday morning, 31 August. From London. Not too early. But back to New York just a few hours later. Jet lag minimal. Down to it by the crack of noon the next day (coffee on, Camels out).
Got to London City Airport in plenty of time. So convenient. A brief pause at Shannon, on the west coast of Ireland, to refuel. Settled himself comfortably into his business-class seat, stretched out his long legs. (First-class? No thanks; they never left you alone for five minutes, ‘Another glass of champagne, sir?’ It was too much.) Felt sublimely, blissfully, confident. He’d had enough vacation, enough fjords, it was time to get down to business again. Reacher-time. And talking of time (he pulled out his phone and checked, he didn’t have quite the same chronological omniscience as Reacher), wasn’t this plane kind of late to take off?
2 THE DEARTH OF THE AUTHOR
I was barely on to my second cup of coffee that morning when I picked up the Leemail. By his standards it was almost long-winded.
Urgent – forget tomorrow – plane broke down, stuck in Ireland for the night. Don’t know when I’ll get home.
Which explains how it comes about that I am in New York, on 1 September, writing about Lee Child’s newly published Make Me in the absence of Child himself. The author is not dead, he is only delayed, somewhere in Ireland. But he is AWOL. He has stood up the muse. Risky.
He should have known he was leaving it too late – the day before. Pure hubris and thoroughly deserving of a comeuppance. I had a kind of smug told-you-so feeling. Verging on Schadenfreude. I whipped off the following reply:
Looks like I’m going to have to start without you. Maybe you should try writing in the airport lounge?
I knew he hated writing in airport lounges. He had to be back in his cool, comfortable office space on the Upper West Side, or nothing. No loud rock music (unlike Stephen King, for one). No perching on stools in cafés. He needed that silver metal desk, the size of a steam engine or the wing of a Spitfire. The 27-inch monitor. The reference books and the bestseller listings on the wall. And – above all – the cigarettes. Maybe if you could smoke in airport lounges and Starbucks it would be a different story.
I wasn’t too worried about him, to be honest. He would probably get over the bad start. Then again, maybe all his worst fears would come true and he would completely mess up the next book. Maybe it would never happen.
But it wasn’t my concern. I had to prioritize. And my priority was the fate of Make Me.
I had watched over the slow, sometimes gruelling genesis and evolution of a book. I had borne witness, almost like a midwife, to its birth. In fact I was more involved than a midwife – I had been there, at the primal scene, overseeing the inception, the embryonic struggle for life, division and multiplication, the gradual formation of a text. And now it was out there, in the world, on its own, and somebody had to keep an eye on it. I had gone from midwife to nanny, or possibly minder.
Obviously, the author himself was useless, knocking back Guinness in a pub in the Emerald Isle, carousing with the spiritual descendants of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. But even if he weren’t, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do, in any kind of practical way. He couldn’t exactly write the reviews himself.
Months had passed since he had hit the send button. He had finessed, here and there, in response to his editor. She had one telling point: the bad guys in the home invasion scene would definitely refer to Chang’s Chinese look (now that she was no longer ‘Stashower’). He had proofread and eradicated error. Okayed the cover (had to change the colour scheme: silver came out grey online – that neon yellow ought to do it). And he would be present for the launch party at Union Square Barnes & Noble, he would go and converse with Stephen King in Cambridge (Mass.), he would give away enticing and intriguing snippets on talk shows, shrewdly summarize on breakfast TV, and try to sound like a serious and reputable writer on radio. He would sign a thousand copies (more!) as he trooped around the bookstores of North America and Europe. Not to mention a couple of high-security military bases. Maybe even a campus or two.
But the reality was that the book was on its own now. It was vulnerable. It was an orphan. The author was not dead, but he might as well be. It had been thrown in at the deep end of the world and now it had to sink or swim.
This is going to sound more ruthless than I intend, but the truth is, strictly from the point of view of the book itself, his premature demise would be no kind of disaster. Au contraire. ‘FAMOUS AUTHOR DEAD’ headlines would do it no harm at all. As far as Make Me was concerned, he could just go ahead and chuck himself off that mountain, fill up the tank with horse tranquillizer, or drink himself into oblivion in Ireland. It would not only be obscurely poetic, it would sell shedloads. A posthumous thriller – now that was thrilling. Look at Larsson, for example: finishes the ‘Millennium trilogy’, bids farewell to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then promptly drops dead. Good timing, Stieg. ‘The End’, then aaaagh.
Better still, to come back to the case of Child, if some delusional obsessive should choose this moment to gun him down, à la Lennon, preferably on the doorstep of his apartment building, after all only a few blocks north of the Dakota, that would (personal regrets aside, and speaking purely on behalf of Make Me) be a great way to go. As I say, I am not advocating any such occurrence, only contemplating the kind