‘Headlines?’
‘Thriller writer in mystery fall. Investigations continue. The police are looking for a white-haired guy in shorts and flip-flops. With a notebook.’
‘Recreational drugs also suspected. Police analysing pipe found on premises.’
‘Recreational? That’s work!’
Short of actually pulling a Larsson, however, the author would be doing his utmost to sell the book.
Nevertheless, there was something beautiful and entirely appropriate in his absence from New York, the scene of the crime, as it were, where he had only written the book, and where it would now be read, many times over, quite independently and regardless of its author. But, surely, was he not father to the book? And therefore legitimately proprietorial? Deserving of respect? More – I thought – like a sperm donor, or a surrogate mother. He would have to let go, eventually. The readers now (quite literally) owned it. All the talk shows and the signings were just prolonging the agony. There was not a lot he could do about it. Nor could the publishers. All that immense apparatus, the network, the team, everybody beavering away, but fundamentally nobody really knew what they were doing. Why does this work, and not that? It was a mystery. ‘You’re trying to control the future,’ Lee said. ‘It’s like picking a lock with a pipe-cleaner. Or pushing water. All you can do is put it out there and hope.’
Every reading was, potentially, an act of subversion. A form of deconstruction. Every reader (and especially reviewer) was an anarchist, mounting a coup, refuting the authority of the author. Reading was tantamount to revenge. Stephen King’s story of the fan-turned-sadist-and-tyrant (Misery) is only a dramatization of the truth that every writer acknowledges and fears. The fate of the book is in the hands of the reader (always assuming there is one), not the writer. As Lee says, it’s the reader who gets to decide whether or not a book is any good.
On the other hand, there were those ‘Reacher Creatures’: addicted to the works of Lee Child, desperate for their next fix, all in the grip, to a greater or lesser degree, of a specific form of lexomania. All of them relying on the author to get the job done.
The writer needed his readers, but those readers definitely needed the writer. They were accomplices in a perfect dialectic.
from: LeeChild to: andymartinink subject: Reacher said nothing Will be back late tonight. Determined to get the first sentence down before midnight.
3 BEFORE MIDNIGHT
The plane had been leaking fuel apparently. Just as well they didn’t try to make it over the Atlantic (at least as far as the next book was concerned).
Lee and the other eleven passengers (a small United plane) had been shuttled off to the Strand hotel in Limerick, only a short ride away, where he spent a comfortable night, other than panicking. There had been a tacit consensus not to talk about what anyone did for a living. If anyone had asked, Lee was planning to say ‘drug dealer’ – maybe it wasn’t that far from the truth, metaphorically speaking. Anything other than writer (he feared the dread follow-up question: And have any of your books been made into a movie?). A Jamaican guy had been wondering whether to retire to Edinburgh or Honolulu, and the odd thing was that he was only in his thirties. Suspicious. But, on the other hand, maybe not everyone was a criminal. The jury was out. Anyway, they got shuttled back again to Shannon the next morning, the plane had been repaired, and they took off. Legs stretched out again. Newark by 8, hopped in a cab, back safely in the apartment by 10, still on the first day of September. He was almost relaxed. The idea had come to him on the flight over. Dropped right into his lap. And a title. Manna from heaven, as usual.
Fuelled up on coffee again, he went into the office, sat down at the desk, cranked up the computer, and opened up a fresh file. ‘NIGHT SCHOOL’. It was only a provisional title – it might not stick, but he liked it. Where had it even come from? No idea. Re-education. Everybody needed it. Especially Reacher. And the word ‘Night’, that was promising. School? Was that too … Jack Reacher and the Philosopher’s Stone? Fuck Rowling! She can’t Hogwarts everything! He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Got the first sentence down, no problem. Nice. Now he was on a roll. Got half the next sentence down … then he got stuck. A medal … Hmm, what kind of medal, exactly? He’d have to think about that. It couldn’t just be ‘a medal’ – or could it? Oh well, that would do for one day’s work. Flaubert only managed an adjective some days. Just a very, very good adjective. One-and-a-half sentences. A grand total of twenty-two words. It was a start. Before midnight, that was the crucial thing. Mission accomplished, job done. He had stayed true to the good old tradition that had never yet let him down. Big sigh of relief. The gods had been appeased. As far as the new one was concerned.
More importantly, as regards the last one, there was another development. I hit it first online, but went out to buy an actual paper copy of The New York Times. Now it felt real. I opened the newspaper, Tuesday, 1 September, around the same time Lee was sitting down to work on the next one. It was exactly one year to the day (as Lee himself reminded me, in his chronocentric way) since he tapped out, ‘Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy’ and I watched him doing it (all I could make out from my position was the ‘-ing’). And now it was all over the front page of The New York Times.
Maybe ‘all over’ is a slight exaggeration. It was all over page C4, to be precise, in the Arts section, but it had its own dedicated box on the front page, previewing what was on the inside (‘“Make Me”, Lee Child’s latest novel, hints at change for Jack Reacher’). Lee Child nestled naturally alongside ‘Hope Running Out, Iraqis Rally’, ‘Crisis Tests European Core Value’, ‘Obama Aids US Workers In Late Push’, and especially ‘MURDER RATES RISE SHARPLY IN MANY CITIES’. I flipped through, passing over the tempting ‘New Cache of Clinton Emails’. The full review of Make Me. By Janet Maslin. Under the heading, ‘Tough Guy Protagonist Adds Another Layer’. Huge. Two whole columns running right down the page (with just a little box on the New York Times Wine Club right at the bottom).
It was a great review, because it insisted the author was still getting better. The closing lines were: ‘… the big guy’s definitely on the upswing. The guy who writes about him is too.’ As if to prove the point, the article carried a classic hard man author photo, Lee in the leather jacket with all the zips, a taller, thinnerlooking Marlon Brando. Taken straight off the back cover of the book itself.
‘It’s kind of gnomic,’ Lee said, the following day, around noon, uptown. ‘You never quite know what she means.’ He was looking stubbly, a bit Desperate Dan, but not too bad considering. His apartment’s air-conditioning was a mess and there were guys making holes in walls, or mainly standing around and scratching their heads.
By anyone’s standards, it was a rave. She had certainly not given too much of the plot away. Only hinted at the ‘horror’, as if it was the end of Apocalypse Now. But she also threw in how Reacher was learning more than he ever wanted to know. ‘Yeah,’ Lee said, rubbing his chin. ‘Normally he not only wins, he likes to show the other guy that he really has lost. Rub his face in it. It’s not like that this time. The whole thing is too big. He can’t really defeat the evil. All