‘In pursuit of a sniper who is threatening world leaders. He arrested him once, now he has to nail him all over again.’
‘So it’s “personal”?’
‘Yes, but it’s also because his old army general tracks him down using an ad in the Personal column of the Army Times.’
The thing I liked about Personal was that the bad guys were known as the ‘Romford Boys’. Reacher ends up not in the middle of London, at Buckingham Palace, but in the suburbs to the east, in Essex. Romford is where I grew up, so I naturally took this swerve in the narrative as a homage to me. That was probably mad, but every act of reading is also an act of madness, because you have to assume that the writer is writing for me, specifically. I have this relationship thing going on with the author. So I was no more nuts than anyone else. Well, maybe a little more.
Lee admitted, when we were sitting about in the café later, that he was probably a little nuts himself. Although he began by denying it. (Obviously, he was still putting off making a start on the new book. He was enjoying the gorgeous feeling too much.) ‘I’m not a weirdo,’ he said, knocking back a cup of black coffee. ‘I know I’m making this all up. I invented Jack Reacher. He is nothing but a fictional character through and through. He is imaginary.’
He has this way of emphasizing particular words that I can only capture with italics.
‘On the other hand, with another part of my brain, I’m thinking, I am reporting on the latest antics of Jack Reacher. Hold on,’ and here he cupped his hand around one ear, as if listening intently, ‘what’s that? Let me note that down right now! The novels are really reportage.’
When he writes, he goes into a ‘zone’ in which he really believes that the non-existent Jack Reacher is temporarily existent. ‘I know I’m making it up, but it doesn’t feel that way. OK, so maybe I am a bit of a weirdo.’
I discover, as we’re driving back, that Reacher is very popular in prison. Lee gets fan mail from a lot of prisoners. He once paid a visit to a prison in New Zealand. The prison governor was worried about security. He needn’t have been. Hardened jailbirds love Lee. ‘I grew up in Birmingham,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen worse. And I was in television, therefore I’ve worked with worse.’
Later – OK, let me be more specific: it was around twelve – we’re back at his apartment, and Maggie Griffin is explaining how Killing Floor took off in the States. Maggie was one of the first readers of his first novel (in galley proofs) in New York, back in 1997. And she is still with him, as ‘independent PR adviser’. She is probably his number-one fan too. Back then she worked on Wall Street and was a partner in an independent bookstore, Partners & Crime. They made Killing Floor a ‘Partners’ Pick’. She would phone people up and say, ‘Buy three copies. It’s going to be collectable.’ She was right, of course. ‘One to read, another to share, and one to keep pristine. It’s going to be worth a lot of money.’ And it had a great and memorable cover (the white background with the red hand print over it).
She was the one who persuaded him to come to New York, on his own dime (as they say here). ‘Yes,’ she would say in her phone calls, lying her head off, ‘Putnam are flying him over.’
They sold a few thousand in the first weekend.
‘Yeah, I was a “cult hit”,’ said Lee. ‘A blip on the radar. I guess it’s been incremental since then. The odds against me being in this position are huge. But at the time we were just making it up as we went along. I never had a breakthrough moment really. Just a hard relentless slog in the middle years. Which is why I always have Reacher doing a lot of hard work.’
‘As in, for example,’ says I, ‘The Hard Way. “Yes, we are going to have to do this the hard way,” Reacher says, being deeply put upon and overworked by his tyrannical author.’
‘I never like to make it too easy for him – why should he have it easy?’
And then two or three books in, his agent says to him, ‘Have you heard about this Internet thing?’ Dinner at the Langham, next to the BBC. And Lee persuaded Maggie to build him what would become the poster-boy of author websites. Streets ahead. Leaving everyone else trying to catch up.
‘It probably helped,’ Maggie said, ‘when Bill Clinton came out as a fan. Clinton – that was like Kennedy reading the James Bond books.’
Maggie said that at the beginning the publishers had ‘misjudged’ the appeal to women readers.
‘They like the same things guys do,’ she said. ‘Violent retribution. They want blood on the page.’
We were just sitting around talking, still delaying the beginning. It was a day of postponement. Lee was pondering Amazon’s influence. Amazon have this thing of showing you 10 per cent of a book to suck you in. ‘Some writers,’ Lee was saying, with a degree of scorn, ‘some writers have started writing the first episode in their books to fit the 10 per cent and kick the book off. They’re actually calculating exactly how long their chapters should be.’ Lee didn’t want to be one of those writers. He didn’t want Amazon telling him how to write a book. He didn’t want anyone telling him.
I knew things went wrong in publishing. Sometimes embarrassingly so. A friend of mine had her book printed with someone else’s cover on it. ‘They go wrong all the time,’ Lee said. ‘This is an industrial process with hundreds of millions of manufactured items.’ He’d done an industry event recently where the publishers had a big pile of books. A reader came up to him with one of them which had a perfectly fine cover, but was completely blank inside. Lee apologized. Signed the book as normal. But this time he wrote in it: Reacher said nothing. It was one of his recurrent phrases, almost a catchphrase, if saying nothing could be a catchphrase.
‘Reacher often says nothing,’ Lee said. ‘He shouldn’t have to be wisecracking all the time. He’s not into witty repartee. He is supposed to do things.’ Basically, Reacher made Lee Child sound like Oscar Wilde. Not that he was an idiot (Reacher, I mean). More of a particularly taciturn, very muscular philosopher. Lapidary. Succinct. More at the Clint Eastwood end of the spectrum. With just a dash of Nietzsche and Marcuse.
Then we went to the radio studio a few blocks away (Lee would write about how we turned left to go north on Central Park West as we came out of his building). Which is when we had the John Lennon moment (somewhere between 86th and 87th).
3 THAT JOHN LENNON MOMENT
Lee lives north of the building where John Lennon used to live and Yoko Ono still lives (I think). Just across from the Strawberry Fields monument to Lennon. I had forgotten all about it until the moment when a fanboy came running up to us in the street. We had just come out of Lee’s building. It was a nice sunny day. Not too hot. We were walking along and suddenly out of nowhere – I think from the other side of Central Park West – up he popped. White guy. He had on a black baseball cap, pulled down over his forehead. T-shirt and jeans, I think. Glasses. An intense look. ‘Hey, Mr Child,’ he says, ‘I’m a great fan of yours.’
The whole Lennon story flashed back to mind, the shooting in the street outside his building, by a fan. Mark David Chapman probably said to Lennon, ‘I’m a great fan of yours.’
So naturally I thought, Uh-oh, here we go, when is he going to pull the gun out?
‘I’m grateful to you for your novels, of course,’ the guy in the baseball cap said, getting into time with us as we walked north, highly respectfully, ‘but I also admire everything you’ve written about the art of writing.’
‘Really?’ said Lee. Calm and composed.
‘Yes, your work has been a great inspiration to me.’ Turned out he was an up-and-coming thriller