I glanced at the walls of his office. They were blissfully devoid of little bits of paper stuck to the plaster.
‘A lot of readers come up to me and say – or send me emails and say – “How come Reacher gets into all this mayhem all the time? Can there be that much drama in these little towns?” You could do Waiting for Reacher, but I’m not into that.’
He had seen Waiting for Godot about forty times, he reckoned. (‘Forty!?’ ‘Thirty-nine maybe.’) He denounced a recent production involving Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. It was too local, too northern, and they weren’t really trying. Self-indulgent. I said something about Hamlet, about how not much happened for long periods, it was all anticipation and retrospection on things that really had happened off. Lee didn’t fully approve of Hamlet either. Self-indulgent. Too long. Were they paid by the minute? ‘Only Macbeth would you leave alone. All the others you would want to speed up. I hate these Richard IIIs which are supposed to be authentic and they’re just too long and slow.’
He wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the comedy in Shakespeare either. ‘It’s just not funny enough.’
I asked, ‘Do you ever want a comic touch in your books?’
‘Of course Reacher has more in the way of sardonic humour than he is given credit for. But I’m allergic to comic thrillers. We’re talking about killing here. That doesn’t seem like the right place for a lot of humour. There are moments – when Reacher leaves a body in the trunk of a car for the rest of the gang to find.’
‘Classic Reacher sense of humour.’
‘But I’m not going out of my way to try and be funny. Look …’ He scanned the screen. Only one thing went wrong – that is almost funny. It’s wry.’
He kept on contemplating what he had written. ‘It indirectly involves Reacher. The train is Reacher. Another big guy – as you say, an alternative to Keever.’
‘As big as a silo.’
All this talk of size brought us round to the subject of how much he hadn’t written exactly. On that particular day. We understood – it was implicit – that it was all about the quality not the quantity. On the other hand Lee likes to crank it out, if possible. Steadily. Day by day.
‘So is that the first page, then?’
‘It’s two pages – of a book. Five hundred words. Half a per cent of a book. On day one. That’s not bad. On a good day, fairly relaxed, I can do fifteen hundred words.’ Lee likes to use the word efficient or efficiency in relation to his work. ‘The efficiency is severely hampered by not knowing what’s coming next. So it’s inefficient. But it’s efficient because I don’t do revisions.’
‘Not at all?’
‘Not much. And I certainly don’t let other people do revisions for me.’ Which started him off on another of his rants. ‘Look at this word,’ he says. ‘Waterbed. Or nothingness or whatever. Barring catastrophe or the end of the world, I know that this will be published, and in this form. Waterbed will remain. Right there, where I’ve put it. So I care about that word. In the movies, it’s a completely unreal feeling. How can you care about this word or that one when you know it’s not going to be there further down the line. A lot of other people are going to come along and rewrite it. Waterbed will be gone. You can’t care about it in those circumstances. This is why I’m writing novels and not films.’
Feeling. It was all about the feeling. Everyone thought that feeling was the thing that was left out in a Lee Child novel. Whereas the truth was that it was all feeling, all the way through, every last word. And it had to feel right.
‘That is why I can’t change anything. The book is like a diary of how I felt at the time. I can’t change that.’
‘I lost count of the cigarettes. Do you think I should be adding up the butts? Making a tally? People probably want to know what the optimal number of cigarettes is, how many per thousand words.’
‘Too many cigarettes. End of a paragraph, end of a sentence: another cigarette. Normally I’d have had more coffee too.’ He turned and looked right at me. ‘I am writing on the verge of a stroke. I’m teetering on the edge.’
‘Hey, you haven’t finished the book yet. You’ve barely started. We need to know who the hell Keever is.’
It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. Is that why he had let me in on the whole thing – to bear witness, just in case this was the last time? Before it was too late. Despite a solid collection of bad habits, he looked healthy enough. For now. I needed a full medical report. A brain scan maybe. Lungs too.
Lee was like an ageing boxer. Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier coming back for one more big fight. Another twelve rounds in the ring. Another payday. But conscious all the while this could be his last shot at the title. Right up against the odds. And I was his only spectator.
Which reminded me, just a little, of Reacher: this is what he does, he bears witness. Without Reacher it’s just another tree falling in the forest, silently.
The old split between ‘office’ (downstairs) and ‘home’ (upstairs), in the Flatiron district, had gone. Now it was all one. Which was probably why we were quarantined off, in the dedicated office, at the back of the apartment. Lee reckoned the trouble with working from home was that you are never done, you are always on. And so it proved. He got back to me later that night with some small but significant revisions to what he had already done in the afternoon. A few points had been nagging him.
This is the email he sent me:
Went through what I wrote again and made minor changes that I think snap the voice into better focus – following James Wood’s Flaubert theory [in How Fiction Works], the ‘semi-close 3rd-person’ voice there should subtly modify to better characterize the actors. Now I think I have it down, so at the page break we’re really going to feel the country villains stepping off stage, and Reacher stepping on.
There was one thing about what he had written that, to my way of thinking, was definitely wrong. But I didn’t like to mention it to him. I thought it would be stepping over the line. Like making some kind of sarcastic remark to Reacher.
8 FUCK YOU, LEE CHILD!
Following day. Back in the office. The first few sentences remained the same. Keever was still Keever. ‘I think Keever will always be Keever,’ Lee said (he admitted later that maybe there was an echo of Cheever in the name, i.e. John Cheever the writer).
But then came the comma. So he did revise after all! He felt the need for a comma. It would make it more ‘rueful and contemplative’, he said. And they would use the air for a guy like Keever had, overnight, become And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever.
The comma picked out and emphasized the importance of Keever, but it also served to draw attention to the thought process of the parties unknown – or rather known but unnamed – who were preparing to bury him. ‘The punctuation not only makes it stronger – it reflects their being mentally slow. You can hear them saying that.’
And then there is a whole word changed in the next sentence. ‘It seemed to me spotter sounded too trivial.’ Now that sentence reads: They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.
In the second paragraph, the only man-made structure their side of the horizon was a problem for Lee. Whose horizon? he wanted to know. It was too definite. And possibly ‘confusing’. ‘Here they are in the middle of nowhere. They don’t even know where the horizon is.’ In the revised draft this reads: the only man-made structure their side of any horizon …
‘It emphasizes their position