Lee loves repetition. But he is also sensitive to overdoing it. One of his immediate revisions was to take out one repetition too many. I had become quite attached to the safe enough phrase. Ironic (with Reacher in town, who is safe?) and incantatory (like they have to keep saying it to themselves). But where previously he had So, safe enough. No prying eyes, now he has only, Therefore, no prying eyes. The second paragraph first sentence contains safe enough already. The third paragraph, as we know, is nothing but ‘safe enough’. The point was made. No need to overdo. Their assumption of some kind of step-by-step irrefutable logic in what they are doing is anything but well founded, especially when Reacher is about to step off the train.
And when it came to the description of the hog pen, Lee wondered if he had been over-embellishing. Enjoying it too much. Rubbing it in. The dirt was always freshly chewed up comes out, in the slightly more compressed version, The dirt was always chewed up.
‘We don’t need freshly. Adverb. One word too many. Better styling. Economy.’
I wasn’t interrogating him: he was volunteering these thoughts. I wasn’t doing any analysing. He was analysing himself. Being really rather professorial. Maybe he could get a job as writer-in-residence, at Columbia for example. For the moment, I was his only student. This wasn’t an inquisition. Lee had made a big pot of coffee and we were knocking it back, mulling things over. Seminar-style.
There was something he hadn’t changed but still wasn’t sure about. ‘I’m still not sure about shit and piss,’ he says. ‘I want something different, but it has to be honest. Would they use “waste”? I don’t know. “Ordure”, for example, is clearly a non-starter.’
I had thrown in ‘ordure’ just for the hell of it and got it thrown right back in my face.
He turned to me and said, with feeling, almost like a reprimand: ‘But it has to be honest.’ Lee likes to stress certain words, mentally italicizing.
Only one thing went wrong, and it happened halfway through the job.
Halfway? On second thoughts, Lee reckoned this was ‘too retrospective’. He wanted something more immediate. Now there is no halfway etc. It’s right then: it happened right then.
I was thinking, there is still a problem with the timing though. If the train comes through only five hours late, that places it at midnight, when they are only just starting work. Shouldn’t it be more like six? This was my issue, the one I didn’t dare mention to Lee, in case it put him off (or he head-butted me in response). He would take care of it, I was sure.
He was more focused on the train going by at that point: what it looked like, not the timetable. The hallucinatory effect. He had swung back to point of view. ‘It has to be like a vision in a dream. I wanted to emphasize that they were dumbstruck and there was nothing they could do about it. It’s beyond their control.’
Another thing. Lee didn’t want Reacher stepping down into the dirt. He often got dirty, of course. But dirt here has been too closely associated with the rural natives and the hogs. We don’t want Reacher getting right in the hog pen, surely? So when the train eases to a stop and the doors wheeze open, now we have: Jack Reacher stepped down onto a concrete ramp in the lee of a grain silo bigger than an apartment house. It’s more solid. ‘I wanted it slightly higher tech, not dirt. We’ve had enough dirt. Dirt is for the hicks. And we need to know it’s all industrial agriculture, not bucolic at all.’
Later that day I’m with Lee in the back of a limousine riding to another TV studio downtown. Chauffeur-driven. All very suave. The sales figures were just coming in from the UK. First week of publication. Personal was number one. Of course. But the really interesting thing I noticed, poring over the stats, was that it was outselling the next thirteen combined. ‘Wow, it’s a massacre,’ I exclaimed. ‘The opposition has been comprehensively annihilated.’
‘I almost feel bad about it,’ said Lee, barely suppressing a wicked grin.
The also-rans included people like Martin Amis and his holocaust novel, Zone of Interest.
‘It’s good to have the literary guys around,’ Lee said. He stretched his long legs out comfortably.
‘Are they dinosaurs?’
‘Writing is essentially a branch of the entertainment industry – like football is – and I’m Chelsea, at the moment. Almost exactly. Doing well on the pitch, but only because there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes talent and investment supporting me.’
We had been talking about the Premiership earlier. His old team Aston Villa had made a flying start to the season. Seven points out of a possible nine. (‘But I’m sure they’ll break my heart later. They always do.’) Whereas my team, West Ham, had only managed to scrape three together. ‘Surprisingly, the American system is much more egalitarian. The revenue-pooling system, the draft, it levels the playing field, gives every team a chance. In Britain … remember when Villa were winning the league and Ipswich were right up there challenging them? Now … the first really are first, and the last are last. It’s harder than ever to make up the difference.’
A big fat New York bus cut brazenly across our car. The driver was spluttering after stomping on the brakes. ‘The bus is bigger than you,’ Lee said reassuringly, leaning forwards. ‘And he doesn’t care.’ He could see the point of view of a bus. He knew what it felt like to be a juggernaut.
I bumped into Joel Rose that evening. Joel is a writer, of the noir persuasion (e.g. Kill Kill Faster Faster and corpse-strewn graphic novels), with mad-professor hair, goatee, and John Lennon specs. He is less successful than Lee. Everyone is less successful than Lee. So naturally I happened to mention those sales stats. Lee Child annihilating the competition and all that. The Napoleon of literature. We were standing around on the corner of Charlton and Varick in the West Village. Joel thought about it for a while. Weighed the pros and cons. Then gave utterance to his considered judgement:
‘FUCK YOU, LEE CHILD!’
9 THE SONG OF REACHER
‘Professor Andy Martin,’ Lee says to me. ‘Come on in.’
Apparently Maggie had been checking my academic credentials, such as they were. His people didn’t want some maniac creeping up on him in the middle of the night. Or stealing his Renoir or whatever. Technically, I wasn’t even a professor (I was only ‘Doctor’), but Lee didn’t seem too worried about the detail. He had an unwarranted faith in the moral integrity of academics.
He made coffee. He reckoned there was some milk somewhere but he wasn’t too sure about its status. I took it black.
Lee hadn’t shaved; he had Reacher-worthy stubble. But he was in jovial mood, really enjoying being at the beginning of something. He liked it so much he didn’t really want to leave the beginning alone.
He had been thinking about the word ‘like’. Of course it was in the second sentence of chapter one – simile – but he was thinking of the contemporary verbal tic (I’d mentioned it in some article he had read to do with roaming around New York like a Trappist monk for twenty-four hours). ‘It’s actually quite economical. I like like. When someone says to you, “He was like ‘I’m so into you’,” it’s not that he actually said, “I am so into you.” It’s more, “He behaved in such a way that a reasonable observer might conclude he was so into me.” Which carries an element of doubt. Some kind of approximation has been conceded. So really you’re abbreviating the sentence, and implicitly acknowledging the power of impression, while also acknowledging the impossibility of knowing for sure … but it’s all still there. What was it Ezra Pound said – all poetry is condensation?’
His own chapter one remained stubbornly condensed too. We went into his office and he gave me a fresh printout of