From:
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Lee Child
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Sent:
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28 August 2014
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To:
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andymartinink
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Subject:
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Wild Idea
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Cool. Be there at 7.30 a.m. Monday and we’ll head to the breakfast show. (Note Monday is Labor Day – subways will be running a Sunday schedule, but there should be cabs about and the streets will be quiet.)
From:
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andymartinink
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Sent:
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28 August 2014
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To:
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Lee Child
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Subject:
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Wild Idea
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See you 7.30 Monday – good early start!
1 THE END
It ended the way it was always going to have to end. With a burial. Lee stubbed out a final Camel filter cigarette (except it was anything but final) and breathed out a cloud of New York Times number-one bestseller smoke. Leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the last sentence of Personal:
O’Day was to be awarded three more medals posthumously, and a bridge was to be named after him, on a North Carolina state route, over a narrow stream that most of the year was dry.
Always good to end with a death, of course. Posthumously … it was like hammering a last nail into the coffin. Or more, planting a gravestone. There was a finality to it. A valediction. But then it was a pointlessly inadequate memorial. He liked anything to do with bridges and routes (so much sheer hard labour had gone into them), but he particularly liked the dried-up stream. So the bridge was pointless too.
And his own stream, the great flow of inspiration that had kept the novel afloat for the last eight months – hadn’t that about dried up now too? A narrow stream that most of the year was dry. Could that be … me?
What the hell, it was all like a diary anyway, only masquerading as an adventure.
The End. He didn’t write it down. Didn’t need to. He knew he was supposed to put it in for the benefit of the typesetters, but he didn’t see the necessity. That great sense of an ending – the release, the relief, the closure, that satisfying last expulsion of smoke – it all had to be contained in the rhythm and feel of the last sentence. The end had to be nailed right there. Those concluding lines, like the final notes of a Beethoven symphony, a coda, had to have some kind of dying cadence to them, a falling away, an elegiac cessation that said, ‘I’ve said everything I needed to say.’ So you really didn’t need to write The End too. It offended his sense of economy. Two words too many. If it was the right sentence, the sentence would say it for him.
He couldn’t hit send just yet though. He would have to wait a couple of days, let it percolate in his head, see what subliminal second thoughts might bubble up. But all the loose ends had been tied up with a bow. Personal, his nineteenth Jack Reacher novel – done.
Word count: 107,000. Substantially across the crucial 100,000 line. That’s what it said on the contract. Anything shorter and it would be too short. Still, 107,000 was relatively short for him. The Enemy, for example, was a full 140k. But it was enough. His books had been getting shorter and tighter. He loved the beginning, that gorgeous feeling when nothing has been screwed up yet. Loved the ending too, that great rush towards the finale, when it was all downhill. But the middle – the middle was always a struggle – by around page two it was like rolling the rock up the hill again day after day. He’d developed a cunning strategy for Personal though, had pretty much outwitted the middle – he just left it out, fast-forwarded straight from the beginning right through to the end, without a pause, non-stop. Problem solved.
Anyway, it had been a blast, the whole way – Paris, London, Romford – so fuck it, it would have to do. He wasn’t going to change it now.
He glanced at the time on the computer screen. 10.26, Tuesday night. April 15, 2014. (Reacher, he considered, would know what time it was automatically, without having to check with a mere machine, but of course he – Lee – was not Reacher, he had to keep reminding himself. There was so much Reacher could do – about the one thing he couldn’t do was write a novel about his own experience. Which was why Reacher still needed him.) He’d written the first line on September 1, 2013. It had to be September 1. Every year. Without fail. Now it was over.
Lee turned his head away from the screen and looked out of the big window to his left. Tonight the Empire State Building was lit up orange and green – pistachio, like some dumb giant icecream cone. It didn’t use to look that way. Once it had had only clean vapour lights, white or maybe yellow, so it was like looking up at heaven. Now, with the coming of LED, it could look like anything anybody wanted – it could be red, white and blue on July 4, for example. But mostly it looked like a bad 1970s disco light show. It used to be an immense, stately edifice, he thought. Now it’s ice cream. Like dressing Jack Reacher up like a disco dancer. It was this view that had convinced him to come and live here, on 22nd Street, on the twenty-fifth floor of a building across from the Flatiron Building. Now – cheapened, stupid, gaudy – the view made it less of a wrench to leave. Farewell Empire State, I loved you once. Or maybe twice.
He still remembered that feeling he’d had when he first came here. The romance. With the Empire State framed in the window, it would be like living in the offices of the Daily Planet in Metropolis: oh look, isn’t that mild-mannered, neatly suited Clark Kent up there in the clouds, looking out masterfully on the world (with lovely Lois Lane by his side)? And wouldn’t his superhuman powers extend to writing too? It was logical. Wouldn’t a writer from Krypton be all-powerful, all-conquering – a Superman among writers?
My Home in America. That other great work of literature that always sprang back to mind – was never really out of his mind. His genesis and exodus. The book of commandments that had guided him here in the first place. He had come across it, aged five, in the old Elmwood Public Library, in Birmingham. It was just lying there on the floor. He’d picked it up. A stiff, cardboard sort of book, mostly illustrations with just a few words. With pictures of children in their faraway homes – he remembered a New England colonial ‘saltbox’, an isolated farmhouse on the prairies, and a Californian beach house with surfboards and palm trees. But the picture he always went back to (he borrowed the book and took it home and eventually returned it, much thumbed, but he had carried it around with him in his head ever since, pristine and perfect, a portable Garden of Eden) was the one of the apple-cheeked boy who lived in New York. He lived on the nth floor of some lofty Manhattan apartment block, reaching right up into the sky, with a bird flying by. And he was looking out of his window at the Empire State Building. Lee Child was that boy, half a century later. He had always wanted to be him, had just been temporarily trapped in the wrong country or the wrong body.
It was like a brain transplant – or metempsychosis – or déjà-vu. He must have been that New York boy in a previous