Andy Martin spent a year with Lee Child, watching him write a Jack Reacher novel, asking questions, discussing life. These are his stories.
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I knew it was serious when he offered to pour me a mug of black coffee. We wandered into the kitchen and he refilled the coffee machine.
‘For the first time, I’m actually worried.’
‘About?’
‘Sales, obviously. We’ve got the new Stieg and the new Franzen coming out at the same time. It’s going to be tough.’
Lee had written a very fair and balanced review of The Girl in the Spider’s Web (by David Lagercrantz)—the Stieg Larsson sequel—for the New York Times (and kindly sent me a preview). Thoughtful. Shrewd. Pros and cons. ‘I thought your review was very fair and balanced,’ I said.
‘What I really wanted to do was to kill it. Stomp on it. Like a cockroach. It’s competition. I had to grit my teeth not to trash it totally.’
I sort of wondered what he thought of Jonathan Franzen. His name came up from time to time but I realized I didn’t know what he thought of his writing as opposed to the myth and the hype. And I wasn’t about to find out either, because he raised another question entirely.
‘And then Harper Lee is still selling.’ Go Set a Watchman, the new old one.
‘Oh come on!’ I spluttered, having read that phony non-novel over the summer. ‘That is crap!’ And then added, ‘Sorry,’ feeling that my one-word review was perhaps a little unfair, but also that the other Lee was not even in the running. Unless it was fixed. (Need I add, I know nothing. When I finally get around to opening the ‘Bestsellers’ page of the New York Times, dated Sunday, 30 August, guess what I find? Yep. Fiction. 1. GO SET A WATCHMAN.)
Lee smiled. Oh well, one down. ‘What they did for Larsson makes me wonder … Is there anyone else out there who could carry on the Reacher series?’
I scratched my head, like the aircon engineers, trying to think of someone. ‘Like the James Bond franchise. Of course, unlike Larsson, unlike Fleming, you’re not dead yet. You’re not planning to retire young like that Jamaican guy you met on the plane are you?’
‘I can’t! There’s no one to take over the store.’
‘You must have had offers.’
‘There’s a number of people hinting at it. Ghost-writers.’
‘Almost like writing your will and there are all these relatives poised to swoop. Vultures. “Hey, Lee, you know, when you’re dead and all, I wonder what happens to good old Reacher … Got any plans?”’
‘Yeah, that kind of thing.’
‘Anyone?’
‘Nah, not really.’
‘Carl Cederström—he’d do a good job. He’s Swedish.’
‘Yeah, he’s got the umlauts.’ Lee liked Scandi names, thought they would have an edge. ‘And he’s tall.’
‘What about Big Blue?’
Lee had recently visited the IBM artificial intelligence research lab (invited there by our friend Quiller). I assumed they had stolen some part of his brain to incorporate into their electronic neocortex.
He was generous. ‘There is a madness to Reacher. Big Blue could hit maybe 90% of it. But it’s the off-the-wall stuff it can’t do.’
‘Make Me, for example.’
‘Come on, who else is going to come up with Reacher reciting the Gettysburg Address in the bath? Would anyone else do that? Who is going to go there?’
‘Or the name “Mother’s Rest”? That is so idiosyncratic. Almost absurd.’
‘I guess I’d better keep going then.’
‘I know, what about …?’ I mentioned a couple of names, one man and one woman. Maybe they could do it?
‘Them!’ he exploded. ‘In their self-published world, they just make me feel that whatever it is I do is the Real Thing by comparison!’ He wasn’t scornful, just conscious of a differendum. I think it was why he liked academics so much. It reminded me of something he had said when I told him I was off to go to work in Starbucks. The kind of thing he refused to do. It wasn’t just the cigarettes, he argued. ‘They’re all writing novels in Starbucks! Who isn’t writing a novel with a latte in one hand?’ He spat out the word latte with a particular disgust. Coffee was coffee and milk was milk and never the twain shall meet. ‘Starbucks should have a competition—the Best Novels Written in Starbucks.’ He made the kind of derisive noise that suggested he wouldn’t feel worried by that kind of competition. He was going to be head judge—and executioner. They were bound to be frothy, latte-lite books. But he was worried about Franzen and Lagercrantz. Big guns. Not just black but double espressos.
I’d always liked that self-confident line of Reacher’s: ‘There are only five or six guys in the world who are maybe as good as I am.’ By good he meant good at killing. ‘What are the chances that your guy is going to be one of them?’ (When I checked back with Lee about which novel that line came from he said, ‘The Visitor? [Running Blind in the UK]. Hmm, could be any one of them really.’) What were the chances that Franzen and Lagercrantz could be bigger and better?
Lee was up against it. In fact, he was (as Sartre would say) doomed to fail. I had only just realized. All the time I had been watching him write Make Me, the whole of the previous twelve months, I had been convinced that I was watching the Numero Uno. Something like Socrates and Schwarzenegger all rolled into one. The Napoleon of literature. Beyond compare (we had agreed to leave J. K. Rowling out of it). And, it was true, he was writing beautiful sentences and an epic book. But, coming out again into the real world beyond the precincts of that hushed, orderly library that was Lee’s fortress on Central Park West, Child Tower, it was obvious: he was just one guy, up against hordes. The mob. The book would do OK for a while. But, as the economist John Maynard Keynes shrewdly pointed out, ‘In the long run, we’re all dead.’ Lee would live or die by the numbers. And the fact was, even if you got to be a bestseller, you couldn’t be a bestseller for ever. Not unless you were the Bible or Shakespeare. The other guys were Lilliputians, but there were a lot of them. Even if you got to No. 1, all it meant was that there was a long line of contenders waiting to knock you off your pedestal.
Even Napoleon had Waterloo and St Helena on his CV. Dead aged fifty-one. Lee was nearly a decade older.
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Excerpted from With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher. Courtesy of the publisher, Polity Books. Copyright © 2019 by Andy Martin.
