Heather Martin is the authorized biographer of Lee Child and the author of The Reacher Guy (Constable at Little, Brown in the UK and Pegasus Books in the US)
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‘The Child is father of the Man’
—William Wordsworth
Most children enjoy stories about kids getting away from their parents, even the ones who are perfectly happy at home. The young Jim Grant was never very happy at home. For as long as he could remember he had sought out books about feuding brothers, orphans and changelings, daring escapades and survival against the odds: reading, for the boy who would one day become Lee Child, was all about escape.
The first book he fell in love with was My Home in America, a twelve-page picture book he discovered at the library aged four. On each page was an image of a different type of American home: a California bungalow, a New England salt box, a Pennsylvania log cabin, a prairie farmhouse with windmill and water pumps. One page was captioned ‘New York skyscraper’ and featured a fair-haired blue-eyed boy of around five years old, sitting on the window ledge gazing out at the Empire State Building, with the city lit up like Christmas around it. It was like Jim was seeing himself for the first time, more clearly than in a mirror.
‘That was me,’ Lee told everyone who ever interviewed him who ever wanted to know who he was. ‘It was there that I belonged. Not in Birmingham. That was my city. That was my home.’
The sense of alienation was deep-rooted. Writing for Scotland’s Sunday Post about Shuggie Bain, the novel that had won the Booker Prize when Lee was a judge, he said of its author Douglas Stuart: ‘He’s a guy who, just like me, had worked hard and escaped and was now living in America as a way of transcending [his] upbringing. You had a love-hate relationship with where you came from, family, city, country. You are reluctant to say you had to escape but really, you did have to escape.’
At Sheffield University in the early Seventies Jim met and married a girl from New York, though it would be another twenty-three years before he got his first home in America, a sprawling wooden house in Westchester, and another six till he finally moved into a high-rise on East 22nd Street with a view of the Empire State Building across Madison Square Park. But by the time he was granted residency in 1998 he had visited the US precisely one hundred times.
The first was in 1974. He and Jane got a student fare with Air France to Montreal, then flew down to La Guardia on Eastern Airlines. They circled Manhattan for half an hour before landing and Jim thought he had ‘died and gone to heaven’. But amid all the wonders of New York what impressed him most was seeing his future father-in-law reading a hardback he’d bought new from a shop. Back in the UK Jim had been known to steal the odd book he was desperate to read on release, such as Alex Haley’s Roots. For a long time he could afford only 10p books from the secondhand bookstore.
I’d been with twenty-first-century Lee Child when he was shopping for books and had seen him leave the store not with a bag but a box. His appetite for reading had not dimmed, and he was a passionate supporter of the industry. He was always being asked to list his favourite books, and there was one he returned to with an insistence that stuck in my mind.
Partly because it was French. Daddy (original title) by Loup Durand (who like Lee started writing around the age of forty) was published in 1987, then in English the following year. But Lee knew he couldn’t have read it then. ‘It would have been a year or so later,’ he told me, ‘because in those days I had to wait for the paperback.’ He hadn’t yet caught up with his father-in-law. The paperback I bought was published in 1989 by London’s Arrow Books; this was also the year Lee first read John D. MacDonald (The Long Silver Rain) and, inspired, decided to write a book. Five years later he would begin work on Killing Floor – then called Bad Luck and Trouble – while holding down a full-time job at Manchester’s Granada Television.
The front cover of Daddy features a single grey eye in close-up, reflecting a red swastika. The jeopardy was in the tension between image and title. The front cover blurb reads:
HE HOLDS THE KEY TO $350 MILLION LOCKED IN HIS HEAD
HE’S BEING HUNTED BY THE NAZIS
HE’S ELEVEN YEARS OLD
It might as well have been written for Jim Grant, whether aged eleven or thirty-five.
It wasn’t, of course, written about him. Or was it?
Here is the opening:
‘Thomas the Younger opened his eyes. September 18th, 1942, his eleventh birthday, had dawned. It couldn’t have been more than five o’clock. He peered out of the window. Fiery shafts of light were transfixing the sky and plunging into the sea. A leaden silence hung in the air, which was already stiflingly hot.
An unnatural silence.
Thomas scanned the motionless countryside without detecting anything or anyone that might have explained why he’d woken up so abruptly, or why the machine in his head should have sounded a sudden alarm, or why he’d darted to the window in three swift strides.’
I was reminded immediately of Past Tense, where Reacher is inexplicably woken at precisely a minute past three in the morning (he doesn’t need to check the clock) by some barely perceptible sound that had scared the primitive cortex. Like Thomas, he goes to the window to scan his surroundings, and like Thomas, puzzled, instinctively trusts his (preternatural) instinct for danger.
The more I looked, the more the biographer saw.
Wartime setting. Jim’s Irish grandfather lost a leg at Gallipoli. His father fought in the European Campaign. The first film Jim saw at the cinema was The Dam Busters, the second was Reach for the Sky. He breathed in war stories along with the smog, but thanks to the sacrifices of preceding generations there was nothing left for him to do – his own skirmishes were limited to neighbourhood bomb sites.
Absent (wealthy) parents. The stuff of boyhood fantasy.
Idealised mother. A corrective to Jim’s own and a Resistance fighter, like the young Josephine Reacher, mysteriously introduced in Killing Floor as ‘a French civilian’, her past not disclosed until The Enemy, eight books later. Josephine was Reacher’s mentor, as was Maria Weber to her son in Daddy. This was not true of Audrey Grant.
Books. Like Jim, Thomas has a taste for popular series: he’s just read Man With the Club Foot by Valentine Williams (a First World War tale of spies and brothers) which he considers as good as L. J. Vance’s The Lone Wolf (about a jewel thief turned detective). Later he compares himself to Rouletabille in Le Château Noir (The Black Castle) by Gaston Leroux, the French counterpart to Conan Doyle and Poe. Temporarily rescued, ‘he didn’t want for much except for books’.
Cars. Jim was born near the Browns Lane plant in Coventry, where Jaguar cars were made (coincidentally, Jaguar is the title of another Durand novel). But his all-time favourite was the Bentley, which he worked into Killing Floor for the sheer joy of it, perhaps hoping that the incantatory power of a bestselling series might one day conjure it up for real (it did). Sadly the white Bentley in Daddy is a signifier of evil, but there is a ‘good’ car too:
‘The car was still there, nestling like a jewel in the manmade grotto it had taken weeks to hew from the living rock. Thomas depressed a switch, and a naked bulb revealed it in all its incredible splendour. It was a Hispano-Suiza J-12 coupé type 68A with coachwork by Franay and a thirteen-foot wheelbase. The colour scheme was silver-grey and black, the superb stylised stork surmounting the radiator cap cast in solid silver. Everything about the vehicle scintillated and shone. Even in the semi-darkness, it seemed to have a life of its own.’
The Hispano-Suiza derives an almost magical power from its connection with Maria; it’s like the boy hero’s Patronus or spirit daemon. Young Jim was in thrall to a car too: his Corgi R-Type Continental, ‘black over grey with great suspension and a spare wheel and sparkling jewel headlights’ .
Information. Like Jim, Thomas is hyper-observant with a near-photographic memory.
‘He examined the contents of his mind. Nothing wrong there: the machine was functioning smoothly, sifting every detail, scouring the countryside inch by inch for the smallest detail that wasn’t as it should have been. He could trust it not to overlook a thing.’
He registers and stores information for recall as required, which is how Lee researched his books, and like Lee, Thomas would surely never lose a game of trivial pursuit.
Logic. Like Jim, he is merciless in his logic, often at some emotional cost. It was difficult to live with a well-oiled machine ticking over in his head night and day.
‘Thomas smiled back, but the wheels in his head went on turning: the torment persisted. He had re-examined his line of reasoning and found it logical – inescapably so.’
Unsurprisingly – not for nothing the mirrored reflection of the cover image – his only worthy challenger is (per the blurb) ‘the bizarre and brilliant Gestapo agent’ Laemmle (or ‘Yellow-Eyes’ as Thomas calls him), whose fetishistically rational mind requires him to be an atheist.
‘He believed in nothing on principle, and his sole interest in religions and political ideologies was that of a man who studied human idiosyncrasies as an entomologist might study the habits of the bee.’
From about a third of the way through the book the metaphor of chess takes over, with both Laemmle and Thomas engaging in constant ‘mental impersonation’ of the kind repeatedly advocated by Lee’s hero too. ‘This is my thing,’ Reacher says in Echo Burning, in a rare confessional outburst. ‘This is what I’m built for. The thrill of the chase. I’m an investigator, Alice, always was, always will be. I’m a hunter.’ To be a good hunter you had to think like the bad guy, which meant being doubly on your guard because you were constantly flirting with evil. Laemmle’s ‘burgeoning hunter’s instinct’ inspires him with ‘a positive lust for the chase’ that quickly degenerates into a sordid lust for the prepubescent boy.
There is a disconcerting kinship between hunter and hunted in Daddy, as between Holmes and Moriarty in Conan Doyle, Erik Lönnrot and Red Scharlach in Jorge Luis Borges (‘Death and the Compass’) and Reacher and Horace Wiley in Lee Child (Night School). Thomas finds his foe ‘intriguing to the point of fascination’. ‘The game has really started now,’ he muses when first they meet. He and Laemmle are as one in their intolerance of stupidity; when Lee was invited back to King Edward’s School to deliver a Speech Day address, he warned the assembled students that the biggest problem they would face in life was that of being ‘intelligent people required to live in a profoundly stupid world’.
Numbers. Thomas clearly shares Reacher’s (Jim’s) affinity for numbers: it’s the fundamental premise of the plot. He also shares Reacher’s chronometric sense of time, a legacy of Jim’s eighteen years as a transmission controller at Granada Television, where every action was measured in seconds.
Compulsion to win. Thomas ‘never liked losing – not one little bit’. ‘It’s always win or lose with you, isn’t it?’ Susan Turner observes in Never Go Back, to which Reacher replies: ‘Is there a third option?’ It was a recurrent theme. ‘I could feel the stupid breathless urge to win,’ admits Reacher in chapter two of the handwritten manuscript of Killing Floor. And although these self-psychologising words didn’t survive the cut, they lend credence to Lee’s jokey claim that ‘Reacher is me, but with the violence toned down to make it plausible’. ‘I’ll always win,’ he said when recounting a dispute with the taxman. ‘It’s my greatest weakness.’
Fearlessness. ‘There was no fear in the startlingly grey eyes; on the contrary, they were cold and keen and penetrating in the extreme,’ notes Laemmle of his prey. Lee’s school friend recalled how Jim would face down the bullies: ‘He had these enormously long arms and was kind of fearless.’ And we all know the story of how, at a movie on some Marine base in the Pacific, the six-year-old Reacher launches himself straight at the monster rather than recoiling in terror like the other kids, his response time measured at three-quarters of a second.
Loneliness. Thomas draws strength from his memories of mother Maria: ‘She’d told him scores of times: to play any game really well, you had to be on your own. Well, now he was.’ So was Reacher, mostly. He has a love-hate relationship with solitude. I’d written a whole chapter on loneliness in The Reacher Guy. Lee had even written a song about it.
All in all it’s a persuasive check list. But if I were to choose just one thing that binds Child to Durand it would be their obsessive preoccupation with the extraordinary. That Reacher is extraordinary is what matters most about him, Lee concluded, after we had spoken many times – he’d arisen directly out of Jim’s boyhood dread of being trapped by middle-class mediocrity. ‘It was stupid to treat him like an ordinary youngster,’ Thomas reflects as Daddy approaches its climax. ‘That he’d never been.’
For both writers, character is king. Durand’s novel is brimming with quasi-mythic characters bordering on caricature (it was later made into a classic bande dessinée illustrated by Belgian René Follet). Of the four Spanish bodyguards assigned by Maria to protect her child, two in particular are reminiscent of Reacher.
Javier Coll is ‘a very tall, gaunt man with a face like stone and eyes fit to chill your blood’. Many were afraid of him.
‘Javier spoke little, or at any rate infrequently, and he seldom smiled. His dark eyes were on the wide side, and you felt the weight of his gaze when it rested on you. He was pretty old – forty at least – and thin as a rake, but watch out: he could lift a hundredweight sack one-handed as easily as you could do the same with a bag of sweets, and he’d crack you a nut between his thumb and forefinger just like that.’
Miquel the Invisible is equally taciturn: ‘you seldom saw him and he seldom spoke.’ ‘“The more I hide the less people see of me,” said Miquel – or rather, said Miquel’s voice.’ Even Thomas is ‘not the type to say a thing for no good reason’.
‘Long experience had taught me that absolute silence is the best way,’ says the newly minted Reacher in chapter one of Killing Floor.
‘Say something, and it can be misheard. Misunderstood. Misinterpreted. It can get you convicted. It can get you killed. […] I said nothing.’
He’s good at staying out of sight too, ‘looking for the shadows, not on the verdant savannah but on the grey nighttime streets’ (Blue Moon). Jim was a ‘slippery, shadowy figure’, his old English teacher told me, who would ‘slither and slide’ his way around the school like someone either conducting covert surveillance or seeking to evade it. ‘I’m very stealthy,’ Lee admitted, when he surprised me once at the entrance to a Manhattan diner.
Lee had read Daddy ‘probably three times’. ‘I always felt the kid was too non-violent for my tastes,’ he told me. ‘At eleven I would have fancied my chances against the Gestapo guy.’ What he most responded to were Javier and Miquel – physical proxies for the mother’s care and concern, and the reassurance of tribal belonging. ‘In that fiction gives you what you don’t get, I think that’s what impressed me most.
Thomas the Younger, old beyond his years, is finally unburdened, achieving salvation through the return – the love – of his father, Quartermain. ‘I’m no Pistol Pete,’ the American says to his son as they begin shyly to form a bond. ‘I know,’ Thomas said, ‘you’re an ordinary man.’
‘Quartermain felt stifled. He drew a deep breath.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing, being an ordinary man?”
Thomas didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “A good thing – a very good thing, actually.”’
Lee Child is not a teenage boy. His father, like Reacher’s, is dead. There was no moment of tender rapprochement. No reconciliation, no redemption. But in retirement he too was finally freed of a burden. He’d done extraordinary, twenty-four times over. Ordinary had been beaten to a pulp.
‘A unique thriller – I’ve never read anything quite like it. It has the depth and texture of Le Carré, yet the tension of Forsyth. How many novels scare you, make you think, and ultimately move you to tears?’
So writes William Diehl on the back cover of my copy of Daddy, and I have to say I agree.
I thought back to the fiery shafts of light transfixing the sky on page one, and to the somewhat perfunctory scene of the burning car about half way through the book. Then I thought of the inferno of A Wanted Man (chapter thirty-six), like a scene shot by Terence Malik in the magic hour:
‘A mile out the fire took on a shape, wide at the base, narrow above. Half a mile out Reacher saw strange jets and fans and lobes of flame, pale blue and roaring and almost invisible. He figured the fuel line was failing, maybe at the seams or where the metal was stressed by folds and turns. He figured the tank itself was holding, but vapor was cooking off and boiling out through tiny cracks and fissures, sideways, upward, downward, like random and violent blowtorches, the tongues of flame as strong and straight as metal bars, some of them twenty or thirty feet long. Inside the fireball the car itself was a vague cherry-red shape, jerking and wriggling and dancing in the boiling air. […]
In the end the fire died just as fast as the sun came up. On the left the eastern skies cracked purple and pink and gold, and dead ahead the unspent gas ran out, and the smaller blaze ebbed, and the bigger blaze came over the horizon. Cold daylight lit the scene and gave heft and form to the blackened shell. […] The tires were burned away. All the glass was gone. The paint had vaporised. The sheet metal was scorched gray and purple in fantastic whorls. For twenty yards all round the winter stubble had burned and blackened. An arc of blacktop was bubbling and smoking. There were last licks of flame here and there, low and timid and hesitant compared to what had come before.’
And I thought of the epic dawn in chapter fifty-two of Make Me, where Lee seems to want to track the event in real time:
‘From the metal walkway on top of the old concrete giant the dawn was vast, and remote, and infinitely slow. The eastern horizon was black as night, and it stayed that way, until at last a person with straining wide-open eyes might call it faintly gray, like the darkest charcoal, which lightened over long slow minutes, and spread, side to side and wafer-thin, and upward, like tentative fingers on some outer layer of the atmosphere, impossibly distant, the stratosphere perhaps, as if light traveled faster there, or got there sooner.
The edge of the world crept into view, at least to the straining wide-open eyes, limned and outlined in gray on gray, infinitely dim, infinitely subtle, hardly there at all, part imagination, and part hope. Then pale gold fingers probed the gray, moving, ethereal, as if deciding. And then spreading, igniting some thin and distant layer one molecule at a time, one lumen, lighting it up slowly, turning it luminous and transparent, the glass of the bowl, not white and cold, but tinted warmer.
The light stayed wan, but reached further, every new minute, until the whole sky was gold, but pale, not enough to see by, too weak to cast the faintest shadow. Then warmer streaks bloomed, and lit the horizon, and finally the sun rose, unstoppable, for a second as red and angry as a sunset, then settling to a hot yellow blaze, half-clearing the horizon, and throwing immediate shadows, at first perfectly horizontal, then merely miles long. The sky washed from pale gold to pale blue, down through all the layers, so the world above looked newly deep as well as infinitely high and infinitely wide. The night dew had settled the dust, and until it dried the air was crystal. The view was pure and clear in every direction. […]
After twenty minutes the sun had pulled clear of the horizon, and was already curving south of east, setting out on its morning journey. Dawn had become day. The sky had gotten brighter, and bluer, and perfectly uniform. There was no cloud. New warmth stirred the air, and the wheat moved and eddied, with a whispered rustle, as if waking up.
I would never understand the reductively parodic perception of Lee among some fans as a writer of crudely short sentences. He could write a sentence as short or as long as you like. Stylistically, poetically, he left Loup for dead. And his uninhibited use of repetition was a big part of that. The measured return of the adverb ‘infinitely’, at first on its own, then twice in apposition, then together again, but separated by the space of a conjunction as the dawn grows higher and wider, picked up by the single repetition of ‘perfectly’ and echoing through the fading reverberations of ‘faintly’, ‘impossibly’, ‘hardly’, ‘slowly’, ‘finally’, ‘merely’ and ‘newly’: this writing has harmony as well as melody and rhythm. And who was it dared decree that the adverb be forbidden?
Yet Loup Durand would sit pretty close to Lee Child on the shelf in the bookstore – closer in spirit than Chandler or Christie. It may have been John D. MacDonald who handed Jim Grant the how-to manual, but Daddy pierced through to his soul.
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Heather Martin’s authorized biography of Lee Child, The Reacher Guy, is published by Constable at Little, Brown in the UK, and in the US by Pegasus Books.
