—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)
___________________________________
Once upon a time, no one knew the name ‘Lee Child’. Jack Reacher was the new kid on the crime fiction block, the secret thrill of an inner circle of cognoscenti connected across the Atlantic by a dedicated avant-garde of genre bookstores. There were no Facebook fan groups. No Reacher Creatures. No Facebook, even.
Despite his ambition, his self-described ‘creative and combative personality’, in the late nineties there was a part of Lee Child—the forty-year-old Jim Grant part wounded by the bad guys at Granada Television—that welcomed that obscurity, with its intimations of retirement. In adopting a new name he was retreating inwards as much as fleeing outwards. He’d recently emigrated to the States, had finally realized his lifelong dream of escaping the gloom of his Birmingham boyhood. No more commuting. No more early morning shifts. No more big bust-ups with management. No one counting on him to troubleshoot when the live feed failed and the red telephones all started ringing at once. And, projecting forwards, no one writing to abuse him for his choice of actor, or to ask for money, or yet another blurb or interview.
Jim Grant was at peace, looking out over his own pond from the window of his upstairs study in Upstate New York while his alter ego took a benevolent paternal interest in Reacher’s next move in book number four. But he knew it couldn’t last forever. He couldn’t afford to go on being invisible. This passage from Tripwire, only his third outing as Lee Child, where the recent past is still seared on his memory, is among the most explicitly autobiographical passages in the entire Reacher canon:
In the front part of his brain, [Reacher] knew it was some kind of a complex, alienated response to his situation. Two years ago, everything had turned upside down. He had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to being nobody. From being a senior and valued member of a highly structured community to being just one of two hundred and seventy million anonymous civilians. From being necessary and wanted to being one person too many. From being where someone told him to be every minute of every day to being confronted with three million square miles and maybe forty more years and no map and no schedule. The front part of his brain told him his response was understandable, but defensive, the response of a man who liked solitude but was worried by loneliness. It told him it was an extremist response, and he should take care with it.
In October 1998, mere months after moving to New York, Lee Child attended Bouchercon XXIX in Philadelphia, scooping the prestigious Anthony Award for Best First Novel for Killing Floor as well as the Barry Award from Deadly Pleasures magazine. This was his first high-profile event and his first major introduction to the world of his fellow authors (in five years time he would be Toastmaster). He recalled sitting around with a bunch of other nobodies—Harlan Coben, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos—thinking obscurity would be a step up, but if they just kept showing up maybe one of them one day might just make it big.
Another year went by. He kept showing up. But in his own words, it was like being published by witness protection. Somehow, he needed to be seen, to get his name out there to the book-buying public. People who read the New York Times, perhaps.
On 6 January 2000, he opened the newspaper to an article about digital time compression in radio, which made it possible to ‘snip out’ silent pockets between words, shorten pauses, and even remove ‘redundant data’ from individual syllables, in order to maximize lucrative advertising income by squeezing in more commercials per hour. It was no coincidence that this should catch his eye. It was not for nothing that the creator of Jack Reacher should share with his hero an uncanny sense of timing. Former GTV transmission controller Jim Grant knew all about seconds. For eighteen years his life had been measured in them: breaks, bulletins and countdowns exactly calculated, punctiliously delivered, and recorded with pernickety precision by the daily loggist. In those old analogue days, a five-minute break could entail up to fifty separate actions, and if you lost a second you were sure to be held to account: ‘15:45 break, finger trouble, missed first two seconds of commercial’. Dead air was wasted air, dead air cost money, dead air could cost you your job.
Even forty years later, if Lee Child had nightmares, they were about commercial breaks gone wrong—five minutes of unmitigated disaster.
He had no problem with the technology as such. But this particular digital programme was aptly named ‘Cash’, a painful reminder of the grubby money-grabbing emphasis on the bottom line at the expense of artistic integrity that thanks to Thatcher and Murdoch had blighted Jim’s final years at Granada. And the pain was compounded by the (reported but still) strident voice of ultra-conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, moaning that it was messing with the artistic integrity of his rabble-rousing rhetoric. It was a toxic combination that stung Lee Child into action.
On 13 January 2000 the New York Times published a letter: ‘Silence Can Be Golden’.
To the Editor:
Re “Radio Squeezes Empty Air Space for Profit” (front page, Jan. 6): I wish we could find some digital technology that would automatically remove Rush Limbaugh’s voice from his radio show. Then we could just listen to the pauses and the commercials.
I’d prefer that.
LEE CHILD
Pound Ridge, N.Y., Jan. 11, 2000
Both the concision and the acerbic wit are vintage Reacher. Not to mention the loathing of the big guy, fomenter of hate and racist division.
When Lee Child emigrated to the US in 1998 Bill Clinton was president. Three years later he wasn’t president any more but had become a big Jack Reacher fan. One day he’d telephoned Lee to tell him so. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. Thenceforth Clinton would send a note on publication of every new book, on A5 notepaper headed WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON under a variation of the gold presidential seal.
No politician was ever going to be perfect. But Lee thought Clinton better than most. Not least because he read books: in his own words, ‘to learn how to do it better’.
Lee Child’s second letter to the New York Times, headed ‘Bush in the Mirror’, was published on 3 May 2001. He was still working at promoting his name, but once again the sentiment was nonetheless sincere.
To the Editor:
In “Blocking Judicial Ideologues” (editorial, April 27), you write, “As a general rule, the president’s choices for judgeships deserve significant deference.” But the general rule does not apply here, and the only deference expected now is that which President Bush owes in the face of reality.
He should say to himself each morning: “I lost the popular vote. A man of honor and integrity does not pretend that he won by a landslide when he barely won at all. Therefore, my appointments should please as many people as possible, especially in matters that will endure long after my time in office.”
But clearly, Mr. Bush does not say these things to himself every morning, and I, for one, find that omission both unattractive and unacceptable.
LEE CHILD
Pound Ridge, N.Y., April 27 2001
Nine months later, he wrote again (8 January 2002, ‘Bush Has Changed. No, He hasn’t.’):
Re “Bush, on Offense, Says He Will Fight to Keep Tax Cuts” (front page, Jan. 6):
Actually, the president said, “Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes.” This might represent his normal muddled syntax, but on the other hand it might be a clever get-out clause for later use, because inasmuch as it means anything, it seems to mean, “If they raise your taxes, it won’t be over my dead body.”
LEE CHILD
Pound Ridge, N.Y., Jan. 6, 2002
Dubya was as much an offense to the English language as to honor and integrity. In November Lee writes on cynicism around the timing of the Iraq war, then again in January 2004, on duplicity around terrorism and fake news, before throwing his hands up in despair.
Lee’s last letter to the Times—‘Who’s An Exemplary Evangelical’—appeared on 3 December 2004, almost a month to the day after Bush was re-elected with an absolute majority of the popular vote, mainly due to points scored from 9/11 (from which—it was bittersweet—the sales of Reacher books also benefited). Four years later he would publish his twelfth book, Nothing to Lose, whose bad guy Thurman presumably has roots in Stott and Falwell:
Unlike David Brooks (“Who Is John Stott?”, column, Nov. 30), I don’t see any real difference between the evangelists John Stott and Jerry Falwell. Both would say to me, “I believe something you don’t, and I’m right, and you’re wrong.”
Of course, I would say the same thing back to them. So far, so good, and hooray for diversity.
But: Whereas I would then be happy to let them go on their way, they have decided they must stop me, change my mind, modify my behavior and regulate my access to rights, freedoms and services.
That’s not humility. That’s arrogance. And it doesn’t need “understanding”. It needs opposition.
LEE CHILD
Pound Ridge, N.Y., Nov. 30, 2004
Truth was, he didn’t really need to get his name out there any more. The Grants sold their house in Pound Ridge and fled the country, hiring a private jet to fly them to Saint-Tropez. When they finally moved back to New York in 2008 they could never quite recapture the innocence of ten years earlier. It wasn’t only the residual sourness of the Bush years. Their own world had changed too, especially since Tom Cruise had bought rights to the franchise in 2005 and Nothing to Lose had gone straight to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. Lee was now a celebrity. Soon he would become an institution.
The first time Lee met Barack Obama, the new president was apologetic: he’d been a little too busy to read Lee’s novels. It was something he hoped to rectify. Lee was magnanimous. It didn’t stop him supporting each of Obama’s campaigns with maximum donations. He liked his dog Bo (whose Wikipedia page rivals his own in detail), and appreciated the president’s honesty. At least he was another reader, unlike his Limbaugh-inflected successor. Lee didn’t have Obama on speed dial, but he was definitely on the president’s Christmas list.
One time he joined a select group of four for afternoon tea at a midtown hotel owned by the Tisch dynasty, ostensibly because Obama was eager to solicit their views on foreign policy. ‘Really it was just a stroking thing for donors.’ Lee was sitting right next to Obama, but last in line to speak. When it was his turn he said: ‘I want to know why your watch is ten minutes fast.’ He was genuinely curious about the Jorg Gray JG6500 gifted to Obama by the Secret Service. But mainly he wanted to puncture the pomposity, which Obama seemed to welcome, explaining it was a habit he’d developed long before becoming president, and the only way he managed to get anywhere on time.
The New York Times was not the first newspaper to receive a letter from Lee Child. That was the Sunday Times of London, in March 1998, a year after the publication of Killing Floor, four months before he emigrated, and twenty-one years before Queen Elizabeth would make him Commander of the British Empire in her birthday honours list:
I was staggered by your front page last Sunday: apparently some woman I have never met is debating with her husband and her son whether or not I should be released from my obligation to bow to her. To expect any normal person in Britain in 1998 to feel an obligation to bow to any other person is at best pompous and at worst delusional.
The original letter (‘Hello? Hello?? Let me toss this into the debate’), more Jim Grant than Jack Reacher in tone, had been ‘judiciously edited’, with the adverbs ‘stupefyingly’ and ‘massively’ deleted along with the writer’s judgement—‘w-a-a-y beyond absurd’—on the paper’s sense of priorities.
It still blew Lee away that for the launch of his penultimate (sole-authored) novel, Past Tense, he’d been interviewed by a man who had once been president of the United States of America: ‘I would have paid to be here,’ said Clinton at Barnes & Noble on New York’s Union Square in 2018. Even Lee’s wife wanted to come along to that one. Even his perpetually disappointed parents might have sat up and paid attention.
But he wasn’t going to let it go to his head.
‘I don’t think of myself as a writer per se. I’m not trying to be Albert Camus. I’m the guy that writes Jack Reacher. It’s just that simple. I’m the Reacher Guy.’
___________________________________
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.
