Reacher is born a hero. But in the first draft of Lee Child’s first novel he is both familiar and unfamiliar. He is already the man with no middle name and no address, traveling with just the clothes on his back and a toothbrush. Logic, deductive skills, fists, killer instinct, compassion: all present and correct. But he’s only just ditched his harmonica, and he’s carrying some emotional baggage. He is more introspective and self-critical. Less sure of himself. More explicitly human, and less monumentally mythic.
As Reacher’s biographer, I was speaking to David Highfill, Lee Child’s first editor—in those days of G. P. Putnam’s Sons—at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. ‘[Lee] would say to you that he did it like in a fever dream, very fast, that [Reacher] came to him fully formed. But his instincts and choices and decisions were all right.’
It was the same with him and Lee. Highfill had barely touched the manuscript of Killing Floor, he said (not strictly true, but heartfelt nonetheless): ‘Imagine there comes to you a man in a suit: handsome, well put together—cut, coor, fabric, image, design, all there. My intervention came down to cuffs or no cuffs, or a slightly narrower lapel. Maybe I might move a button.’
The memories were vivid, and Highfill’s recollections of that early collaboration had a poetic intensity that entranced me. But clearly, as with Lee himself, his instincts were spot on. And when I got to work with the twenty-two boxes and nineteen linear meters of the Lee Child archive at the University of East Anglia, I found documentary evidence for his claims.
The sheer hard labour Jim Grant put into his debut novel was phenomenal: two handwritten drafts, one in pencil and a second in blue ink, before he even started typing up for submission. But the planning notes are sparse and the vision crystal clear. From the beginning, character was king. There’s an outline summary that mirrors Jim Grant’s own biographical trajectory: ‘H is an alienated loner, redundant from job, becomes involved in some kind of [activity] which provides a determined loner the opportunity of appropriating large amount of cash, which he does, after dangers and contests, subsequently leaving the area, revenged against oppression, and enriched.’ There’s a high-concept bullet-point list of twelve steps that has its origins in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (via Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey), where Lee is laying the foundations for his signature brand of mythic realism. There are seven sketchy lines on ‘features of plot’. And ahead of all these is a single paragraph on character.
Character of H –
This is vitally important. It will be make-or-break. Must be such that it arouses envy in male readers. They must admire him & want to be him. Women readers must be fascinated by him. They must want to be with him. Must be some moral base albeit probably bleak & cynical to a degree. Needs to be alienated, outsider, loner, tough, resourceful. There must be a very subtle portrayal of superman powers. Must be unfeasibly tough & strong & invulnerable, to provide escapist identification. Gets away with things, possibly unrealistic but serious & convincing. Always knows better. Things turn out OK.
Quite enough to get the writer started and propel him through to the end.
The character had not yet been named. Lee and his wife Jane had not yet made that fortuitous trip to the Asda supermarket where inspiration would finally strike: don’t worry dear, if you blow it as a writer you can always make your living as a reacher. There had been talk of ‘Franklin’, and ‘Jackson’, but neither of them stuck. For now the hero was simply ‘H’. But it didn’t matter. The story would be told in the first person, and not until well into chapter two would Margrave law enforcement oblige H to identify himself by name.
But early Reacher still needs beating into shape. For one thing, he talks too much. ‘There is too much dialogue,’ said Highfill, sternly. ‘If the total now is 625 pages and we’re cutting 150 pages, then most scenes should come down about 25%.’ Here is an editorial note on p. 547:
R sits down to eat at Eno’s with Picard guarding him. R figures out how he can beat the clock and Kliner. This is brilliant deduction on Reacher’s part [. . .] but it’s a step back from the action. Can he think about this in half the number of pages? While he’s driving with Picard? Can he just think about one challenge at a time instead of ticking them all off in his mind over 10 pages? He doesn’t leave Eno’s for 10 pages. This has all been thinking. It’s slowing it down.
The relatively compliant debutant cuts eight pages of dialogue between Reacher and Charley Hubble in chapter eleven down to one. His conversations with Finlay are abbreviated. Reacher would remain a thinker, but henceforth process information with Holmesian speed. I was reminded of agent Darley Anderson’s words when I interviewed him in London: ‘Lee was a lot of moves ahead of the game.’
First-draft Reacher also has a disconcerting tendency to express his emotions. Forced to leave Roscoe behind at the end or face several years in jail, he ‘didn’t stop crying until [he] was halfway across Alabama’ (after that he was fine). Back at the beginning, Finlay is trying to get to the bottom of why he doesn’t settle down to a job. What could I say? Reacher wonders. Then says:
‘What can I say? I just don’t want that. Don’t want it. I don’t want their world. Don’t need it. I feel like, I tried it their way, and to hell with it. Now I’m going to try it my way.’ It came out all wrong. Sounded whining and pathetic. Paranoid. I actually feel great. Strong and confident. Free.
Which on publication becomes:
‘Because I don’t want to work,’ I said. ‘I worked thirteen years, got me nowhere. I feel like I tried it their way, and to hell with them. Now I’m going to try it my way.’
No weakness to apologize for there.
Later Reacher would rarely reflect on his feelings. It’s not that he doesn’t have any: the opening of The Midnight Line, before the ring gives him a renewed sense of purpose, is punctured by his hurt at losing Chang (from previous book, Make Me) and his empathy for fellow West Pointer Rose Sanderson is off the scale. But he would never again be self-conscious or cringe at his own words. Mature Reacher was aphoristic. Never forget, never forgive. Never worry, apologize or explain. Instead of interrogate his sense of responsibility, he would simply act on it, with maximum efficiency and no energy wasted on introspection. Eventually Lee would come to rationalize Reacher’s violent lawlessness as a highly condensed metaphor for the legal process, which spared the author from the long-drawn-out tedium of a courtroom trial.
Just as Reacher himself becomes more streamlined, so too does Lee’s prose. It’s a remarkably clean first draft, with only minor revisions. The first five lines of the briefest of false starts are scored through (see biography for a full account). Two things felt wrong. The use of parataxis (a defining feature when Lee wants to slow the pace or mimic the rhythm of a journey) was premature: ‘The bus droned and hissed and vibrated. The passengers dozed and snored and stank.’ And H was too outspoken: ‘I knew none of them. I hated them all.’
This is the revised first paragraph:
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I had ordered lunch but not eaten it yet. I was eating lunch eggs, drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. // This was a small diner, but bright and clean. Looked brand new. Built to resemble a converted railway car. // I was at a window.
The fragmentary, choppy style was deliberate. It was also deliberately exaggerated. The old television pro figured he had the length of a commercial to make himself unputdownable. To grab his audience and hold on to it. But it took a while to get that first paragraph right. Here is ‘new para 1’, undated, written up in red ink on a separate page:
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. They came for me at twelve noon. I was eating eggs, drinking coffee, and reading somebody else’s newspaper about the campaign for a president I hadn’t voted for last time and wasn’t going to vote for this time. Twelve noon, but it was breakfast, not lunch. I was late and wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way down into town from the highway.
And here it is as published (now singing):
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way from the highway to the edge of town.
It was a subtle process of compression. ‘Looked brand new’, replacing ‘New, I think’, became simply ‘Brand new’; ‘This major operation had to be for me’ became ‘This operation was for me’. At the same time, Lee introduced more on Reacher’s point of view, more descriptive and sensory detail—about the lunch counter bumped out back and the booths and the rain pebbling the windows with red and blue light and the car hissing over smooth soaked tarmac. So even as the prose becomes leaner it also becomes more lyrical. Reacher becomes cooler and less hot-headed. He stops saying he hates people, and muttering ‘smug bastard’ under his breath. He stops analyzing his shortcomings and agonizing over his failures. Henceforth his heart will beat between the lines.
Looking back from the vantage point of success, Lee could see that if Reacher sprang fully formed to his mind it was thanks to the generations of storytellers who preceded him. His lone-wolf hero, pre-loved and pre-approved, went back to Lancelot, Robin Hood and the ronin, to Don Quixote, Beowulf, Odysseus—right back to the guy who first ventured from Plato’s cave. And looking back at his manuscripts, I remembered his response when I’d asked for stylistic influences. He cited just three, none of them bookish: Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves (stilted, staccato), Linda Manz in Days of Heaven (melancholy, unpolished, innocent yet knowing), and Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’.
‘What I like about that song,’ he said, ‘is how it tells the whole story in super-compact form but still has time for redundancy and incidental detail, creating a feeling of expansiveness inside a fast-forward narrative’ (the example he gave was: A log cabin made of earth and wood). This is the paradox of Lee Child’s prose: that even while it lingers lovingly over descriptive detail and is as peripatetic as his wandering hero, it still keeps you turning the pages and ‘tripping forward’: the beat falling always just ahead, ‘so it’s like riding a bike downhill’.
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