Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me

“[Andy] Martin, an unabashed fan of [Lee] Child’s work, conveys his excitement at hanging out with Child.” — Publishers Weekly “In more than seventy tight vignettes . . . Child, his backstory, and his work come alive. Martin’s irrepressible glee about the project is infectious. Recommended for fans of Child’s work or aspiring novelists who could benefit from an insider’s view of the messy, complicated, and transcendent act of writing.” — Library Journal “Amazingly enjoyable and genuinely enlightening, largely because Lee Child is as thoughtful and as amusing as you’d think from reading his great thrillers.” — Sullivan County Democrat “An unusual entry in the annals of literary biography . . . fascinating . . . I could not stop reading.” —Sarah Weinman, The Crime Lady “One-of-a-kind . . . It’s funny, serious, a kind of mock-heroic and heroic together. It’s quizzical and respectful, sophisticated and self-deprecating.” —Professor Dame Gillian Beer “Andy Martin is no mere ‘Reacher Creature,’ as fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher are known. He’s something of a Reacher Teacher. Martin’s book is the perfect accompaniment to all things Reacher. It explores, it explains, and it entertains. Like a detective novel, Reacher Said Nothing takes you down alleys and lanes and streets cast in shadow—but the journey isn’t urban, it’s in the boulevards and byways between your own ears. Andy’s writing is a brainiac’s delight.” —Sam Fussell, author of Muscle Andy Martin is a former fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A native of Britain, he lectures at the University of Cambridge for the Department of French. He is the author of Waiting for Bardot, The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, Walking on Water, The Knowledge of Ignorance, Stealing the Wave, and Napoleon the Novelist . Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IT ENDED the way it was always going to have to end. With a burial. xa0 Lee stubbed out a final Camel filter cigarette (except it was anything but final) and breathed out a cloud of New York Times no. 1 bestseller smoke. Leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the last sentence of Personal: xa0 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. xa0 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 labor had gone into them), but he particularly liked the dried-up stream. So the bridge was pointless too. xa0 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? xa0 What the hell, it was all like a diary anyway, only masquerading as an adventure. xa0 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. xa0 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. xa0 Word count: 107,000. Substantially across the crucial one hundred thousand 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 2 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, nonstop. Problem solved. xa0 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. xa0 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 Septemberxa01. Every year. Without fail. Now it was over. xa0 xa0 xa0 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 ice-cream cone. It didn’t used to look that way. Once it had had only clean vapor lights, white light 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. xa0 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? xa0 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 temporarily been trapped in the wrong country or the wrong body. xa0 It was like a brain transplant—or metempsychosis—or déjà vu, he must have been that New York boy in a previous life, and somehow he had contrived to get back to what he always had been. A kid in a skyscraper. xa0 And yet now he was leaving. xa0 The apartment he called his “office” had been emptied out. Hoovered clean. The white walls were a blank. It was not just the end of one novel, it was the end of a whole string of novels, the end of an era that would forever be identified with this place. Another time, he might have stood up and picked up the red Fender he kept in the corner for celebratory moments like this one. Plugged it in and switched on the amp. Turned the volume up high. Put the strap over his head and hoisted up the mast of the guitar, stared out into the night and tightened the fingers of his left hand over the frets and wound up his right arm and unleashed the plectrum over the strings. And some mighty earth-shattering chord would rip out into the darkness, accompanied by obscene pelvic thrusting. xa0 Except all the guitars had been shipped back to England. And…oh yeah, he couldn’t play a note. He was no musician. The guitars were just there for inspiration. Maybe he’d come back as a rock star. (Or maybe a soccer player? Georgie Best or Lionel Messi would do.) xa0 Even his desk had been taken: he was perched on an old diningxa0table, white, circular, sitting on a black dining chair. Not evenxa0a decent ashtray (the saucer was full of butts—where was hexa0supposed to empty it? The wastebasket had gone too). He felt like a refugee crouched in the corner of an abandoned building. Squatting. Like the last man left alive, staring out at the abyss, the ruined deserted city that was once New York. Just him and a few postapocalyptic rats. And a coffee machine. xa0 He took the phone out of his pocket and switched it back on. It pinged with a text from his daughter, Ruth. xa0 “Hey, Doof!” it began (short for dufus). xa0 Lee smiled. Okay, not quite all alone. She was the one who had started it, all the talk about moving. Maybe she was right though, maybe he had been vaguely dissatisfied. And now he was really dissatisfied. xa0 He’d had to finish by April. Moving date was the 24th. Most of the furniture had already gone. The books had all gone. They’d left him the computer, the old Mac desktop. Now it was doomed. He wasn’t going to take it with him. He shut it down for the night. It didn’t know it was junk just yet. Shhh. Read more