Also by Andy Martin

Reacher Said Nothing

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

FOREWORD

Andy Martin’s extraordinary Reacher Said Nothing was a day-to-day account of the writing of my twentieth novel, Make Me. The idea was he should witness the first word, the last, and everything in between, and he did. Job done. But naturally we stayed in touch afterward, and he joined me for some of the launch events, six months after that last word was recorded. It seemed only fair – he had witnessed the long gestation, and he wanted to see the birth. Which meant he saw the book’s early reception, and heard from its early readers.

Which led to another idea. We had talked a lot over the previous year, about the minutest minutiae of sentence construction, punctuation, word choice, and so on, but also about larger issues, one of which was my firm belief that writing and reading is a two-way street. First a book is written, then it is read, and only then does it exist. Readers create the story in their own heads, literally, at that point expending their own mental energy, burning their own calories. We agreed that the reader’s sense of what the book is about is just as determinative as the writer’s.

Andy was talking to the readers, listening to them, hearing their opinions. It struck both of us that Reacher Said Nothing was only half the story – the writer’s half. We felt the readers’ half should be recorded too. Hence this new addition. It completes the circle, and it tells me what the book I wrote is really about.

Lee Child
New York
2018

BEFORE
‘A LOT OF WRITERS ARE LIKE THAT, THEY START WITH DIALOGUE’

Three months later. New York.

CHILD: About a month after I finished Make Me I started writing ‘Small Wars’, the short story for the summer. I wrote the first line, ‘In the spring of 1989 Caroline Crawford was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel,’ and I turned around … and you weren’t there. Weird. I wanted to discuss the approach to setting the story in the past … about how to let the reader know this isn’t the present day. I felt it best to just announce, ‘In the spring of 1989,’ and have done with it. I’ll have to get back in the habit of talking to myself. Instead of you.

MARTIN: It’s like the end of a romance. There’s one immigration guy convinced I was having an affair. Wanted to know why I kept coming back to New York. I said I wasn’t working, it was just pleasure. How was it for you?

CHILD: The earth didn’t move. Except when the subway went by under the building. I’m used to having a housekeeper knocking around the apartment. It’s similar. And you had a knack of getting out just before I started to feel physically oppressed. I mean, I understood why you wanted to do it, but sometimes I thought, why me?

MARTIN: It could have been … almost anyone. In theory. Maybe not Donna Tartt – too slow! But you were willing. I liked your economy of style – very degree zero. And you said, ‘I’m starting Monday.’ So naturally I hopped on a plane. I’m still trying to work out why you let me do it, though. I used to think it was something to do with an ageing boxer wanting a spectator for his last big fight. Or maybe a magician who finally decided to twitch aside the curtain and say, ‘OK, come back here and see how it’s done.’

CHILD: Do you ever think there’s something crazy about writing twenty books about the same guy?

MARTIN: Well, no crazier than nineteen, I suppose.

CHILD: That’s why I did it. I thought it would make a change. I’ve been writing about Reacher for twenty years. I never had anyone watch me do it before. And it was a world first. A mad experiment. Literary criticism, but in real time. You were a wild card. What was the worst that could happen?

MARTIN: I was sitting about two yards behind you, reclining on a psychiatrist’s couch, while you tapped away. Trying to keep quiet. I could actually make out a few of the words. ‘Nothingness’ I remember for some obscure reason. And ‘waterbed’. And then I kept asking questions. I couldn’t help myself. How? Why? What the … ? Oh surely not! A lot of people thought I would destroy the book. I was like the ‘person from Porlock’ who stopped ‘Kubla Khan’ in its tracks (according to Coleridge, anyway). ‘You’re killing Reacher, man!’ as some guy said to me (after half a bottle of bourbon, but still).

CHILD: Here is the fundamental reality about the writing business. It’s lonely. You spend all your time writing and then wondering whether what you just wrote is any good. You gave me instant feedback. If I write a nicely balanced four-word sentence with good rhythm and cadence, most critics will skip right over it. You not only notice it, you go and write a couple of chapters about it. I liked the chance to discuss stuff that most people never think about. It’s weird and picayune, but obviously of burning interest to me. Previously only my daughter Ruth ever got it. Once we spent a whole drive to Philadelphia talking about a gerund we saw on a billboard.

MARTIN: And the way you care about commas – almost Flaubertian! I tried to be a kind of white-coated detached observer. But every observer impinges on the thing he is observing. Which would be you in this case. And I noticed that everything around you gets into your texts. You are an opportunistic writer. For example, one day the maid was bumping around in the kitchen and in the next line you used the word ‘bucket’. Another time there was some construction work going on nearby and the next verb you used was ‘nail’. We go to a bookstore and suddenly there is Reacher, more unexpectedly, in a bookstore. I couldn’t help wondering, for example, if I influenced the ‘home invasion’ scene? Sneaking past your security downstairs, pen and notebook in hand.

CHILD: I don’t know, to be honest. It was a logical development, for a thriller. It gave me a set-up for a set piece. But it could have been subconscious. I could have gone other ways. Or heard other things. Because you’re right, that’s my method. Like the thing with the bucket. In one ear, straight to the page. But not the name Wittgenstein [see page 398, Make Me]. That was a private joke.

MARTIN: The funny thing is you are clearly a frustrated academic. For starters, you have officially seen Waiting for Godot thirty-nine times. And you are good at the professorial analysis. Be it of Shakespeare’s ‘stony limit’ (Romeo and Juliet) or your own onomatopoeia. All I had to do was quote you. It was like watching Lionel Messi running rings around the opposition and providing simultaneous commentary.

CHILD: I believe it was Kant who said something like, Newton knew what he was doing and could take you back through the steps logically, whereas Homer had no idea and couldn’t possibly explain it either. I sort of thought: maybe I can explain it, I’ve been doing it long enough. Lots of readers ask me how I do this or that. I thought this was an opportunity to tell them. Or at least to figure it out for myself. Which was the main thing, to be honest. Normally I operate in a fog of instinct. I wondered if being required to explain as I went along might actually be more illuminating for me than for you.

MARTIN: That was the thing that drew me in: you never knew in advance what you were going to be writing about. You really were making it up as you went along. I can certify that. I remember what you said when we started off down this road: ‘I have no plot and no title.’

CHILD: The beginning of a new book feels like stepping off a cliff into the abyss. A long free-fall. One of these days I’m going to end up flat on my face. Or not, as the case may be.

MARTIN: Sublime confidence. And no rules.

CHILD: Elmore Leonard had rules. Made to be broken. ‘Never use an adverb.’ Never is an adverb! If you want to start with, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ go for it. I mean, suppose it really was a dark and stormy night? What are we supposed to do? Lie?

MARTIN: Do you think you learned anything from watching me watch you for a year?

CHILD: Well, I learned that line about Kant and Newton and Homer, that was one of yours, so thanks to Cambridge for that. It was like having a coach in baseball or tennis – you’re forced to reflect on what you’re doing, and maybe therefore you do it better. And certainly I think Make Me came out well. After this I reckon every writer is going to want a meta-book to go with their book – a boxed set. What about you: did you learn anything of value over the last year?

MARTIN: I remember one of the first things you said to me. ‘This isn’t the first draft – it’s the only draft!’ Actually, you do finesse things a lot; ‘churning’, as you call it. But you trust your own voice. Maybe that’s what I learned above all: don’t try to sound like someone else. But, looking ahead, I know you’re starting the next one on 1 September. The annual ritual. Any ideas?

CHILD: Pure déjà-vu for you. No title, no plot, nothing. Starting from zero.

MARTIN: How about Remake Me?

CHILD: That reminds me of my life in television. The endless sequels. Make Me Again, Make Me One More Time … What about you? You going to watch Jonathan Franzen next?

MARTIN: I’ve done Reacher Said Nothing. I see a series. Reacher Said Something. Then maybe Reacher Said a Load of Stuff, Reacher Said Way Too Much …

CHILD: You’re not watching me again. So what are they going to be about?

MARTIN: No idea. Your influence. I thought I might steal your schedule. Start September 1st. Finish March or April. I had to learn something from the master. I’m like a sorcerer’s apprentice. Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop. And drink a hell of a lot of black coffee in between.

FALL

It begins (whatever it is). Or it should do. 1 September 2015. New York. Twenty-one years to the day since he went out to buy the paper and the pencil he would use to write Killing Floor, his first Jack Reacher novel. Twenty novels later, it is time to begin the twenty-first, the successor to Make Me. 1 September: a date he cannot miss. Kick-off. Ignition. Genesis.

It is a ritual with him: a superstition, a good luck charm. So long as he starts a new book on the first day of September he knows that, infallibly and inevitably, he will complete it, some time around April, May at the outside, in the following year. It was a completely reliable system, like a chronometer, keeping the ship steady and heading in the right general direction rather than falling off the edge of the world. All he had to do was sit down at his desk in his office in his eleventh-floor apartment on Central Park West and switch on his computer and type. Pausing only to light another cigarette. ‘It’s not rocket science,’ he would say. ‘It’s not curing cancer.’ Writer’s block was pure myth. He had nothing in his head, almost nothing, but something would come to him. It always did.

So long as he got going on 1 September. It was in the diary. What could go wrong?

Of course he had to have his traditional summer break, recharge the old batteries, hang with the family. He had spent a couple of weeks on a ship cruising around Norway; he loved all those fjords, and the bright sun at sea-level and then the snowcapped mountains right above. Crisp and clean. Cut off, remote from the world, no wi-fi. He was off the grid again, on the loose, roaming free, almost like Reacher. (Albeit with more stylish kit – and Reacher on a ship …? One way or another he’d probably have to sink it, after locking antlers with the captain, in reality a drug smuggler or people trafficker, and the second-in-command, and the third … .)

As he looked up into those mountains – not so high after all, eminently climbable – and visualized himself up there, looking back at the ship a couple of thousand feet below, and peering out over the abyss, he couldn’t help but recall the idea, which a friend had put to him in the Union Square Café, one year before, and that had fallen on fertile ground and grown and blossomed into Make Me, that when the time came for oblivion, all you had to do was climb up a mountain (did he say in Austria, specifically? or Switzerland? surely Norway would do – a couple of thousand feet would still kill you, it didn’t have to be the north face of the Eiger) and fling yourself off, sailing down down into the void. A seductive idea, but he’d never given his friend’s specific plan much credence.

All that climbing, the pure air, the ruggedly beautiful landscape below: you’d want to live! You’d never finish yourself off that way, unless you just accidentally fell off, exhausted by all the unaccustomed exercise. But the principle was sound enough: to choose one’s own fate. With complete clarity of mind. And he knew the perfect little veterinary store down Mexico way with a more than adequate supply of horse tranquillizer, when the time was right. Pity about catalytic converters. Back in the day all you needed was a car exhaust and a hosepipe and it was off to dreamland. He loved the whiff of benzene.

But that time was not yet. There was at least one more novel to write. It said so in his three-book contract and he didn’t want to let anyone down. Anyway, he could feel one coming on, even though he had no clear idea, no plot, and no title. That was the way he liked it. Inspiration would come, at the right time, in the right place. He didn’t want to have to think about it too hard, in advance. Far better to relax and forget about it and let it happen. Just cruise … on the cruise. He barely left his deckchair (got more reading done that way). An occasional lap of the deck – enough exercise and fresh air! Feet up again.

Back to Winston Churchill. The Grand Alliance, volume III of his history of the Second World War. The Brits declared war on Japan faster than the Americans. Churchill only had to go through the cabinet; Roosevelt had to check it was OK with Congress. The British Prime Minister sent his letter to the Japanese ambassador, declaring war, the day after Pearl Harbor. Signed off with,

I have the honour to be, with high consideration,

Sir,

Your obedient servant,

Winston S. Churchill

‘Some people did not like this ceremonial style,’ he added in the history. ‘But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.’ Reacher had a line just like that in A Wanted Man (Reacher 17). You don’t have to be rude. Just do it. After you, No, after you, and then … pow! The courteous killer. The executioner’s etiquette. A gorilla with manners. He liked that, jotted the Churchill down on a scrap of paper and tucked it in his wallet. You never know when these things might come in handy. 90% of writing was reading anyway.

His muse had never been known to let him down before. She wouldn’t this time either – always providing, of course, that he had it all lined up, everything in place, for 1 September. He had the flight booked for Monday morning, 31 August. From London. Not too early. But back to New York just a few hours later. Jet lag minimal. Down to it by the crack of noon the next day (coffee on, Camels out).

Got to London City Airport in plenty of time. So convenient. A brief pause at Shannon, on the west coast of Ireland, to refuel. Settled himself comfortably into his business-class seat, stretched out his long legs. (First-class? No thanks; they never left you alone for five minutes, ‘Another glass of champagne, sir?’ It was too much.) Felt sublimely, blissfully, confident. He’d had enough vacation, enough fjords, it was time to get down to business again. Reacher-time. And talking of time (he pulled out his phone and checked, he didn’t have quite the same chronological omniscience as Reacher), wasn’t this plane kind of late to take off?

I was barely on to my second cup of coffee that morning when I picked up the Leemail. By his standards it was almost long-winded.

Urgent – forget tomorrow – plane broke down, stuck in Ireland for the night. Don’t know when I’ll get home.

Which explains how it comes about that I am in New York, on 1 September, writing about Lee Child’s newly published Make Me in the absence of Child himself. The author is not dead, he is only delayed, somewhere in Ireland. But he is AWOL. He has stood up the muse. Risky.

He should have known he was leaving it too late – the day before. Pure hubris and thoroughly deserving of a comeuppance. I had a kind of smug told-you-so feeling. Verging on Schadenfreude. I whipped off the following reply:

Looks like I’m going to have to start without you. Maybe you should try writing in the airport lounge?

I knew he hated writing in airport lounges. He had to be back in his cool, comfortable office space on the Upper West Side, or nothing. No loud rock music (unlike Stephen King, for one). No perching on stools in cafés. He needed that silver metal desk, the size of a steam engine or the wing of a Spitfire. The 27-inch monitor. The reference books and the bestseller listings on the wall. And – above all – the cigarettes. Maybe if you could smoke in airport lounges and Starbucks it would be a different story.

I wasn’t too worried about him, to be honest. He would probably get over the bad start. Then again, maybe all his worst fears would come true and he would completely mess up the next book. Maybe it would never happen.

But it wasn’t my concern. I had to prioritize. And my priority was the fate of Make Me.

I had watched over the slow, sometimes gruelling genesis and evolution of a book. I had borne witness, almost like a midwife, to its birth. In fact I was more involved than a midwife – I had been there, at the primal scene, overseeing the inception, the embryonic struggle for life, division and multiplication, the gradual formation of a text. And now it was out there, in the world, on its own, and somebody had to keep an eye on it. I had gone from midwife to nanny, or possibly minder.

Obviously, the author himself was useless, knocking back Guinness in a pub in the Emerald Isle, carousing with the spiritual descendants of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. But even if he weren’t, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do, in any kind of practical way. He couldn’t exactly write the reviews himself.

Months had passed since he had hit the send button. He had finessed, here and there, in response to his editor. She had one telling point: the bad guys in the home invasion scene would definitely refer to Chang’s Chinese look (now that she was no longer ‘Stashower’). He had proofread and eradicated error. Okayed the cover (had to change the colour scheme: silver came out grey online – that neon yellow ought to do it). And he would be present for the launch party at Union Square Barnes & Noble, he would go and converse with Stephen King in Cambridge (Mass.), he would give away enticing and intriguing snippets on talk shows, shrewdly summarize on breakfast TV, and try to sound like a serious and reputable writer on radio. He would sign a thousand copies (more!) as he trooped around the bookstores of North America and Europe. Not to mention a couple of high-security military bases. Maybe even a campus or two.

But the reality was that the book was on its own now. It was vulnerable. It was an orphan. The author was not dead, but he might as well be. It had been thrown in at the deep end of the world and now it had to sink or swim.

This is going to sound more ruthless than I intend, but the truth is, strictly from the point of view of the book itself, his premature demise would be no kind of disaster. Au contraire. ‘FAMOUS AUTHOR DEAD’ headlines would do it no harm at all. As far as Make Me was concerned, he could just go ahead and chuck himself off that mountain, fill up the tank with horse tranquillizer, or drink himself into oblivion in Ireland. It would not only be obscurely poetic, it would sell shedloads. A posthumous thriller – now that was thrilling. Look at Larsson, for example: finishes the ‘Millennium trilogy’, bids farewell to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then promptly drops dead. Good timing, Stieg. ‘The End’, then aaaagh.

Better still, to come back to the case of Child, if some delusional obsessive should choose this moment to gun him down, à la Lennon, preferably on the doorstep of his apartment building, after all only a few blocks north of the Dakota, that would (personal regrets aside, and speaking purely on behalf of Make Me) be a great way to go. As I say, I am not advocating any such occurrence, only contemplating the kind of impact an author can have on his own work after it is finished. So far as I can work out, the worse for him, the better for it.

I happened to mention this scenario to Lee, some time later. He agreed. Didn’t mind the harshness at all. Liked it, in fact. ‘Seems to me I have three possibilities. The book comes out with zero participation from me. It does OK. It comes out with participation from me. Better. But, better still, a tragic feature – that would be best of all.’ He was already using the word ‘feature’, as if it would make a good article, or a movie perhaps, seeing the creative, writerly possibilities inherent in a good death, even if it was his own. ‘The best thing I could do would be to fall out of this window right now.’ He had the window open, looking out over Central Park, and it was all of eleven storeys straight down. 98% guaranteed mortality he once told me. ‘Or jump. An author dying tragically is a great sales booster. I’d be fine with the first second or so. I wonder what I’d be thinking about before the lights went out?’

‘Headlines?’

‘Thriller writer in mystery fall. Investigations continue. The police are looking for a white-haired guy in shorts and flip-flops. With a notebook.’

‘Recreational drugs also suspected. Police analysing pipe found on premises.’

‘Recreational? That’s work!’

Short of actually pulling a Larsson, however, the author would be doing his utmost to sell the book.

Nevertheless, there was something beautiful and entirely appropriate in his absence from New York, the scene of the crime, as it were, where he had only written the book, and where it would now be read, many times over, quite independently and regardless of its author. But, surely, was he not father to the book? And therefore legitimately proprietorial? Deserving of respect? More – I thought – like a sperm donor, or a surrogate mother. He would have to let go, eventually. The readers now (quite literally) owned it. All the talk shows and the signings were just prolonging the agony. There was not a lot he could do about it. Nor could the publishers. All that immense apparatus, the network, the team, everybody beavering away, but fundamentally nobody really knew what they were doing. Why does this work, and not that? It was a mystery. ‘You’re trying to control the future,’ Lee said. ‘It’s like picking a lock with a pipe-cleaner. Or pushing water. All you can do is put it out there and hope.’

Every reading was, potentially, an act of subversion. A form of deconstruction. Every reader (and especially reviewer) was an anarchist, mounting a coup, refuting the authority of the author. Reading was tantamount to revenge. Stephen King’s story of the fan-turned-sadist-and-tyrant (Misery) is only a dramatization of the truth that every writer acknowledges and fears. The fate of the book is in the hands of the reader (always assuming there is one), not the writer. As Lee says, it’s the reader who gets to decide whether or not a book is any good.

On the other hand, there were those ‘Reacher Creatures’: addicted to the works of Lee Child, desperate for their next fix, all in the grip, to a greater or lesser degree, of a specific form of lexomania. All of them relying on the author to get the job done.

The writer needed his readers, but those readers definitely needed the writer. They were accomplices in a perfect dialectic.

from: LeeChild
to: andymartinink
subject: Reacher said nothing
Will be back late tonight. Determined to get the
first sentence down before midnight.

The plane had been leaking fuel apparently. Just as well they didn’t try to make it over the Atlantic (at least as far as the next book was concerned).

Lee and the other eleven passengers (a small United plane) had been shuttled off to the Strand hotel in Limerick, only a short ride away, where he spent a comfortable night, other than panicking. There had been a tacit consensus not to talk about what anyone did for a living. If anyone had asked, Lee was planning to say ‘drug dealer’ – maybe it wasn’t that far from the truth, metaphorically speaking. Anything other than writer (he feared the dread follow-up question: And have any of your books been made into a movie?). A Jamaican guy had been wondering whether to retire to Edinburgh or Honolulu, and the odd thing was that he was only in his thirties. Suspicious. But, on the other hand, maybe not everyone was a criminal. The jury was out. Anyway, they got shuttled back again to Shannon the next morning, the plane had been repaired, and they took off. Legs stretched out again. Newark by 8, hopped in a cab, back safely in the apartment by 10, still on the first day of September. He was almost relaxed. The idea had come to him on the flight over. Dropped right into his lap. And a title. Manna from heaven, as usual.

Fuelled up on coffee again, he went into the office, sat down at the desk, cranked up the computer, and opened up a fresh file. ‘NIGHT SCHOOL’. It was only a provisional title – it might not stick, but he liked it. Where had it even come from? No idea. Re-education. Everybody needed it. Especially Reacher. And the word ‘Night’, that was promising. School? Was that too … Jack Reacher and the Philosopher’s Stone? Fuck Rowling! She can’t Hogwarts everything! He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Got the first sentence down, no problem. Nice. Now he was on a roll. Got half the next sentence down … then he got stuck. A medal … Hmm, what kind of medal, exactly? He’d have to think about that. It couldn’t just be ‘a medal’ – or could it? Oh well, that would do for one day’s work. Flaubert only managed an adjective some days. Just a very, very good adjective. One-and-a-half sentences. A grand total of twenty-two words. It was a start. Before midnight, that was the crucial thing. Mission accomplished, job done. He had stayed true to the good old tradition that had never yet let him down. Big sigh of relief. The gods had been appeased. As far as the new one was concerned.

More importantly, as regards the last one, there was another development. I hit it first online, but went out to buy an actual paper copy of The New York Times. Now it felt real. I opened the newspaper, Tuesday, 1 September, around the same time Lee was sitting down to work on the next one. It was exactly one year to the day (as Lee himself reminded me, in his chronocentric way) since he tapped out, ‘Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy’ and I watched him doing it (all I could make out from my position was the ‘-ing’). And now it was all over the front page of The New York Times.

Maybe ‘all over’ is a slight exaggeration. It was all over page C4, to be precise, in the Arts section, but it had its own dedicated box on the front page, previewing what was on the inside (‘“Make Me”, Lee Child’s latest novel, hints at change for Jack Reacher’). Lee Child nestled naturally alongside ‘Hope Running Out, Iraqis Rally’, ‘Crisis Tests European Core Value’, ‘Obama Aids US Workers In Late Push’, and especially ‘MURDER RATES RISE SHARPLY IN MANY CITIES’. I flipped through, passing over the tempting ‘New Cache of Clinton Emails’. The full review of Make Me. By Janet Maslin. Under the heading, ‘Tough Guy Protagonist Adds Another Layer’. Huge. Two whole columns running right down the page (with just a little box on the New York Times Wine Club right at the bottom).

It was a great review, because it insisted the author was still getting better. The closing lines were: ‘… the big guy’s definitely on the upswing. The guy who writes about him is too.’ As if to prove the point, the article carried a classic hard man author photo, Lee in the leather jacket with all the zips, a taller, thinnerlooking Marlon Brando. Taken straight off the back cover of the book itself.

‘It’s kind of gnomic,’ Lee said, the following day, around noon, uptown. ‘You never quite know what she means.’ He was looking stubbly, a bit Desperate Dan, but not too bad considering. His apartment’s air-conditioning was a mess and there were guys making holes in walls, or mainly standing around and scratching their heads.

By anyone’s standards, it was a rave. She had certainly not given too much of the plot away. Only hinted at the ‘horror’, as if it was the end of Apocalypse Now. But she also threw in how Reacher was learning more than he ever wanted to know. ‘Yeah,’ Lee said, rubbing his chin. ‘Normally he not only wins, he likes to show the other guy that he really has lost. Rub his face in it. It’s not like that this time. The whole thing is too big. He can’t really defeat the evil. All he can do is staunch the flow, for a moment. It goes beyond him.’

‘Does that explain the romantic enjambment? A kind of consolation?’

‘It’s funny, I only have him not answering a question directly. Everyone takes that for a yes.’

‘Come on!’ I was attached to Chang, the ex-FBI agent formerly known as Stashower. ‘Let Reacher have some fun for a change. Apparently some advance readers have already been bitching about how it’s too dark and they had to avert the gaze.’

‘That’s the world. It’s not all pleasant.’

I was thinking, as I walked away from Lee’s place, that maybe there was something in this sense of even Reacher, wise old bird that he was, discovering something new and utterly beyond his power to master that inspired the ‘Night School’ idea. There was at least a certain continuum there, even though the new novel was a prequel, the young Reacher back in the army again (as he was in The Enemy, The Affair, and the short story, ‘Small Wars’, the one Lee had dashed off back in July).

I knew I was focusing on Make Me. But it all came from the same place. And just as I had fallen for that opening sentence about Keever, the big guy, and the moving, and how hard it was, so too I couldn’t help but think about the new opening sentence too. This was all hush hush. I had to keep it under wraps for now. But the first sentence he’d written was this:

In the morning they gave Reacher a medal, and in the afternoon they sent him back to school.

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 ofThe 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 US]. 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.