Also by Andy Martin

The Knowledge of Ignorance

Walking on Water

Waiting for Bardot

Napoleon the Novelist

Stealing the Wave

The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus

With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher

I love his knowledge, his diffusion, his affluence of conversation.

Samuel Johnson
quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page – as when I read Rider Haggard, the Odyssey, Conan Doyle and the German author of Wild West stories, Karl May. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All the conversations in this book are real. Some of them got compressed. The names are real too (unless they are actually fictional). In the interests of authenticity, any modifications are minimal. The timeline is as faithful as I can make it. The quotations from Make Me are as I originally heard them or read them – they don’t always correspond exactly to the text as it finally appeared. But they have an archaeological value.

FOREWORD

Some authors don’t read their reviews, but I do. I like to get a sense of how my books are being received, and I like to map out the reviewer landscape, in terms of who responds to what, or doesn’t, and who is generous and who is mean … above all, I suppose, I like to see who gets it, and who doesn’t.

Years ago I was reviewed in the UK newspaper the Independent, by a guy named Andy Martin. It seemed to me he got it. He called Reacher ‘a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s’, which delighted me. He reviewed another book, and then the Independent sent him to New York to do a feature interview with me. He turned out to be a fun guy, into Sartre, Camus, Bardot, surfing, and a dozen other things. The interview came out well, and we remained friends.

That’s the good news. Then I got a message from him – it’s right here in the prologue – proposing a harebrained scheme, whereby he would write a book about me writing a book. Which would involve him physically watching me write it, for months and months, and discussing it as I went along. Normally (although this had never been done before, so really there was no ‘normally’) such a venture would be considered ahead of time and possibly agreed, in which case it might be booked in a year or so in advance.

But I got the message only days before I was due to start writing that year’s instalment. So I didn’t get time to mull it over. If I had, I might have said no. Instead I said, OK, but you better get here before Monday. And he did, and what you’re about to read is what came of it.

At first I found it irksome – writers are usually solitary, and the act of creation is intensely insecure and personal, and I didn’t like the idea of him seeing imperfect or half-finished sentences. But I got used to it, and eventually – Stockholm Syndrome, probably – I came to enjoy it. I felt that together we were placing something in the record. Not just about me, I hoped, but my peers and colleagues collectively. My genre is packed with talent and invention, and people in it work really hard, with passion and ferocious intelligence – as opposed to the lazy trope that we ‘churn it out’, as if mechanically or formulaically. I hope this account makes that point. I’m one of many working writers, and we all do it differently, but really we all do it the same – we start with a blank page, we fill it with words, then hundreds of pages more, and they have to be the right words in the right order. This is the story of some of those words. I don’t remember exactly how many there were, but I bet Andy does.

Lee Child
New York
2019

E-FACE

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

22 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

Hi Lee

How would you feel about a ‘making of’ story about your next book?

Thinking about some of the questions that get bowled at you at public events, I reckon most of them concern the process of creation. (Apart from actual marriage proposals.) I was thinking that a genesis-and-what-happened-next type approach could be of wide interest as regards one of your books. i.e. a sort of work-in-progress approach.

Obviously you would have to be up for it, which is why I ask now, so you can blow the idea out of the water entirely if you want.

There are about 10 different ways of doing it, could be more or less systematic and focused, depending. But I guess the minimum is –depending on how it was done – I would need feedback from you on what you are actually getting up to as the story rolls along.

I’m not sure this has been done before – a kind of literary criticism but in the moment, in real time, rather than picking it up afterwards. How This Book Was Written, but actually trying to capture the very moment of creation. I think it could be exciting, but as I say, you would have to really be in the mood for it. You have to admit, it would be different – so instead of the old cutting yourself off in a log cabin approach (or the urban equivalent), you would have someone (i.e. me) looking over your shoulder as you are typing the words. Not exactly Boswell to your Johnson but something along those lines. Or Ishmael to your Captain Ahab. (Keith Richards to your Mick Jagger?)

Kind of crazy I know and you might say ‘yes, and TOTAL BLOODY NON-STARTER TOO!’ On the other hand, you might feel that it could be a different angle on the whole Jack Reacher adventure. And it would definitely save you having to answer a lot of those questions!

all the best, Andy

From:

Lee Child

Sent:

23 August 2014

To:

andymartinink

Subject:

Wild Idea

Very interesting idea. Much to discuss. Detailed answer Tuesday from New York. Lee

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

24 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

great!

beginning: where did that idea come from? (one of the great mysteries)

end: getting it out there, reviews etc

writing Reacher could be as strong a narrative as the Reacher adventure (possibly with fewer actual punch-ups, but you never know)

From: L

Lee Child

Sent: 2

26 August 2014

To: a

andymartinink

Subject: W

Wild Idea

Andy

I’m totally up for this, but we better figure out the how/where/when, because the process is about to start.

Tomorrow I start on the concentrated launch promo for Personal, and then early next week I’ll start writing the 2015 book. So really coverage should start now, to show how writing and promoting are inevitably combined.

So far I have no title, no real plot idea, but I have the opening pages in mind. I hope to get them down soon, and see what emerges after that.

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

26 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

Are you going to be in New York or what? I love the ‘no title no plot’ thing – this is like the genesis moment. Void and without form.

From:

Lee Child

Sent:

26 August 2014

To:

andymartinink

Subject:

Wild Idea

Yes, in NYC now, doing media etc, then on the road in Savannah, Georgia, Ireland and the UK between September 11th and 20th.

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

26 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

OK if I am going to do this SERIOUSLY (obviously a must), I’d better get right over there and talk it over asap. On the other hand I don’t want to get in the way if you are right in the middle of big media hoopla. On yet another hand, big media hoopla is a good part of the story. We start not at the beginning of this one, but at the end of the previous one … Basically, I don’t want you to start writing before I get there! Sounds as though you’re already writing it in your head. I feel I’ve got to be perched on your shoulder like some kind of pirate’s parrot for the first line … obviously could catch up with you readily here but I reckon I need to start looking for flights … how soon, from your point of view, could I pop up in NYC for purpose of prelim conversation? Am cancelling dinner with the PM of course.

From:

Lee Child

Sent:

27 August 2014

To:

andymartinink

Subject:

Wild Idea

Get here any time, sooner the better … but seriously, Monday or Tuesday next week wouldn’t be too late.

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

27 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

Sorted. In NYC Sunday. See you Monday? Say where and when and I’ll be there.

From:

Lee Child

Sent:

28 August 2014

To:

andymartinink

Subject:

Wild Idea

Excellent. Could start (early) on Monday – CBS TV in the morning, a Simon Mayo phoner to the UK in the afternoon, for a flavour of how it goes … plus Monday is 20 years to the day since I bought the paper to write Killing Floor.

Let me know how you feel about that and I’ll give you the details.

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

28 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

Ha! so you actually had to go out specifically to buy the paper – wow – the next best thing to cuneiform and clay tablets, right back to the very beginning. Sounds perfect. If you don’t mind me being a fly on the wall it would be great to tag along on the publicity train for a while. I was having lunch with Bronwen Maddox the other day – I bought her a copy of The Enemy! – and she was saying how she had known loads of guys who were dreaming (in vain of course) of doing exactly what you did (the re-naissance thing). So the funny thing is although this is a unique one-off kind of phenom, at the same time there is definitely a universal factor here.

From:

Lee Child

Sent:

28 August 2014

To:

andymartinink

Subject:

Wild Idea

Cool. Be there at 7.30 a.m. Monday and we’ll head to the breakfast show. (Note Monday is Labor Day – subways will be running a Sunday schedule, but there should be cabs about and the streets will be quiet.)

From:

andymartinink

Sent:

28 August 2014

To:

Lee Child

Subject:

Wild Idea

See you 7.30 Monday – good early start!

It ended the way it was always going to have to end. With a burial. Lee stubbed out a final Camel filter cigarette (except it was anything but final) and breathed out a cloud of New York Times number-one bestseller smoke. Leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the last sentence of Personal:

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.

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 labour had gone into them), but he particularly liked the dried-up stream. So the bridge was pointless too.

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?

What the hell, it was all like a diary anyway, only masquerading as an adventure.

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.

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.

Word count: 107,000. Substantially across the crucial 100,000 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 two 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, non-stop. Problem solved.

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.

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 September 1. Every year. Without fail. Now it was over.

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 icecream cone. It didn’t use to look that way. Once it had had only clean vapour lights, white 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.

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?

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 been temporarily trapped in the wrong country or the wrong body.

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.

And yet now he was leaving.

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, Forever. 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.

Except all the guitars had been shipped back to England. And … oh yeah, he couldn’t play a note. He was a lapsed musician. The guitars were just there for inspiration. Maybe he’d come back as a rock star. (Or maybe a footballer? George Best or Lionel Messi would do.)

Even his desk had been taken: he was perched at an old dining table, white, circular, sitting on a black dining chair. Not even a decent ashtray (the saucer was full of butts – where was he supposed to empty it? The bin 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 post-apocalyptic rats. And a coffee machine.

He took the phone out of his pocket and switched it back on. It pinged with a text from his daughter Ruth.

‘Hey Doof!’ it began (short for ‘dufus’).

Lee smiled. OK, 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.

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 quite yet. Shh.

Lee lived upstairs – same building, different apartment. That was stripped nearly bare too. Just a bed. And a coffee machine. He didn’t go back to the office all the next day, the 16th. Just wandered around. Sat in cafés or diners, drank coffee, smoked more cigarettes. Came back to it on the 17th. Looked at it one more time. Then hit send.

Then he started looking for his hammer. The big claw hammer.

That would do the job.

Of course his hammer wasn’t in his office. Where the hell was his tool box? So he popped out the hard disk and put it in his pocket. Went to the hardware store in Union Square. Then he hopped on an uptown C train at 23rd Street, got out at 86th and went up to the new apartment. Put the disk down on the kitchen table, then he opened up his bag from the hardware store.

It didn’t have to be a very big hammer, he knew that. It was just a modest claw hammer, this one, but it would do the job. A hard disk consists mainly of glass, toughened up with some kind of aluminium or ceramic. He gave it a gentle whack and it shattered into a dozen pieces straight off. Was that all it took? He was kind of disappointed. So much for the ‘hard’ disk. Fragile disk more like. Mission Impossible-style: this disk will self-destruct in … about two seconds.

If anyone asked, it was a security thing. Really. He had the new Apple desktop set up in the new apartment, in the office at the back. So the old one was surplus. He wasn’t too worried about identity theft. If someone wanted his identity they were welcome to it. There was no such thing as privacy any more. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy people poking about in his old emails. Seeing little phrases popping up on social media. Embarrassing. Potentially.

And really it would be a betrayal of his entire life’s work if he wasn’t just a little bit paranoid.

But then again: hard disk, hard man … Reacher was all over the old computer. He didn’t exist as far as the new one was concerned. Lee loved Reacher, naturally. Reacher was Lee Child on steroids, after all, a surgically enhanced, superhumanly calm hooligan. A zen caveman. But at the same time, it would be good to have a holiday from him. Reacher had been pounding his brain for the last eight months. Now Reacher lay in pieces over the table. Shattered into little shards. Dust. Random pixels. Stray molecules.

But if there was one thing he had learned about the recurring hero series business, it was this: You can’t kill the bugger off!

It would be like killing off the golden goose. You can expose him to mortal danger of every kind. You have to expose him to mortal danger. Bury him. Blow him up. Cuff him to a train. Put him up against an entire army. Put an angry sniper on his trail. But he has to get out of those ridiculously tight situations. Somehow survive, no matter what. Otherwise how could he recur? He couldn’t see a metaphysical, ghostly Reacher working. Reacher v Vampires. Reacher v Zombies. That was never going to fly.

He wasn’t Dracula, but maybe he was a little bit Frankenstein’s monster. A behemoth on the loose. Which he, the mad Dr Lee Child, had unleashed upon the world.

‘Predictable.’ That is what Reacher had said about himself in Personal. Predictable in survival terms, anyway. It was a constraint. Look at the trouble Conan Doyle had got into when he bumped off Sherlock Holmes, shoving him over the Reichenbach Falls. The fans had forced him to bring the great detective back again. He’d had to turn the tables on Professor Moriarty after all.

The number of times he’d thought about killing him off. He’d have to go out with a bang, that was the first theory. Shot to pieces while in some way saving the day. Lee still remembered a cartoon story in Valiant so many years ago (or was it Victor? or Hotspur?). It’s the Second World War and a very big guy is given the job of guiding a couple of young kids to safety across enemy territory. They are holed up in a bomb shelter and then some passing Nazi lobs in a grenade. It’s about to go off; they are all doomed. And then the big guy hurls himself on top of the grenade in a final, heroic gesture, buries it beneath his massive, muscular chest. He, naturally, is blown to smithereens, but the two kids are saved. He is their saviour. A sublime father figure. But dead. It was simple and beautiful. Something like that would work.

And then Lee had thought, wouldn’t it be better just to have him arrive at the bus station, at the end of the book – all the bad guys are dead, he’s about to hop on the bus, and then he says to himself, ‘I like it here, I think I’ll stay.’ And he gets off the bus. (Maybe he becomes an upstanding citizen – or a writer? Gets married, settles down, buys a house.) There would be an emotional resolution. He could have ended Personal that way. But he hadn’t. Medals, bridge, stream. Reacher lives! Lee had a contract – a three-book contract – that said he would have to.

All the same, he would enjoy having a Reacher-free vacation. Reacher, unreachable.

All May and June he was setting up the new apartment. Stacking the shelves. Putting up the Renoir and the Warhol. Ruth was right, it was a great place. She’d found it, a classy-looking turn-of-the-century building north of the Dakota, and extolled its virtues; he’d bought it on the basis of the floor plan alone, the geometry: he knew it could accommodate all the shelves. He’d have somewhere for everything. So long as he kept on reading he would always need more shelving.

Jack Reacher – huge footloose wanderer, armed only with a toothbrush. Lee Child – tall guy with shelves! Paintings! First editions! Apartment overlooking Central Park. House in France. Farm in the south of England (two farms, to be exact). On the one hand, nomadic hunter-gatherer, on the other … farmer? It was easy for Reacher, he didn’t have to do any writing. His job was straightforward enough – go about killing bad guys, and also not die. Easy. Whereas writing about that … it for sure needed more than a toothbrush. He’d still be the boy in the tall Manhattan building.

Sometimes Reacher felt like a reproach. It was like writing about Jesus. The gospel according to Saint Jack. How could you live up to those standards – or down to them?

July, he wrote a TV pilot with his daughter. She was into forensic linguistics. The pilot was CSI but with words, not DNA. It suited Lee. The job was to track down villains on the basis of what they actually said. Everybody leaves verbal fingerprints. There was the case of the guy who murdered his girlfriend, and then texted afterwards using her phone but pretending to be her. The forensic linguists were able to demonstrate that it was really him not her, on the basis of his distinctive punctuation – or lack of it. Lee loved that idea – that you could be sunk by a comma or a hyphen. It all mattered, linguistically. Nothing was too trivial. The best clues were like that – subtle and insubstantial, not a big fat muddy boot print by the garden window.

Most of August he spent in France and England. Eating and drinking. Reading. Smoking. Putting his feet up in the sun.

But now it was nearly the end of August and he was back in New York.

People would often say to him: ‘How come Reacher is always getting into trouble? Always finding some new drama to poke his nose into? Doesn’t he ever take a break?’

‘I write about him when he’s doing nothing,’ he would reply. ‘When he’s on holiday and not smashing up bad guys. But they don’t publish those ones. They’re too boring.’

Now it was time for Reacher to get real again. Reacher was back from vacation. Reaching out to him. Again.

Which is when I blew into town. To watch it happen. To bear witness to Lee Child writing the next instalment of Jack Reacher’s continuing adventures. I first picked up a Reacher, purely by chance, in a little bookstore in Pasadena, down the road from Caltech. I knew exactly how Malcolm Gladwell felt when he plotted his incremental curve of addiction: you start out reading Lee Child in paperback; then you realize you can’t wait that long and start buying his books in hardcover; your next step is to call around your publishing friends and ask them to send you the galleys. Ultimately, he reckoned, you would have no option but to ‘break into Lee Child’s house and watch over his shoulder while he types’.

I had read all the books. I’d reviewed a few of them. I’d interviewed the guy. Twice (once in the UK, again in the US). Now I was finally breaking in. I had to know what happened next. Before it happened. I was doing what Gladwell had only dreamed of.

There was a date Lee couldn’t miss.

September 1, 2014. Labor Day in the US. A public holiday. But not for Reacher. It was twenty years to the day since, on the verge of leaving his job with Granada Television, Lee, nearly forty years old, had gone out and bought the paper to start writing Killing Floor, the first of the series. And a pencil (he still had the pencil, much reduced in size). Every year, ever since then, he’d started a new one on the very same day. It was a ritual with him. One he couldn’t mess with.

Lee didn’t have to become a writer. He had a couple of options after he dropped (or was pushed) out of television. After being fired, he had taken the trouble to go along to his local employment exchange, as it was then known. More like an unemployment exchange. This was the height – or depth – of the post-Thatcher golden age in the north of England. Manufacturing jobs were being slashed – not that he would necessarily have got one even if they had been numerous. There was only one job going that he was really qualified for: warehouseman. He had given it some serious consideration. Then he had gone out to buy the paper. ‘We were only just making enough to get by. Then I lost my job. It was fairly desperate.’

He wrote the first chapter. Killing Floor, chapter one. Then showed it to his wife. Everything depended on what she said. He could keep on with chapter two. Or he could go and apply for the warehouseman job. She read what he had written and then put it down.

‘What do you think? Shall I keep going?’

‘Keep going,’ she said.

He went back to work. The choice had been made. Maybe he would never have made a decent warehouseman anyway.

At seven-thirty that morning, September 1, we got in the car to drive to the TV studio. CBS This Morning. With Lee Child. There were more people in the car – Lee and his publicist and his editor and his assistant and one or two others (his crew) and me – than on the streets outside. ‘Everyone else is on holiday and we’re working,’ his apartment doorman had said. As we glided through empty streets, New York on Labor Day reminded me of Lee’s description of a backwoods smallville in Montana:

There were no people on the sidewalks. No vehicle noise, no activity, no nothing. The place was a ghost. It looked like an abandoned cowboy town from the Old West.

‘Today we begin!’ said Lee, like a kid going to a birthday party, not thinking about the TV interview at all. ‘I want to get ahead this time, take the pressure off.’

‘Do you have it in the diary?’ I said.

‘No, that would be too obvious,’ he said. ‘But it is in my head. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Twenty years ago. It was a Thursday. Around one fifteen. My lunch break, because I was still working even though I knew it was nearly over. W. H. Smith in the Arndale Centre, in Manchester – the one that got bombed by the IRA. I was working all weekend. Then I started writing on the Monday. I had no real time off at all.’

‘So it has to be today.’

‘I need ritual. My life needs a shape. It doesn’t matter that I’m doing interviews, I have to start today.’

‘That was a great opening [to Killing Floor],’ I said. ‘I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.’ ‘The first day is always the best,’ Lee said. ‘Because you haven’t screwed anything up yet. It’s a gorgeous feeling. I try to put it off as long as possible because when it’s gone it’s gone.’

‘Do you have any kind of strategy for writing, or rules or whatever?’

‘I only really have one. You should write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast. I picked that up from TV. Think about how they shoot breaking waves – it’s always in slow motion. Same thing. You can spend pages on pulling the trigger.’

‘Die Trying. All the mechanics and chemistry of firing a shot. Like calculus.’

‘And what happens to the bullet afterwards. That’s the thing most writers forget – they think it’s just pull the trigger and wham. But in reality there’s a lot of physics. Stuff happens afterwards. Think of The Day of the Jackal. The sniper assembles his weapon, fires his shot, but then de Gaulle bends forward to kiss the guy he’s pinning the medal on. There can be a lot of time between firing and hitting the target.’

This was the day on which Lee would pull the trigger on his new book. The funny thing was that he was having to talk about the old book. Although everyone thought it was new. It was just out – Personal. Reacher 19. This was what the interview was all about.

He was wearing denims, a charcoal Brooks Brothers jacket, and shoes with the laces taken out. He has this thing about laces. ‘Yeah, I got rid of all the shoelaces,’ he said. ‘They’re a pain when you’re travelling.’

The studio was great. Some kind of old warehouse in midtown. We were in the green room. Lee went off into make-up. The snacks were great: piles of fresh fruit – pineapple, melon, kiwi, banana, all neatly sliced up – gallons of coffee and tons of croissants. And there were any number of fabulous-looking women just sitting around looking fabulous. Don’t know what they were doing there exactly. One was called Whitney. She had ‘temporary tattooed jewellery’.

‘I want it to be the same but different.’ Lee was doing his thing with the TV interviewer. A couple in fact – a man and a woman. His ‘new’ book. Told them the story about his old father and how he had once asked him, when he was peering at a whole stack of books, how do you choose a book to read? And his dad had replied, ‘I want it to be the same but different.’ And Lee says, ‘I applied it to writing this one. It had to be the same – it’s the same old Reacher again, love him or hate him – but instead of roaming around America for a change, I have him getting on a plane to Paris, France, and London, England.’

I thought he didn’t really need to say ‘France’ or ‘England’, but then again maybe he did. He liked to spell things out. It’s a salient characteristic of his writing. What time is it? What road is this? Whereabouts are we? Don’t skim over the details. So that was the same too.

‘In pursuit of a sniper who is threatening world leaders. He arrested him once, now he has to nail him all over again.’

‘So it’s “personal”?’

‘Yes, but it’s also because his old army general tracks him down using an ad in the Personal column of the Army Times.’

The thing I liked about Personal was that the bad guys were known as the ‘Romford Boys’. Reacher ends up not in the middle of London, at Buckingham Palace, but in the suburbs to the east, in Essex. Romford is where I grew up, so I naturally took this swerve in the narrative as a homage to me. That was probably mad, but every act of reading is also an act of madness, because you have to assume that the writer is writing for me, specifically. I have this relationship thing going on with the author. So I was no more nuts than anyone else. Well, maybe a little more.

Lee admitted, when we were sitting about in the café later, that he was probably a little nuts himself. Although he began by denying it. (Obviously, he was still putting off making a start on the new book. He was enjoying the gorgeous feeling too much.) ‘I’m not a weirdo,’ he said, knocking back a cup of black coffee. ‘I know I’m making this all up. I invented Jack Reacher. He is nothing but a fictional character through and through. He is imaginary.’

He has this way of emphasizing particular words that I can only capture with italics.

‘On the other hand, with another part of my brain, I’m thinking, I am reporting on the latest antics of Jack Reacher. Hold on,’ and here he cupped his hand around one ear, as if listening intently, ‘what’s that? Let me note that down right now! The novels are really reportage.’

When he writes, he goes into a ‘zone’ in which he really believes that the non-existent Jack Reacher is temporarily existent. ‘I know I’m making it up, but it doesn’t feel that way. OK, so maybe I am a bit of a weirdo.’

I discover, as we’re driving back, that Reacher is very popular in prison. Lee gets fan mail from a lot of prisoners. He once paid a visit to a prison in New Zealand. The prison governor was worried about security. He needn’t have been. Hardened jailbirds love Lee. ‘I grew up in Birmingham,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen worse. And I was in television, therefore I’ve worked with worse.’

Later – OK, let me be more specific: it was around twelve – we’re back at his apartment, and Maggie Griffin is explaining how Killing Floor took off in the States. Maggie was one of the first readers of his first novel (in galley proofs) in New York, back in 1997. And she is still with him, as ‘independent PR adviser’. She is probably his number-one fan too. Back then she worked on Wall Street and was a partner in an independent bookstore, Partners & Crime. They made Killing Floor a ‘Partners’ Pick’. She would phone people up and say, ‘Buy three copies. It’s going to be collectable.’ She was right, of course. ‘One to read, another to share, and one to keep pristine. It’s going to be worth a lot of money.’ And it had a great and memorable cover (the white background with the red hand print over it).

She was the one who persuaded him to come to New York, on his own dime (as they say here). ‘Yes,’ she would say in her phone calls, lying her head off, ‘Putnam are flying him over.’

They sold a few thousand in the first weekend.

‘Yeah, I was a “cult hit”,’ said Lee. ‘A blip on the radar. I guess it’s been incremental since then. The odds against me being in this position are huge. But at the time we were just making it up as we went along. I never had a breakthrough moment really. Just a hard relentless slog in the middle years. Which is why I always have Reacher doing a lot of hard work.’

‘As in, for example,’ says I, ‘The Hard Way. “Yes, we are going to have to do this the hard way,” Reacher says, being deeply put upon and overworked by his tyrannical author.’

‘I never like to make it too easy for him – why should he have it easy?’

And then two or three books in, his agent says to him, ‘Have you heard about this Internet thing?’ Dinner at the Langham, next to the BBC. And Lee persuaded Maggie to build him what would become the poster-boy of author websites. Streets ahead. Leaving everyone else trying to catch up.

‘It probably helped,’ Maggie said, ‘when Bill Clinton came out as a fan. Clinton – that was like Kennedy reading the James Bond books.’

Maggie said that at the beginning the publishers had ‘misjudged’ the appeal to women readers.

‘They like the same things guys do,’ she said. ‘Violent retribution. They want blood on the page.’

We were just sitting around talking, still delaying the beginning. It was a day of postponement. Lee was pondering Amazon’s influence. Amazon have this thing of showing you 10 per cent of a book to suck you in. ‘Some writers,’ Lee was saying, with a degree of scorn, ‘some writers have started writing the first episode in their books to fit the 10 per cent and kick the book off. They’re actually calculating exactly how long their chapters should be.’ Lee didn’t want to be one of those writers. He didn’t want Amazon telling him how to write a book. He didn’t want anyone telling him.

I knew things went wrong in publishing. Sometimes embarrassingly so. A friend of mine had her book printed with someone else’s cover on it. ‘They go wrong all the time,’ Lee said. ‘This is an industrial process with hundreds of millions of manufactured items.’ He’d done an industry event recently where the publishers had a big pile of books. A reader came up to him with one of them which had a perfectly fine cover, but was completely blank inside. Lee apologized. Signed the book as normal. But this time he wrote in it: Reacher said nothing. It was one of his recurrent phrases, almost a catchphrase, if saying nothing could be a catchphrase.

‘Reacher often says nothing,’ Lee said. ‘He shouldn’t have to be wisecracking all the time. He’s not into witty repartee. He is supposed to do things.’ Basically, Reacher made Lee Child sound like Oscar Wilde. Not that he was an idiot (Reacher, I mean). More of a particularly taciturn, very muscular philosopher. Lapidary. Succinct. More at the Clint Eastwood end of the spectrum. With just a dash of Nietzsche and Marcuse.

Then we went to the radio studio a few blocks away (Lee would write about how we turned left to go north on Central Park West as we came out of his building). Which is when we had the John Lennon moment (somewhere between 86th and 87th).

Lee lives north of the building where John Lennon used to live and Yoko Ono still lives (I think). Just across from the Strawberry Fields monument to Lennon. I had forgotten all about it until the moment when a fanboy came running up to us in the street. We had just come out of Lee’s building. It was a nice sunny day. Not too hot. We were walking along and suddenly out of nowhere – I think from the other side of Central Park West – up he popped. White guy. He had on a black baseball cap, pulled down over his forehead. T-shirt and jeans, I think. Glasses. An intense look. ‘Hey, Mr Child,’ he says, ‘I’m a great fan of yours.’

The whole Lennon story flashed back to mind, the shooting in the street outside his building, by a fan. Mark David Chapman probably said to Lennon, ‘I’m a great fan of yours.’

So naturally I thought, Uh-oh, here we go, when is he going to pull the gun out?

‘I’m grateful to you for your novels, of course,’ the guy in the baseball cap said, getting into time with us as we walked north, highly respectfully, ‘but I also admire everything you’ve written about the art of writing.’

‘Really?’ said Lee. Calm and composed.

‘Yes, your work has been a great inspiration to me.’ Turned out he was an up-and-coming thriller writer. ‘I really liked that point you made about not giving away too much information – dosing it out. Slow disclosure. I try to keep it in mind while I’m writing.’

‘Who do you publish with?’ Lee said.

‘St Martin’s Press,’ says the guy.

‘Good publisher,’ says Lee. ‘Well, good luck with the next one!’

The guy thanked him again and backed off (no doubt at the same time relaxing his finger on the trigger of the handy little weapon he had stowed away in his pocket). Lee has this habit of seeing the other person’s point of view. I was seeing a threat to life and limb – an assassin, in short. He was seeing a budding fellow writer. (Really, how much difference was there?) And in his parting words I felt a sense that he was wishing himself good luck for his next one too – given that it barely existed.

It wasn’t his own life he was worrying about, it was the life of the unborn book.

I mentioned my John Lennon scenario to Lee as we went on. He laughed it off. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘that was on the way back to the Dakota. It was outside the building, but he was coming home, not going out. He signs a record for the fan. Then the fan pulls out a gun and shoots him.’ It was a fine distinction. But it was clear he had given the episode some thought. Had seen himself as a possible target. Then dismissed it. ‘A writer is never going to be in the same league as a rock star – or an actor, for example. Not even remotely. Writing is show business for shy people. Or invisible people. It’s the book that’s out there, not the person. We just don’t have that kind of visibility – or directness. So I guess, by the same token, we’re less of a target.’

He thought this part of town was more literary than his old neighbourhood. ‘I’m more recognized in this part of New York. The Upper West Side. I might have a couple of fans coming up to me if I walk through Central Park. Only one or two a week. No big deal.’