His whole life was a visit.
The Midnight Line, 2017
He passed it every time they went to the library on Boroughgate, which during the holidays when he was dumped with his grandparents in Otley was about once a week. It was his grandmother who took him there first. She was a great reader, he told me. ‘She only had about nine books, but she used the library, as was typical.’
She held his hand as they turned left out of the house and walked downhill past the biscuit factory and the tannery towards Kirkgate, a continuation of Queens Terrace and Station Road across busy Burras Lane. When he was older he ran ahead with his brothers, the middle one of three in those days, impatient to duck on to the cobbled lane to press his face up against the cast-iron railings of the churchyard. His parents had been married there in All Saints Parish Church, built in Norman times on Anglo-Saxon foundations, on 5 March 1949.
Later he would become famous for being tall. Other things too, but being tall was a big part of it. Tall and fair-haired and blue-eyed. Hair that was dirty blond. Eyes that could blink and come back different, like changing the channel, from a happy show to some bleak documentary about prehistorical survival a million years ago. Even back then he had a reputation – everyone could see he was bigger and stronger than his brothers. But he was only a child, and big as he was, the object of his attention – at six feet – towered over him. Literally, since it had four diagonally symmetrical towers, one on each corner, castellated and crenellated and embattled, connected by parapets and surrounded by eroded headstones buried deep in the emerald grass, like something out of a picture-book edition of King Arthur or Robin Hood or the Canterbury Tales. It was the kind of thing a boy might dream of having in his back garden, if he had a back garden, rather than a paved yard just big enough to string a washing line from one side fence to the other.
He hardly needed to go to the library. There were stories right there on his path, and all sorts of questions to be answered. Life was full of suspense.
Did he wonder what ‘burras’ meant, or whether the Queen had once visited the terrace that was named for her? Did he know about the Vikings who had been there before him, who said ‘kirk’ and ‘gate’ instead of ‘church’ and ‘street’? He was never a trainspotter, nor a stamp collector, but had he always collected words?
Certainly by then he could read. He’d taught himself, eager to catch up with his older brother who was two years ahead of him and already at school, so had eavesdropped jealously on his mother as she helped her firstborn learn his letters and later practised by reading the back of his father’s newspaper at the breakfast table. The first whole sentence he decoded was: ‘Manchester closes down.’ He’d taught himself to write, too. His signature touch was to add extra crossbars to the uppercase ‘E’ so it looked like a millipede bisected lengthwise. It wasn’t vanity. He just thought the number was optional. It wasn’t as though it was maths.
With a little effort, he would have been able to decipher the words carved in slate on the south side of this graveyard gothic monument:
IN MEMORY
OF THE UNFORTUNATE MEN
WHO LOST THEIR LIVES WHILE ENGAGED IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE
BRAMHOPE TUNNEL OF THE LEEDS AND THIRSK RAILWAY
FROM 1845 TO 1849.
THIS TOMB IS ERECTED AS A MEMORIAL
AT THE EXPENSE OF JAMES BRAY ESQ., THE CONTRACTOR, AND OF THE
AGENTS, SUB-CONTRACTORS AND WORKMEN EMPLOYED THEREON.
It had come as a shock. To discover that the fairy-tale castle was a scaled-down replica of a railway tunnel, and was actually a tomb. Where dead people lived. If that wasn’t a contradiction. A grisly place, inhabited by ghosts. Not that he was scared or anything. He wasn’t the type to be scared.
But who were these unfortunate men and how had they lost their lives? Was it all at once, as the result of a single spectacular catastrophe, or one by one, at the hands of some sinister evil force? Was this the very same line that ran past the top of his grandparents’ road, where he and his brothers would go to play, hanging out in the dank underpass and listening to the deafening roar of the steam trains or watching them thunder by like fire-breathing dragons from the footbridge overhead?
Then beneath this factual introduction and harder to read, in a cursive font rather than block capitals:
I am a Stranger and a Sojourner with you: give me a possession of a Burying-Place with you, that I may bury my Dead out of my sight. [Genesis 23:4] Or those Eighteen upon whom the Tower in Siloam fell and slew them: think ye that they were sinners above all the men in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. [Luke 13:4]
This raised a whole new set of questions. Who was this mysterious Stranger newly arrived in town, and what was a Sojourner, and who was it that he needed to bury, and why was he so appealing? Had the unnamed Eighteen been building the tower when it fell and slew them, and was this how the railway workers too had died? Was Siloam connected to Bramhope? Where did sin come into it, and what was sin anyway, and was that the promise of retribution in the final resounding phrase, and if so who was going to deliver it and make right all the wrongs?
He would have to wait for the answers but he was hardwired to want to know. Maybe he would find out at the library. If he ever got there. There was so much to see on the way.
No doubt it was here his love of history was born. There was an intimation of fate in the coincidental connections between these everyday heroes of the Industrial Revolution and this early Christian church and his parents and the railway, leading out of town over the Wharfedale Viaduct to Harrogate and Leeds and the Wild West and beyond. The record-breaking tunnel, the longest on the historic North Eastern Railway system, was an architectural folly whose form (he felt inexplicably betrayed by this) belied its function. It was rumoured to have been made longer than necessary for the amenity of landowner William Rhodes, who conceived of the tallest tower on its north portal as a belvedere that would afford him a view of his expansive estate.
Some of this history was documented on the churchyard railings:
The greatest challenge was to cut the Bramhope Tunnel 25ft high through 2 miles 243 yards of rock at depths of up to 290ft. Some 2,300 men and 400 horses were involved in this work, all being subject to sudden rock falls, subsidence, flooding and accidental death.
Even as a boy he would have lingered over the phrase accidental death and its self-absolving abnegation of responsibility, and intuited that vengeance was called for.
It would have bothered him that the Bramhope Memorial lists the names of twenty-three casualties, whereas other sources cite twenty-four. He had a thing about numbers and liked them to be exact, for their own sake. Numbers were either right or wrong. But this time there were lives at stake. If one man had been missed, then how many more? Twenty-three was a neat percentage of 2300 and therefore compelling, but what if it was fiction, what if it was wrong?
Years later, in 2017, when I went to see Lee speak at the Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate, I told him of my plan to take a bus to Otley for the day.
‘Make sure you visit the library,’ he said. ‘I read a lot of books there.’
So I did. While he was being fêted by fans and fawned over by billionaire sponsors, I sat and read This Little Town of Otley, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War. Harold Walker, the author, was a retired printer who as a boy would happily forgo an iced bun to save the penny it cost to buy the latest ‘blood and thunder’ (the adventures of Buffalo Bill or Sexton Blake, detective). Otley was a market town that traded in stories.
I have always been fascinated by the Friday Market, and the various characters who attended. I well remember such wags as ‘Pot Bob’ Morrison from Knaresborough, who could juggle with half a dozen dinner plates better than many a music hall artiste, and whose quick repartee always kept the crowds amused; Harry Sharp, the ‘Oilcloth King’, from Bradford; and ‘Cudball’ Cooper, the cattle ‘doctor’ from Yeadon. There were vendors of patent medicines that were claimed to cure all ills, from corns to stones in the kidney, and whose rheumatism pills, if taken regularly, would land sufferers halfway up the centre of Chevin, before they even knew they had started; also ‘Eye Lickers’ who, for free, licked incipient cataracts from the eyes of anyone so afflicted, were frequent visitors and always drew a crowd of sightseers.
It sounded like the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude – the heavy gypsy with the untamed beard and sparrow hands who so flamboyantly exhibited the magnet and magnifying glass in a clearing in the Colombian jungle would not have been out of place in this West Yorkshire plaza. In a contest between the magic of ice and the miracle of the Eye Lickers it wasn’t clear who would win. But like Aureliano Buendía, the boy who would one day become Lee Child had breathed in stories like he breathed in air, or maybe – since the area was famed for its spa towns – it was something in the water. It was as though the storytelling gene had been passed directly to him, across the oceans and down through the ages.
The library was an airy structure of brick and glass, with data sockets and charging points embedded in the carpeted floor. I went back to the desk and asked if they had any pictures of how it used to be in the 1950s. Oh, said the librarian, who had grown up in a house on Station Road, facing Queens Terrace, it was on a different site then. She pointed me in the direction of Boroughgate. No. 4 was now a hardware store with a brash blue frontage and a colourful assortment of brooms and buckets arrayed on the pavement outside. The owners sent me out the back to take photographs, explaining that the library had encompassed both floors of a terraced house of the same soot-blackened sandstone as Queens Terrace, but older and more austere, without the assertive extravagance of the bay window. It must have felt like reading in the comfort of home, the dimensions so much more intimate and grandmotherly than the upgraded institutional splendour of its modern-day replacement.
By this point Lee had lived in (North) America for twenty years. He lamented the disappearance of libraries and feared the demise of bookshops, and stockpiled books against a rainy day like others hoarded cans of beans. (He hoarded those as well, along with tins of sardines and chicken noodle soup.) On two occasions I saw him leave a bookstore not with a bag but a cardboard box. I didn’t offer to carry it for him, but once I opened the door of the cab and then stood on the 42nd Street sidewalk and watched as he sped away from the Grand Hyatt towards Central Park.
There were upwards of four thousand books in his Manhattan apartment alone. I’m not sure they included a bible (he’d read the major religious texts at school, and never again since). But if in pensive scholarly mood he had been moved to consult a gloss of Genesis 23:4 it might have felt weirdly like looking in a mirror.
I am a Stranger and a Sojourner, he might have read aloud to himself: ‘one living out of his own country, dwelling in a land in which he is not naturalised; one whose origin is foreign, and whose period of residence is uncertain’.