I didn’t foresee any major difficulties.
Killing Floor, 1997
James Dover Grant was born in Coventry on 29 October 1954. But he doesn’t self-identify as a Coventrian, however strenuously the city might claim him as one of its own.
‘I’m from Birmingham,’ he’d say, with the regularity of a stock refrain in an ancient epic.
Still, it was where his education began.
‘I had gone through a lot of unpleasant education,’ Reacher says in Killing Floor. ‘Not just in the army. Stretching right back into childhood.’
When I asked what he remembered about Coventry, Lee told me a story.
He was outside in the street with his older brother Richard. Which was where they usually were, as kids. Which was normal, since their parents always did what was normal, since normal was all they cared about. The boys were completely untended. They would have breakfast, leave the house, find some bombsite to play on and maybe unearth an old gun or a grenade or two, and not come back till nightfall. ‘This from the time I could walk.’
That unfettered freedom to go where he wanted when he wanted, the obverse of a 1950s brand of neglect, was something he had never forgotten.
On this particular day Nicky from the next street was tormenting Richard. Which was also normal. Richard was no lionheart. He was a dork, a geek, extremely bright, weedy, reedy, a little skinny guy with sticky-out ears who rejected food, a nuclear scientist from the moment he popped out of the womb. Nicky was calling him names. ‘Say that again,’ says Richard, aged five, ‘and I’ll smash you.’ Which made his younger brother, a three-year-old Goliath placidly minding his own business on the sidelines, perk up and take notice. Good, James thought. Because he knew what would happen next. Sure as night follows day. Spoiling for a fight and true to the bully’s code, Nicky said it again. Upon which Richard turned around and said imperiously: ‘James, go smash Nicky.’
In those days, everyone called him James.
I had seen one photograph of the two boys with their parents. It was taken at the old Belfast mill where Sam and Jane Grant had once laboured, and on the reverse John Grant had written in a shaky hand, ‘Apr 57, Jas, 2 1/2’. You could make out a grainy building, an overgrown dry-stone wall and the still powerful-looking wooden mill wheel. Audrey, on the left, is wearing a beret, set jauntily on her short brown curls. Front and centre is four-year-old Richard in a shirt and tie and belted overcoat and cap, with an alarmed expression, exactly as Lee had described him.
Lee had the long fingers of a musician, like he could cover a lot of keys on the piano. His hands weren’t as big as they looked in photographs, where against that stark inky backdrop of black T-shirt, black jacket and black jeans they drew the eye like a full moon in a starless night sky, but they were strong; those carefully manicured fingernails too, which grew so fast, especially on the index finger: he had to trim that one every day so he could carry on typing with it, and it doubled as a screwdriver when the need arose. His father told a story of how the young James, sitting on his lap, had once turned in a random movement and hit him in the mouth with his fist: ‘it was like being hit with a half-brick’. Another time, now an adult, Lee had been in a mountaineering shop and tested out a pair of hand-strengtheners displayed on the counter: he closed them instantly, something that should have taken months of rigorous training. He couldn’t understand the mentality of free-form climbers. ‘If I wanted to be at the top of a mountain I’d rent a helicopter.’ But he always won at the game of human handcuffs (which so far as I know he only ever played with his daughter Ruth).
‘I have unbelievably strong hands,’ Lee said.
It was a grey day when I first visited Coventry, catching an early train out of Euston. The long walk south from the station into thoroughly middle-class Stivichall took me past the landscaped gardens and spreading cedar trees of War Memorial Park, opened in name of the 2587 citizens lost in the First World War and studded with barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns during the Second, past the Open Arms Public House and the Church of St James. It was April, and impossibly unblemished pom-poms of pink and white cherry blossom made up for the lack of sun. At the end of Ridgeway Avenue was another place of worship, the United Reformed Church, opposite a row of sleepy shops: an Indian takeaway, then a butcher, pharmacy, post office, beauty salon and convenience store. Much like Cherryvalley.
No. 20, on an upward-sloping bend, looked neglected. By rights there should have been a blue plaque above the white-painted front door, but instead there was only a blue-and-white ‘For Sale’ sign tamped down into the weed-strewn lawn alongside the weeping cherry and a red camellia. The neighbours had beds filled with flowering heather. The five-bedroom red-brick semi-detached house (extended since the 1950s) was on sale for £375,000, but I couldn’t help wondering how much more the owners might ask if only they knew. Maybe it wasn’t yet like visiting 125 Hyndford Street in East Belfast, where Van Morrison was born, or 251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, where John Lennon spent most of his childhood, but for his millions of readers it was surely close. I was tempted to knock on the door and say, did you know?
With certain notable exceptions Lee was unsentimental about family. The first thing he does in Killing Floor is kill them all off.
‘Have you got family?’ [Hubble] asked me.
‘No,’ I said. […] My parents were both dead. I had a brother somewhere who I never saw.
Reacher next sees his brother on a slab in the morgue.
The truth was I never knew for sure if I loved him or not. And he never knew for sure if he loved me or not, either. […] Most of those sixteen years, we didn’t know if we loved each other or hated each other.
But they had the thing that army families have: unconditional loyalty.
So time to time you might hate your brother, but you didn’t let anybody mess with him. That was what we had, Joe and I.
Early drafts of Killing Floor were even closer to autobiographical experience, until Lee’s first editor at American publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons asked him to tone it down a bit: ‘Should Reacher hate Joe so much?’ Was his hate ‘too strident’?
The truth was I didn’t love him very much at all. And he didn’t love me very much at all, either. […] Most of those sixteen years, we hated each other.
‘I’m toning down the stridency,’ Lee replied, ‘but only a little – because I want the relationship to be very confused and ambiguous. I think it’s something a lot of siblings will understand. It’s like that in my family, that’s for sure.’
When asked about the tour de force choreography of his fight scenes, Lee replied it was ‘mostly just muscle memory’, as though rerunning past conflicts on autopilot. ‘It’s all autobiographical. I just toned down the sex and violence to make it more plausible.’ It’s true that stories he tells about his life can be found word for word in his novels. But equally that in its translation into fiction, reality has undergone a rectification as gratifying to the reader as it is to the writer.
In the books you can go years without seeing a winter. You can be a soldier and a beach bum too. Your older brother would be your leader and mentor, but also your comrade-in-arms: Little John to your Robin Hood, Lancelot to your King Arthur, Athos to your d’Artagnan. In the books, neighbourhood bully Nicky was ‘a dead man’. The brothers would ‘hunt him down and rip him apart’. They would ‘hunt him down and smile at him as he died’. Well Reacher would, anyway.
So when Roscoe asks Reacher what he’s going to do about Joe, his answer ‘came very easily’:
I was going to stand up for him. I was going to finish his business. Whatever it was. Whatever it took.
But Roscoe is a police officer. She and Finlay, the displaced Harvard lawyer, were sworn to uphold all kinds of laws, and laws, like family, were designed to get in his way.
Finlay couldn’t understand the simple truth I’d learned at the age of four: you don’t mess with my brother. So this was my business. It was between me and Joe. It was duty.
Lee was unsentimental about Coventry too. He hadn’t been back since he was four. ‘Weird,’ he said, when I told him I’d taken a train and hiked a couple of hours to see the place where he was born. ‘I was last there August 1959.’ When it was still officially part of historic Warwickshire, since the ‘West Midlands’ was not invented until 1974, following the Local Government Act of 1972.
James was born fourteen years after the Blitz of November 1940, codenamed Mondscheinsonate (‘Moonlight Sonata’) (Goebbels would subsequently use the term coventriert – ‘coventried’ – as shorthand for wholesale destruction). When he was around three years old his mother would wheel his old-fashioned perambulator to Priory Street to watch the new cathedral (designed by Basil Spence, and the stimulus for Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem) being built alongside the skeletal fire-bombed ruins of the old. It was what you did on Saturday afternoons, while Londoners paraded in Hyde Park.
Coventrians suspected (as some historians speculated) that Churchill had ‘let Coventry burn’ so as not to reveal to the Germans that the Enigma code had been cracked. They went to their graves believing that in the eyes of their southern lords and masters they were disposable. Lee thought it plausible that the capital might sacrifice the provinces, noting that only a few hundred were killed as opposed to 35,000 in Hamburg in 1943: at a geopolitical level, in light of the barrage of ‘horrendously distasteful decisions’ the wartime government faced on a daily basis and executed with ‘astonishing brutality’, the sacrifice was ‘trivial’.
Though a poor second to Birmingham in his genealogical hierarchy, Coventry had left its imprint. For one thing, William Shakespeare had hung out there watching plays as a teenager, and the city features prominently in Henry IV, Part 1. For another, it was home to the eleventh-century Countess of Mercia, Lady Godiva, herself rectified in thirteenth-century legend as a spectacular advocate for the poor and oppressed, standing up – or rather riding through the streets naked – against the big guy, who happens also to be her husband, in the name of the little guy, his harshly taxed peasants. It was one of those stories handed down through generations, which was the kind of story Lee liked best.
A statue to Lady Godiva had been unveiled in Broadgate five years before James Grant was born.
Coventry was once the major weaving and dyeing town in England, attracting traders from all over Europe, among them John Shakespeare, glover and father of William, from neighbouring Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘Coventry blue’ – a lost recipe of pigment from the woad plant, chemicals and water from the River Sherbourne – was famed for ‘staying true’, hence the demotic association with loyalty. The ‘mystery’ plays (from ‘ministerium’, meaning ‘occupation’) really were performed by Bottom the Weaver and his Rude Mechanicals: guilds of craftsmen engaged in fabric and leather work from tanning to capping and ribbon-making.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the city became renowned for the manufacture of watches; then, more recently, cars. James had been born in a nursing home a few minutes’ walk from the Browns Lane plant, built as a Second World War shadow factory but taken over in 1951 by Jaguar. The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the British motor industry and even though Coventry had lost much of its historic medieval centre to the Luftwaffe, this was the period of the city’s greatest wealth.
In a small, significant way, Lee collected cars and watches (no ticking, no batteries). He ‘normally’ wore a Patek Philippe, but also had a Breguet and a Fabergé Agathon, the one he liked best, number 6 of a limited edition, which he bought in 2006 in Venice and which ‘cost about the same as a family car’. It was gold, with Arabic numerals and a brown leather strap and a sapphire stud in the winder, and had a transparent back that revealed the exquisite mysteries of the mechanism. ‘I love small intricate machines. But to be honest they’re fragile and don’t keep very good time. Cheap watches are better.’
The stable of cars kept changing, from the red VW Beetle through a couple of Mazdas to a red Jaguar X6 and a silver X8, then a special order black F-Type to replace the red. In Wyoming he had owned a black Toyota Land Cruiser, licence plate WSTERN, and in New York a secondhand Land Rover, bronze, LIC PL8 chosen by his daughter, both since traded in. He’d briefly kept a Jag with REA*CHR on the plate, but let it go because he ‘started getting pestered’.
But, he wrote, ‘the Bentley is the nicest’. It was a 1977 model he’d bought in 2014, a gorgeous dark green, lovingly polished to a deep gloss, about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could think of, a sentimental nod to Hubble’s Bentley in Killing Floor, which as well as getting the whole bestseller game off to a flyer and transporting Reacher and Roscoe from one climax to the next had been weaponised in the final showdown and had literally saved lives.
That old Bentley must have weighed two tons and it tore the metal door right off its mountings with no trouble at all. There was a tremendous crashing and tearing of metal and I heard the rear lights smash and the clang of the fender as it fell off and bounced on the concrete.
‘Call me nuts,’ Lee said, with a rare, verging on shy, sentimentality, unfazed by this orgy of destruction, ‘but I love the way the C pillar resolves into the roofline. Metal pressing at its finest.’ Then after a beat, almost apologetic: ‘Hey, I’m from Birmingham.’
As it happens, James didn’t smash Nicky. Not that day at least. He didn’t need to. And it was his father John Grant, aka Rex, an unseen witness from the Ridgeway Avenue front garden, who described how the scene played out, how the compliant yet merciless James advanced towards Nicky with fists clenched and wearing a menacing look, and how Nicky turned tail and fled.