When he was grown, he was going to be unstoppable.
Second Son, 2011
Lee had a phenomenal memory, but mythifying stories about three-year-olds owe a lot to the fond reminiscences of doting parents. The stories about the half-brick fist and the menacing look, sufficient to defeat the foe and save a brother two years older than him, nuanced his claim that ‘no one read to us or told us stories’.
Thanks to his father, James was already a legend on the mean streets of Coventry.
‘He must have been proud of you,’ I said.
‘In a deep-down human way he probably was,’ Lee conceded, ‘but it was so buried under that superstructure of repressed respectability.’
No doubt James suffered from second-son syndrome. Not without just cause, since Richard enjoyed first-son privileges and was mean and patronising with it. At the age of sixty-three, his parents both recently deceased, Lee had inherited five photographs of himself as a kid. There were hundreds of Richard, he said. It was Richard who got to go places with his father. It was Richard who learned to read and write with his mother. One day Rex and Audrey gave Richard a watch. The three-year-old James wanted one too. Rex and Audrey told him: Sorry son, you can have one when you learn to tell the time. Which he did, within days, spurred on by the promise of a fair reward. Sorry son, you’ll have to wait until you’re six. ‘That was a betrayal right there,’ Lee said. ‘I never forgave them.’ Like Reacher (Nothing to Lose), he was a ‘painfully literal child’. In his punctilious way he thought they should have said what they meant: when you can tell the time or when you turn six, whichever is later. It was a matter of trust.
He still had the watch, kept it in a drawer neatly laid out alongside the Fabergé and the Breguet and the Patek Philippe. It was a Westclox made in Scotland, with a small round silver face and a narrow brown strap, now faintly frayed with age. It still worked. It was one of only a handful of treasured objects to have been salvaged from his childhood.
Now he treasured the photographs too. Each had been lovingly framed and added to the collection of family snaps in his Manhattan dining room, on a long low shelf beneath his wife’s collection of Shelley china. In 2018 he was interviewed by New York Magazine on things he couldn’t live without and along with the coffee, slipping in a plug for his newly launched Jack Reacher brand (‘robust, full-bodied, battle-tested’) and the essential Wrangler jeans (30-inch waist, 38-inch leg – ‘virtually no chance of getting that size in the store’), of which he had twelve pairs, six in each of two different shades (‘I’m not really a fashionista, but I like the slim ones in the dark wash they call Root Beer or the lighter one called Storm Blue’), he mentions the need for a fuss-free, functional photo frame.
It’s a matter of precision.
Of course, photos are never exactly the four-by-six or whatever you need for the frames, which means you have to go cut them and head to the store and laboriously tell the guy what size you need. I found Matboard as an online alternative to all that — they do custom mats for photos — and now they just arrive perfectly sized without the hassle. It’s so easy.
Now, I can display my photos with mats and with nice frames.
You could have given him a job in advertising. Lee was a sucker for internet shopping. It saved him from having to talk to anyone, even on the phone.
Given more space he could (and would) have given chapter and verse on the coffee mug too. It had to be taller than it was wide and made of white bone china so the heat stayed in the coffee rather than being absorbed by the mug. ‘Proper bone china is almost translucent.’ Now Wedgwood had moved to Indonesia and their china was ‘that little bit heavier and denser’. But it wasn’t all about heat retention. It was the feel against your lip. ‘You don’t want to be putting ironstone or stoneware in your mouth – it’s like sucking on a rubber tyre.’ He had six Cuisinart coffee makers distributed among his different homes, so there was always a back-up if one broke down.
All five photographs date from his pre-school years. There’s the one with his two grandfathers. Another is a beaming chubby-cheeked portrait, his face as clear and round as a Westclox wristwatch. In the earliest he is propped up against a pillow in a romper suit with puffed sleeves and a band of smocking across the yoke, with a smile so wide he was probably laughing, like someone had tickled his feet. In the fourth, still sunny, he is sitting up unaided in a Mary Poppins-style Silver Cross pram, appreciating the joys of a good set of wheels and fabulous suspension. In the last he is riding a beast of a tricycle with wheels only slightly smaller than those of the pram, his hands holding tight to the cruiser handlebars and a frown of intense concentration on his face – you might even call it a menacing look. He was off and running – nothing and no one was going to stand in his way.
‘I look at that happy little boy and wonder what became of him,’ Lee said.
He let me study each in turn then restored each to its place on the polished white shelves. One, I put back myself: I knew exactly where it had come from. But Lee, saying nothing, with infinite patience and the meticulous care of an horologist, stepped in, and adjusted the angle and position by a crucial couple of millimetres.
Like all connoisseurs he was fastidious. But the array of delicate, silver-framed photographs, spreading with the profusion of wild bluebells in an English woodland in May time, showed that he could be sentimental too.
Just like his father.
In Second Son US Marine Stan Reacher dwells thoughtfully on the respective attributes of his two boys. The second is a conundrum.
He was going to be an eighth of a ton of muscle. Which was a frightening prospect. The kid had come home bruised and bloodied plenty of times, but as far as Stan knew he hadn’t actually lost a fight since he was about five years old. Maybe he had never lost a fight. […] When he was grown, he was going to be unstoppable. A force of nature. A nightmare for somebody. […]
He wasn’t academic like Joe, but he was practical. His IQ was probably about the same, but it was a get-the-job-done type of street-smart IQ, not any kind of for-the-sake-of-it cerebral indulgence. Reacher liked facts, for sure, and information too, but not theory. He was a real-world character.
A degree of awe is built into parenthood. So it’s only natural that in creating Reacher in his own enhanced image the author should make doubly sure he was awesome. What proud father wouldn’t be given pause by a son who weighed in at one-sixteenth of a Bentley and was brainy to boot?
His father said, ‘Stay calm, son. Don’t do too much damage.’
Secretly rejoicing in the fact that he could, and almost certainly would.
In his no-nonsense way Stan shows Reacher the love that was lacking in Lee’s childhood. ‘My father was a cold, disapproving man, all about denial and self-denial.’ Lee could not recall his father saying he loved him, not once in a whole lifetime. Neither Rex nor Audrey was demonstrative, there were no tender displays of emotion: no warmth, no affection. He couldn’t recall a single occasion on which he’d had fun with his father, not one moment he would like to relive. ‘Not a single bloody afternoon. Not an hour. Blank. He was like a Martian.’
But at least he was a Martian who could read. Who liked to read. Which was a great redeeming feature. Perhaps the greatest. When asked by the Boston Globe in 2015 who influenced him as a reader, Lee answered simply: ‘My father.’
He was always trying to get an encyclopedia for the family bookshelf. He ended up getting a magazine that came out every week and you’d put it in a binder to make an encyclopedia. If he didn’t think something was accurate he would cross it out and write in neatly what he thought was correct. That knocked me out. You don’t have to believe what is written — you can question it.
It’s a big debt, and a big acknowledgement too. He might as well be saying: I owe it all to you, Dad. The love of books, the escape from ‘boring’ Britain, his salvation from the dole, his first book and his first bestseller, his home in America, the Jaguars, Bentleys and Fabergés, the views over the Empire State Building and Central Park, the Renoir on the wall and the entrée to Hollywood, the millions in the bank and the hundreds of millions of faithful fans. Thanks, Dad.
More than ten years earlier, in a 2003 interview for January magazine, Lee likewise links his father with books.
I would say I’m from a worn-but-discreetly-darned-white-collar background. My dad was a civil servant on a fixed salary in a time of variable inflation in a city where the car workers’ unions were very strong. So he was white-collar, but poorer than the blue-collar guys. He went to work in a tie, carrying an umbrella, but he went on the bus. We had books but no bikes. We always had three squares a day and wore leather shoes, but if there was a pound left over at the end of the month, it was a miracle.
But his answer as to who cultivated his passion for reading was more evasive. ‘It was just there, like the air. You have to imagine two channels of TV, both of which took long breaks during the day. The local library was all there was.’
Rex liked to play sergeant major to his troop of boys. He would give them their marching orders: dispatch them upstairs to wash their hands observing certain rituals on the way up and down or have them stand to attention at the table. He wasn’t a control freak. It wasn’t a power trip. But it wasn’t playing either. ‘He had no concept of play.’ Other than wordplay, that is. Rex loved the language of the parade ground in the same way he delighted in legalese. When announcing a win on the Premium Bonds and enforcing his rule that all winnings should be divided equally, he would be scrupulous in formally invoking ‘The Lotteries’ Sharing of Proceeds Act’.
But Rex was no storyteller. He lacked the imagination to be a writer. ‘And the empathy too.’
I couldn’t recall seeing an encyclopaedia on the Vitsœ shelves in Lee’s back office (‘the perfect office shelves’, even though, being designed by Dieter Rams back in low-fi 1959, ‘they’re not totally practical’). But there was one in his head. He was often asked how he knew the things he knew, about fighting and weapons and the US Army. Did he do a lot of research? Not really. But he was alive. He’d been alive for a decent stretch of time. His eyes and ears were open. He talked to people and listened. He travelled. Like Reacher, he was only ever passing through. He didn’t want to know too much, would simply file away his first impressions for future reference.
Mostly, he read. He read anything and everything, indiscriminately, voraciously, indefatigably, not excluding histories of air conditioning or the war against rust, choosing books at random or because he liked the look of the cover. He read his grandmother’s back issues of the Reader’s Digest. He read fast and all the time, tearing through books like a locust through crops in the Texas panhandle. His parents took out additional library cards for transient friends and relatives and even the family dog – a black poodle named Timmy, for the Famous Five – in a vain attempt to cater for that impossible, insatiable mythic appetite. He claimed to read an average of three hundred books a year and to have read more books by the age of ten than most people read in a lifetime. He liked saying this, and the gasps of admiration it provoked, but still he worried about the rate at which books were being produced and fretted about the ones he hadn’t read and never could and all the things he didn’t know and never would.
‘I like to know things,’ he said. ‘Three hundred books a year for sixty years equals eighteen thousand books, approximately one tenth the number of ISBN titles published in a single year’ (and the same as the number of copies of Night School sold per day in the first week of release). ‘Statistically, it’s amazing that any of us have ever read any books in common.’
Like the great explorers and the big nineteenth-century novelists, Lee wanted to encompass it all. But like Reacher, he plays it cool.
‘Research and I have a distant and cordial relationship,’ he said at ThrillerFest 2017, not long before picking up his ThrillerMaster award. And in a 2013 email to a friend: ‘I like to pepper my manuscripts with the illusion of knowledge.’
He didn’t often, as a boy, receive books as presents. The best was the Wonder Book of the RAF, given to him by his parents when he was about ten years old, when Richard got the companion book on the Navy. The front cover shows a sleekly sinister Vampire Night Fighter taking off against an indigo sky, with the letters R.A.F. picked out in triumphant red like a blazing sunset. The book still sits on a shelf in his Manhattan library. He knew exactly where to find it.
The way Lee put it, he had ‘an extremely trivial mind’. The only problem he might face on Mastermind would be what to choose as his specialist subject: Aston Villa, Les Paul guitars, the books of John D. MacDonald, Led Zeppelin, the Toyota Land Cruiser 1957–2017, the New York Yankees, the construction of the Chrysler Building – all were contenders. Whichever way he went, he would expect to win.
‘I’ve never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit,’ he told me. As though challenging me to some sort of one-on-one, which I would have lost as surely as a game of human handcuffs. But there was substance to his boast. I’d been present when more foolhardy types had tried to best him. Take James Naughtie, the BBC radio presenter, who interviewed Lee in Harrogate that same July (when he was the recipient of yet another lifetime achievement award) and fancied himself on the subject of Georges Simenon. Which was risky, given this was right in Lee’s ballpark.
Simenon, Naughtie chose to assert, had written forty-eight Maigrets to Lee’s twenty-odd Reachers.
Lee stopped him.
‘Not forty-eight,’ he said. ‘Seventy-five.’
He didn’t mean to be rude. It was a reflex action. He couldn’t help himself.
Naughtie was a confident man three years Lee’s senior. He wasn’t used to being corrected on air. Which is why he let the words ‘forty’ and ‘eight’ slip past his lips a second time before he collected himself.
‘Let’s not argue,’ Naughtie said, all ‘best-voice-to-wake-up-to’ BBC balance and listen-with-mother wisdom. You could virtually see him smoothing the ruffled feathers.
But Lee couldn’t let it go. Not the Birmingham scuffler. Not when it had to do with Simenon. And books. And above all, numbers.
‘I’m the king of trivia,’ he said loftily, willing the audience to contradict him, ready to take on all five hundred if need be. ‘He wrote seventy-five Maigrets out of two hundred books.’
There was a steely say-that-again-and-I’ll-smash-you glint in his eye.
Naughtie segued suavely on.
As he got older Rex loosened up a bit. One day, in the spirit of clearing the decks before it was too late, he told James what he felt most guilty about. Back in East Belfast he used to mow the lawn for his dad. He got sixpence for doing it. One day the lady opposite asks him not to, so as not to disturb her sick husband. I know your dad gives you pocket money for it, she says – how much do you get? Sixpence, replies the young Rex, innocently. I don’t want you to be out of pocket, the kind lady says, so here – I’ll give you sixpence. Later his dad asks, why haven’t you mown the lawn? Rex explains. Well done, son, says his dad approvingly. Then adds, I don’t want you to be out of pocket – here, have the sixpence anyway. Well into his eighties, Rex still felt bad about it.
‘Typical bad timing,’ Lee wrote when his father died. He’d just flown back to New York after the publication of Night School. ‘No issues,’ he said. ‘Complicated relationship. Not upset at all.’ But he could see how his mother might be. So he turned himself round and got back on a plane to be by her side.
‘He read all of my books, and always had something to say about them,’ Lee said when I asked. He remembered his father liking ‘the oblique narrative way’ it was established that Reacher was on the wrong prison floor in Margrave, how it arose out of incidental conversation.
On 4 April 1997, looking forward to the UK publication of Killing Floor, Rex wrote a neat, copperplate letter to his son. It begins ‘Dear Jimbo’, and ends ‘your affectionate father, John Child’, and includes a list of local bookstores, with contact details.
As 5th Jun draws nearer we get more and more excited. The reviews are increasingly encouraging and on their strength I have decided to Read It. The reviews suggest that it is a novel properly so called in which the effect of the events on the hero is studied and we see why he reacts and not just how he reacts. This should widen the appeal of the book and draw in people such as myself who left off reading Alistair Maclean because they got sick of the endless “I did this. Then I did that” style leaving one no wiser at the end of the book as to why the hero ticked as he did. Such characterisation as there was was inevitably stereotyped.
Mum and I are highly impressed at how you have carried this whole thing through. Apart from the actual writing you have obviously put great thought into every stage of the mechanics. The only two points I will take it upon myself to make are: (1) Don’t forget the taxman cometh, shovel in hand and (2) Put the last penny you are allowed into a Pension Scheme (highly tax efficient), but as schemes vary widely take advice.
It is good to hear that you are already at work on Book Three. Have you reached the stage of wondering where Jack Reacher is going to take you next? Is he real flesh and blood to you?
Turns out there was a little of the human in Lee’s father, just as there is a little of the Martian in Lee. In a 2016 essay for the New Yorker he writes about Rex with ruthless compassion.
The other day I saw my father, who is ninety-two years old, and in very poor health. Physically, he’s a wreck, and mentally he’s not much better. At his peak, he was a capable and intelligent man, by nature rational to the point of coldness. But the other day he was full of childlike fear of the darkness that lay ahead. He’s religious, in an austere way. So I knew what he meant. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said. ‘You’re a good man, and you lived a good life.’ In fact, neither thing was true. But what else could I say?
The description of his dying father as ‘a purse-mouthed bigot whose instinct was to prohibit, not encourage’ had been cut from the original copy.
His father was his father, even if he did come from another planet. Probably he too was ‘a trivia geek of enormous proportions’.
I could picture Rex and his DIY encyclopaedia, assembled with all the painstaking care of someone mounting photographs on custom mat boards in millimetre-perfect frames.