A headbutt is always unexpected.
Killing Floor, 1997
A sense of narrative helped to redeem Rex and Audrey. But Lee was never going to go all soft about them. Showing their children ‘zero affection, physical or verbal’ was partly down to period, fashion and the type of people they were, but also because ‘they were bad parents’. Unusually, he called on the support of his (ever absent) older brother. Emotionally, Richard was ‘as hard as nails’ but – Lee had checked, specifically – even he allowed that their parents had been cold and unloving.
On the other hand, if you subscribed to the mantra of benign neglect, they hadn’t been all that bad. Let’s face it, he’d turned out OK. Hadn’t he? Had done all right for himself. ‘I mean I’m not scarred or traumatised or broken. Not at all.’ Then again, perhaps he had as many quirks as the next guy but didn’t know it. Like Reacher, who was ‘full of weirdness, eccentricities and oddness, but without all the tedious navel-gazing’.
He’d heard a radio programme once, a psychologist saying that the measure of good parenting was the self-confidence of the child. ‘Well I’m one hundred and one per cent self-confident, so by that measure they were good parents. But that’s not how it felt.’
It was rare to hear him invoke feelings. Normally he claimed not to have any.
There was no denying it. He was self-confident to the point of arrogance. ‘That’s my handicap,’ he said, as if daring me to disagree. ‘I’ve gotta win. If some guy is saying he’s gotta be top dog in the schoolyard then I’ve gotta be top dog in the schoolyard.’
And that was exactly what he’d been.
The first paragraph of his punchy (auto)biography on IMDb reads:
Lee Child was born in the exact geographic centre of England, in the heart of the industrial badlands. Never saw a tree until he was 12. It was the sort of place where if you fell in the river, you had to go to the hospital for a mandatory stomach pump. The sort of place where minor disputes were settled with box cutters and bicycle chains. He’s got the scars to prove it.
He still didn’t much like trees (but tolerated them eleven floors down in Central Park), if the 2014 novella Not a Drill was anything to go by. ‘Lots of parkland and flowers,’ he complained of Welwyn Garden City in his blog of 5 April 2007. ‘The only expanses of green I want to see are what comes out of an ATM.’
Asked about the origins of Reacher’s aptitude for crunching hand-to-hand – foot-to-knee, forehead-to-nose – combat, he said: ‘A lot of it is me when I was nine.’ So far as I know he never had to go for a stomach pump. But he had a scar above his left eye: ‘from being hit with a brick when I was eight in Birmingham – a hard, hard city’. It went back to a game of marbles he had fixed in the schoolyard, positioning himself by an iron grille on the tarmac and thereby ensuring all the marbles flowed sweetly in his direction. His opponent took exception to his methods, picked up a handy half-brick and threw it straight at his face. No stitches. No one had bothered to patch him up or provide any comfort.
Which was nothing out of the ordinary. He’d come home bruised and bloodied plenty of times, but as far as he could recall he hadn’t lost a fight since he was five years old. If a tooth came loose he shoved it back in with his thumb.
‘I was a fighter,’ Lee told Janet Maslin at ThrillerFest, ‘which I had to be at elementary school, which was pretty rough.’
He’d got stuck in on day one. They’d left Nicky behind in Ridgeway Avenue but it was like he’d been cloned and was lying in wait all over again, along with a gang of his mates. Richard was still a dork and a geek and still had the sticky-out ears. Rex and Audrey had anticipated that their eldest son would still need someone to do the smashing for him. So the first thing they did when James was about to start school was take him aside for a quiet word. ‘They were extremely normal, repressed people. It was mortifying to have to ask me to look after him.’
‘That was my duty every recess,’ said Lee. ‘Go out to the playground, haul off the bullies, then go and play ball with my friends.’ In exchange for biscuits he would extend his protection to other children, seeing off any number of monsters with cheery enjoyment. ‘I operated it as a mutual benefit society.’ Like Reacher, except Reacher acted first and only afterwards accepted the old-fashioned offer of a ‘woman-cooked’ meal.
It was in Birmingham that James discovered the headbutt, which Reacher so reliably made use of ‘to help with the decision-making process’ (The Enemy). It was in Birmingham he learned you never really fight five guys, because two always run away. One day his great aunt was visiting from London. Harriet (Hettie) Scott was his Otley grandma’s sister and the senior matriarch of the family. Audrey had given him clean clothes so he knew it was a big deal. He had strict instructions to meet at Elmwood Library after school. To get there he had to go down a steep alleyway. Which was where they were waiting for him. The lead guy of five was named Douglas Cooper. Somehow that had stuck in his mind. He remembered thinking: Oh no, I’ve got clean clothes AND I’m going to be late. ‘I took out the main guy, then two ran away, and I was left with two.’ He had no problem with that kind of odds. Still, Lee couldn’t help wondering if he’d lost a couple of potential readers that day.
Like the Reacher of Second Son, he was ‘permanently jammed wide open on full auto’.
‘I put that in One Shot,’ he told BBC Inside Out West Midlands in 2017, as he walked down a leafy lane with reporter Mary Rhodes, ‘literally word-for-word all from me being nine years old. It made it into the first movie in that famous scene with Tom Cruise outside the sports bar fighting five guys – that was written from life right here.’ (What, you were expecting someone bigger? was an improvised one-liner from Cruise that sadly ended up on the cutting-room floor.)
‘I always had a knife in my pocket,’ Lee told me. First a wooden-handled fishing knife he’d been given by his grandfather, then a flick knife. ‘All the boys did.’ There were no gangs, ‘but it was very tribal’. The key thing was to behave in such a way that you never had to use it. His thing was to threaten to break the arm of anyone who tried, and one day when someone did, James broke his arm and that was that. He would always stand by his word. Even in 2019, when he spotted a rope-style chainsaw in a hardware store in Wyoming, all he could think of was how cool it would have been to have one of those in his pocket back when he was nine years old.
Lee reiterates the physicality of Birmingham with the same conviction he asserts the class-consciousness of his parents and grandparents. Birmingham was ‘functionally like Detroit’. Violence was ‘the natural language’, ‘the only way to express yourself’. He was smart, which was like having a target on your back. ‘Worst was that I won a scholarship to a fancy school on the other side of town, and I had to fight my way out of the neighbourhood each day and then fight my way back in. I loved every minute of it.’
Charles Spicer, who lived a few blocks away in Grestone Avenue and also went to the fancy secondary school, remembered getting trouble from other boys for being in uniform on Saturday mornings. But he didn’t remember the knives, or the double-edged Gillette razor blades sewn under the lapels of the blue blazer (paired snappily with a purple and yellow tie).
King Edward’s was bigger and better than the rough, tough state primary. It was why the Grants had moved to Birmingham in the first place. Both Richard and James were smart as paint and they were jolly well going to get a good education if it was the last thing their parents did. Which in Lee’s view it was. ‘Once they’d got us into good schools their job was done.’
If King Edward’s was bigger and better it would be so in every way, thought the literal-minded James. It had been drummed into him: You’ve got to take this seriously, son. It was hard to get into, so the fighting would be harder too, right? Again it went down on day one. There was a guy called John Gregory who didn’t like dorky Richard and took it out on James, shoving him against a locker. ‘So I kicked the shit out of him, broke some bones, and sent him to hospital.’ Then, taking stock, it dawned on James that the school wasn’t like that, that it was very ‘genteel’.
It was this incident that briefly earned him the nickname ‘Grievous’, from ‘grievous bodily harm’ (an offence he explained to his American audience as akin to ‘wounding with intent’).
He didn’t get shoved against any lockers again.
He felt no compunction in using force. ‘I won’t see anyone bullied,’ he told me, though he systematically stuck the verbal boot into his (bullying) older brother. In his own view he lacked ‘the prejudice gene’, which was debatable, but I was prepared to believe he lacked the inhibition one.
Once he showed me a selfie from August 2013. His right eye was swollen and purple, and there was bruising just above his eyebrow, in the shape of a gecko, with little padded toes branching out from it and a virulent crimson gash like the flick of its tail. It was taken the morning after a fistfight on Broadway, when he had intervened between a drunken frat boy and a small Sikh cabdriver. It was a comprehensive victory, at the cost of some minor damage. ‘That never happens to the real Reacher,’ he commented, like I needed proof there was a difference. And like he himself was the fictional character.
‘The other guy [the frat boy] was a mess, because I got annoyed when he hit me. Broken nose for sure, and ribs too, without doubt, but I don’t know for certain because I just left him there and went home to bed. You can still see faint bloodstains on my pillowcase. They never quite came out.’
The guy could think, too. He wasn’t an academic like Richard, but he was practical. He was no rocket scientist, was never going to find the cure for cancer, as he took pains to point out, but he was street smart, a real-world character, and when fists wouldn’t do the job he could always fall back on his brains. Oh, and that healthy dose of arrogance.
‘I’ll always win,’ he said on Central Park West in November 2017. He’d just won a fight with the taxman, who he believed now owed him half a million dollars. ‘I call that a result,’ he said, mildly. ‘I told them two things: one, you’re going to lose, you’re already losing, it might be slow, but in the end you’ll lose; and two, I’m very vindictive, so you’re going to lose your boss a lot of money as well.’ The dispute centred on issues of ‘creative product’ and ‘unincorporated business tax’ and whether or not Lee should be taxed on profits from books not written, or only partially written, in New York. Hitherto he had split the income in their favour. Then they started asking awkward questions, so he’d taken to calculating it by the word and the dollar. From now on he would keep a meticulous record of where everything was written, right down to the minute.
I said nothing. Like Lee remarked of Reacher at the Random House ‘Big Ideas Night’ for the launch of Night School: ‘He’s a geek and a nerd in a lot of ways. But are you going to tell him that?’
I knew I shouldn’t make assumptions about the writer based on my reading of his novels. To do so would be foolish, facile, naive. I’d learned my literary criticism at Cambridge, where the author was dead and there was nothing beyond the text. But this author was sprawling on an XXL leather sofa right in front of my eyes, occasionally sitting up in the lotus position or flicking one improbably long leg over the other like some kind of indolent cat deity or filleted Scheherazade. Maybe there was a stitch or two of embroidery, a touch of self-mythification, some subtle adjustment after the fact. Maybe he was a blagger and a bluffer in some ways. But was I going to tell him that?
When I opened a copy of Killing Floor and looked at the words on the page, there it was, all laid out before me in Reacher’s name. What was I supposed to do? Pretend I hadn’t noticed?
The first day at each new school, I was a new boy. With no status. Lots of first days. I quickly learned how to get status.
Then later he’d been trained by experts.
They taught me that inhibitions would kill me. Hit early, hit hard. Kill with the first blow. Get your retaliation in first.
His brutality, as he nicely expresses it, had thereby been refined.
Looking out for his big brother became second nature.
Plenty of times I would run out into some new schoolyard and see a bunch of kids trying it on with the tall skinny newcomer. I’d trot over there and haul them off and bust a few heads. Then I’d go back to my own buddies and play ball or whatever we were doing. Duty done, like a routine.
In Killing Floor he can tell Roscoe thinks he’s overstepped the mark, just as Chrissie and Hemingway do in High Heat.
I’d killed one guy and blinded another. Now I’d have to confront my feelings. But I didn’t feel much at all. Nothing, in fact. No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I’d chased two roaches around that bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature.
And on that 101 per cent-proof self-belief he owed to the you’re-on-your-own-now-son indifference of his parents: ‘The books are all about the contest between the bad guy’s arrogance and Reacher’s arrogance.’ Arrogance was an unattractive characteristic, but it helped keep Reacher on the right side of caricature.
Reacher has more unsightly scar tissue and a few more bullet holes, and yes, maybe Rapid City’s Jimmy Rat can call on six thugs to Douglas Cooper’s four, and it’s a military base instead of a schoolyard, or Vietnam rather than Birmingham, or even Birmingham, Alabama, but these were incidental details. At heart, they were the same guy.
‘By some genetic accident, I was enormous,’ Lee said. ‘I really have not grown very much since I was ten or eleven; I was a giant, a freak.’
Reacher doesn’t stand around shooting the breeze when what is called for is a knee to the groin. Infamously, he doesn’t even hold good on a promise to count to three. ‘He lies, he cheats, he shoots people in the back.’ Which kept him real and made him human. There is darkness and light in all of us.
You could trace a direct line from Margrave, Georgia, all the way back to a school playground in a north-west suburb of 1960s Birmingham and even a single side street in 1950s Coventry. Maybe it was a matter of genes, and evolution. Every little thing had turned him into what he was. But for better or worse you could lay most of the responsibility at his parents’ immaculately polished front door. It was his parents who had instilled in him that survival-of-the-fittest mentality, if only to improve the survival odds of his slightly-less-fit older brother. He had them to blame or thank for the never-say-die kill-or-be-killed winner-takes-all attitude to life that had made him unstoppable, a nightmare for somebody. He’d got status all right, that’s for damn sure.
Lee didn’t go to his mother’s funeral. He was on the wrong side of the world again, for one thing. Funerals were about comforting the bereaved, and since his father was gone and the sons had moved beyond grief that wasn’t really an issue. Anyway, he had something else planned for that day. Something he’d been looking forward to more than anything he’d looked forward to in a long time. There were other people involved and he didn’t want to disappoint them: ‘We’d all been looking forward to it. Why should I put them off, for a dead woman I didn’t even like?’ And more poignantly, he might have added, who didn’t like him.
There was no scar above his right eye, where he’d been slugged defending the little guy on a Broadway sidewalk at the age of fifty-eight, because of a thousand dollars’ worth of stitches. ‘I wasn’t going to bother, but Ruth [his daughter] made me.’ He liked to be mothered from time to time, if only for the novelty of it, the unaccustomed, almost alien humanity. It was never a given. Was Ruth’s insistence behind that obscure, much-debated title, Make Me? When Reacher got hit on the head and had dizzy spells, was this why Chang made him see a doctor? You could tell Reacher/Lee remembered it fondly, this small measure of affection, an unsolicited token of tenderness, because he refers back to it at the start of The Midnight Line:
Fortunately I no longer have a headache. I got hit in the head, but that’s all better now. A doctor said. A friend made me go. Two times. She was worried about me.
‘I was totally unwanted,’ Lee said, with startling and unrefined brutality, when he was shadowed during the writing of Make Me. ‘And disliked. My mother said I was dog shit brought into the house on someone’s shoe. Obviously I’m writing with an idea of getting people to love me.’
Writing. Fighting. Pure linguistic coincidence. Euphony. No more than that. But still it was funny how they rhymed so exactly.