Maybe two pounds of grass a week, with someone to share the hut.
Killing Floor, 1997
There was another thing Lee still kept from his boyhood days: the medal he won at the end of his fifth (O level) year. It was round and weighty, brass, but dull in colour, with the head of Edward VI on one side and, on the other, carved lettering in glinting block capitals reading: ‘Awarded to J. D. Grant on election to a Foundation Scholarship 1970’, with ‘The Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham’ running around the circumference.
Jim joined King Edward’s on academic merit, like Richard, ‘hungry for intellectual fodder’. He recalled walking in with ninety-nine other boys and how ‘the air itself was crackling and buzzing with intelligence and potential’. At last he had something to sink his teeth into and a whole new library to devour. He took piano lessons and learned to read music (Rex and Audrey harboured a fond vision of him playing the organ at Richard’s wedding). He went to Granville on the Cherbourg Peninsula. He got at least one Distinction Prize every year, sometimes two, which meant he had qualified in the top three in at least three subjects. He won prizes across the board, including Art, except in Chemistry, which he was never any good at. He boycotted O-level Chemistry so as to preserve his immaculate grade average (‘Sorry he was ill in exams,’ comments the Chief Master on his report). But he was the only kid to get full marks in Biology. In Fifths, Jim ranked second overall so they were ‘forced’ to give him a scholarship, albeit through gritted teeth.
Unusually for a guy who had to win, Jim was happy with second place. He had achieved his goal. ‘I did it to spite them, because they hated me, because I was bad.’
He wanted to stay in control of the narrative. ‘I had enough native wit to make sure I succeeded.’ But he didn’t care that his headmaster couldn’t in good faith recommend him to Cambridge, where Richard had won yet another scholarship to study Engineering at Churchill College: he didn’t want to go there anyway.
Jim was fourteen when his ‘Age of Aquarius’ kicked in. He felt a compulsion to show off and was quick to accept a dare. On a 1967 ski trip to Sölden in Austria a bunch of guys bet he wouldn’t jump off the chairlift heading up the mountain. Their skis were waiting at the top. They were about 30 feet above the slope when he picked a spot where the snow looked deep and jumped. His mates paid up but his teachers made him return the money.
From that point on Jim treated school itself as a dare. ‘I came to school high every day. My parents were so backward-looking, so far behind the curve they just feared I was drinking. It worked out the same as if they’d been totally permissive.’ He’d be going out and they’d say, ‘Don’t drink!’ ‘I won’t drink,’ he would answer, the picture of filial innocence. Not only did he like weed better, he couldn’t afford to do both. Was he going to buy a cider or score a joint? No contest. Once his mother found a tab of cannabis neatly wrapped in foil inside his blazer pocket. She left it there, had perhaps mistaken it for an OXO cube, even though her son was doing woodwork, not domestic science, at school.
‘I remember the exact weekend,’ Lee recalls in a 2017 interview for High Times:
April 1969, in Birmingham, England. I was 14. A weekend party at a guy’s house – it started Friday night and lasted until Monday morning. Had sex for the first time with two sisters in quick succession. Smoked my first joint. One of the greatest weekends of my life.
It was all about pleasure. ‘Weed is the thing I really enjoy. It makes me feel really good.’
But it’s also the only sane way to behave:
The psychological roots are incredibly interesting. From when I was a tiny kid – and I saw the same thing in my daughter – I know that children love spinning around and around until they get dizzy and fall over. Seems to me there is a basic built-in instinct to alter your consciousness.
When he and wife Jane had ‘the talk’ with Ruth they kept things simple. Only three rules, they told her (in the style of a Lee Child novel): ‘No unprotected sex. No intravenous drugs. No religious cults.’ Ruth thought about it and said: ‘Does that mean I can smoke weed?’ She was a smart kid, a chip off the old block, and for a while, they would supply each other.
Lee didn’t talk much about his sexual awakening. Only to say it ushered in five years of free love and his most successful pick-up line was will you fuck me in the parking lot? (‘which usually worked’) and he almost never slept in his own bed. But there was one myth-busting detail he chose to reveal. They weren’t really sisters. At least not biological. One of them was adopted, or maybe both. He liked sisters though. Sisters made a better story. It was like he was wired to turn life into story in real time. And as soon as the story was told, it was ‘a true story’. Which mattered more than the actual sex.
Not long after this conversation I met one of his closest friends, Robert Reeves, who had worked alongside him at Granada Television in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We talked about his Bob Dylan-like tendency towards fictionalisation, and Rob observed:
The thing is, it didn’t matter whether or not you believed his yarns. You held him in affection, and anyway, they were good stories. There are tall-story tellers I’ve met that you would instinctively mock. Never Jim. I think Jim’s attitude was if I say something about myself it becomes true because I’ve said it. The actual truth is an afterthought.
It was a true story he’d made up from start to finish. I was reminded of Lee’s respect for Reacher’s irrefutable (fictional) reality: I can’t go back and change it because that’s the way it happened. Truth was not merely a matter of fact, but authenticity. It was the way you made sense of life, the way you held it together.
Back when Jim was fourteen ‘everybody smoked’. Now smoking was enough to make you a wild child, however old you were. People who didn’t smoke got ‘a real vicarious kick out of it’, which Lee found ‘pretty pathetic’. But useful. It helped promote the idea he was ‘a bit of rough’ and even well into his sixth decade could still kick ass. ‘I can light up the pipe if you like. Could probably find a needle somewhere.’
Directors and cameramen loved his addiction to cigarettes. To be given licence to shoot was thrilling. In summer 2017 he was the subject of a short film made by New York’s 92Y as part of Xerox’s Set the Page Free project, bringing together fourteen writers (including, among others, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Valeria Luiselli and Roxane Gay) to produce original material based on the theme of the workplace.
For much of it Lee was sitting at his riveted aluminium desk, writing. There were about a dozen people behind him and some hefty machinery rolling back and forth on wheels, but the atmosphere was hushed. It was like watching a programme by David Attenborough. A lot of zooms and close-ups. Long lean fingers hovering above the keys, then moving about slowly, questingly, like a crab picking over invisible crumbs of food. A pause. A cigarette in his left hand resting lightly on the rim of a heavy glass ashtray, the smoke curling lazily upwards. A thoughtful expression, right hand on his chin. Eyes focused on the screen. Silence. Stillness. Then the cigarette drifting back to his lips, a barely perceptible nod of the head, a small movement of his right index finger, a single comma deleted. It was compelling viewing. Light on special effects but heavy on ritual. How much of the magic was down to the smoke?
A guy asked if he was interested in acting in films, which of course he already had, in two, opposite Tom Cruise, which meant he was already a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Lee smiled and like he often did, said both yes and no: ‘For a walk-on part where I can just turn up, do it, be out of there. Play a gorilla or an ageing rock star.’
‘Somewhere inside Lee’s head there’s violent brutality,’ the director said to his crew, helpfully, to get them on the right page.
Our culture placed too much importance on self-preservation, Lee thought. He knew smoking was bad for him. He had even given up for ten months in 1985. Nothing to do with fatherhood. He wanted to buy a Philips CD player and he (still) couldn’t afford to do both. He’d also just bought his wife a horse. But once he’d achieved his short-term financial goals he started up again. Because he enjoyed smoking. He enjoyed it more than not smoking. He liked being a smoker. If he’d had a business card it could have read, Jim Grant: Smoker. Did any of us really want to live forever? He didn’t think so.
The story he wrote for Set the Page Free – one of four he wrote over a four-day long weekend that summer (‘I’d rather hang myself than spend four weeks on a short story’) – was about smoking in the workplace. It was called ‘My Rules’.
Lee was glad they’d taught him woodwork at school rather than cooking or typing. Not being able to touch-type was an advantage. He recalled an essay by Umberto Eco on the importance of handwriting. It encouraged you to think through each sentence before you started writing. Lee had used a computer since partway into Die Trying but still took the Eco approach. ‘It makes for a cleaner first draft.’ Computers, like digital film, bred a lazy extravagance, because you knew you could go back and fix it later. The speed of his typing was perfectly adapted to the speed of his creative brain, and if he went any faster his hands would trip up his head. It was slower, but more efficient. Disciples would often quote his dictum: ‘Don’t get it right, get it written.’ But it was more Get it right as it’s written. A waste-not want-not methodology in tune with his frugal upbringing.
Before sex and drugs there was rock and roll. Because of the sloping elevation, Jim’s new loft bedroom at the back of 6 Underwood was very high up. His father had done the electrics to save money, having learned how in the army, and Jim had learned by watching him. He hung a circle of wire around the top of the room to improve his chances of picking up Radio Luxembourg and after that ‘could get it pretty good’. It would come in and out for five minutes at a time, but that made it more desirable: ‘it was your thing that you were secretly on’. He could also pick up the American Forces Network from Germany, which played whatever was in the US charts – country, rhythm and blues, and pop. When his Otley grandma acquired an iconic Bush transistor radio he inherited her table radio, standing two feet across in a polished walnut veneer casing, narrower at the top than the base, with a long glowing dial and a brown grille cloth with gold threads. It was a heavy thing, had a warm mid-range sound with very little treble or bass, and he had to ground it externally to his iron bed frame to stop it humming. He took it to university and rigged it up as an amplifier for the old turntable he picked up from a junk shop. At some point he got hold of a Dansette, a suitcase record player, that he would take round to friends’ houses for listening to new records.
Piano lessons went out the window. Piano bashing became a spectator sport at the fair, as opponents competed to wreak total destruction with a sledgehammer. Jim upgraded his guitar to a solid body electric and joined a band called Dark Tower, more likely after old Edwardian J. R. R. Tolkien than Robert Browning and the Childe Roland of medieval legend. There were two other boys from school, the lead guitarist and vocalist, and two from outside who played drums and bass, but what brought them together was the recently established, community-funded Arts Centre in Cannon Hill Park, not far from King Edward’s, a symbol of the revolutionary zeitgeist. Cannon Hill was conceived as a space for young people to come together and explore the creative arts. It was open round the clock, with free access, and young teenagers would typically book from 7 to 11 p.m., with older, cooler kids going for the overnight slot.
During one Dark Tower session a clean-shaven well-mannered softly spoken guy came in to check out the studio. Turned out the guy was a young Robert Plant, and the next night the two groups overlapped and helped move each other’s gear. It was one of Led Zeppelin’s earliest rehearsals, said Lee, the first having taken place in August 1968, when the former Yardbirds convened with their new members in a London basement.
Jim was a regular at Henry’s Blueshouse on Hill Street and the newly opened Mothers club on Erdington High Street, converted from the Carlton Ballroom. Mothers only ran from August 1968 to January 1971 but DJ John Peel called it ‘the best club in Britain’. All the big groups played there, many for the first time: Joe Cocker, John Mayall, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues, King Crimson, Yes, Black Sabbath – virtually the resident band, from just down the road in Aston – as well as the Edgar Broughton Band and Soft Machine, who took their name from a William Burroughs novel.
It cost five shillings (25 pence) to get in, twelve and six for the top bands. The stairs were creaky and the walls painted black. There were posters on the ceiling and the tang of beer in the air. Dress code was hair, plus bangles, beads and badges with battered jeans, patched and turned into flares by the addition of flowery, triangular vents, or stripy blazers and duffel coats, maybe the odd mod suit, bespoke, four-button. Curry and chips on the long walk home. No one was asking to see your ID, unless in reverse, when you were buying a child’s ticket for the train.
Jim saw Pink Floyd at London’s Roundhouse in October 1968, when he was thirteen, amid a fog of incense and dope and patchouli oil. Six months later he was at Mothers when they partly recorded the live disc of the double album Ummagumma. In June 1969 he saw Led Zeppelin at the Birmingham Town Hall, where the music was so loud his watch shattered. In July he was in the capital for the Stones in the Park, which he watched from up a tree. (Trains were cheap, or he would hitch, and the all-night gigs meant he didn’t need a place to sleep, not that he was short of offers.) It was Mick Taylor’s first performance with the Rolling Stones, just two days after the death of Brian Jones. Mick Jagger wore white and released a cloud of white butterflies into the air.
In 1969 he went to the Isle of Wight Festival and in 1970, with his then girlfriend Liz, to the Bath Festival in Somerset. The line-up was spectacular: Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Frank Zappa, Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, and John Mayall with Peter Green. Led Zeppelin headlined, playing to an audience of 200,000 for three hours, including five encores. Jimmy Page played the guitar with a bow. Forty years later the band would set the mood and pace for Gone Tomorrow (‘It got off to a great start and just kept on going’) with ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’, as featured in The Song Remains the Same, filmed at Madison Square Garden in 1973. Most of the film was reshot and re-recorded at London’s Shepperton Studios, but still it conveyed the spirit of the ‘gritty’ New York Lee remembered from his early visits with Jane, and that he sought to evoke in his writing.
Jim listened to everything. He wasn’t that into Sabbath and thought King Crimson and Genesis were ‘too undergraduate’. He was ‘a bit of a snob, always seeking out the obscure and the esoteric, especially new American imports or what nobody else had discovered yet, like the Ed Broughton Band and Bachdenkel’. He remembered how Birmingham band Bachdenkel gained notoriety for some avant la lettre guerrilla marketing, spraying advertising stencils on walls and pavements and then skipping the country and moving to Paris.
The members of Dark Tower were all self-taught. They didn’t write their own music. They were in a band because everyone was, and like everyone else they put their own spin on all the great songs already bubbling in the hyper-creative ether. They did ‘two really good paid gigs that gave you the flavour of what it might have been like’, the second on New Year’s Eve 1969 at Digbeth Civic Hall in the old industrial quarter, going out on a high supporting ‘folk-rock hippie eccentric woo-woo band’ Tea and Symphony. There might be some old three-inch reel-to-reel tape mouldering on a shelf, nothing Lee could lay his hands on. But ‘it felt bloody huge’. He remembered setting up before the show and some older guy, a musician with another band, wandering over to take a look. The guy saw they were just kids and didn’t have much kit, so he said: ‘take some old tables from over there and cover them with black cloth, to look like a bank of speakers’. It was then Lee learned that faking it was part of the job.
He was proud of the lighting. They rigged it up themselves, including some improvised strobe lighting involving a single-blade electric engine and a vat of saltwater.
In the tradition of all great bands Dark Tower formed, swelled, peaked and crashed. The bass player had ‘a real cute girlfriend’, which brought kudos to the group, but he and the drummer were older and moved on to other things. Among the King Edward’s contingent decadence set in early. The lead vocalist Alan, a ‘dark-haired magnetic Adonis’ from Jim’s class, got tangled up with a girl at sixteen and had to leave to get a job, ‘so kind of expelled himself’. Dumbo, the lead guitarist, and Handsworth Wood local Mike, who helped out with lighting, got expelled for real. Turned out they’d been stealing violins from the Music School and selling them to a shop in town to fund their rock-star lifestyle of clothes, gigs and substances. When they were caught they tried to blame the scam on Jim, which turned out unlucky for them since he’d been off sick with scarlet fever, or possibly acute tonsillitis, for those two or possibly three weeks, and also because he wasn’t about to let the bad guys get away with it.
The friends ‘fell out big time’ and the whole band experience was tarnished. Jim never forgot. ‘I put it in Killing Floor,’ Lee said, ‘at the end of the first chapter [he put everything in Killing Floor]. You can’t prove something that didn’t happen.’
I was under arrest. In a town where I’d never been before. Apparently for murder. But I knew two things. First, they couldn’t prove something had happened if it hadn’t happened. And second, I hadn’t killed anyone.
His old bandmates would never have got the grades anyway. Lee was certain of that.
Mike Holt lived at 70 Underwood Road and had gone to Grestone Avenue with Charles Spicer. Jim had seen him at the entrance exam, but it wasn’t until they got on the bus on the first day of senior school that they really hooked up. Jim liked going round to Mike’s place because it was so wild in comparison to his own. Mike’s mother was a frustrated actress and his father an alcoholic. He was one of four sons. The second-oldest died in a car accident aged fifteen. The third was an epileptic who wore a helmet to protect him when he fell, but he also died young. Toby, the youngest, was ‘the only sane one’. Mike was a thin, wiry, scrappy kid, clever but unfocused. There was nowhere for him to do his homework and no expectation that he should. Lee remembered him as a ‘mental drop-out who didn’t care’, but with hindsight could see it was the kind of ‘home–school interface problem’ 1960s King Edward’s wasn’t equipped to deal with, or even conscious of, which meant Mike fell by the wayside.
One day Lee Child was in Manchester and a portly, balding guy turned up in the signing queue and said: ‘Remember me?’ Lee didn’t. Like Lee himself, Mike Holt was totally transformed and had become a Professor of Arabic. They agreed to meet up when Lee was next in England, which turned out to be November of that same year, just a few months later. Then Lee got a message from Toby that Mike had died in a bicycle accident while on holiday. His tyre had caught on a stone, he’d flipped over the handlebars, and hit his head on a rock.
Mike was a ‘full-on Age of Aquarius’ guy. He lacked Jim’s instinct for self-preservation, his ability to pull back from the brink.
‘I was the only one who survived into the Sixth Form.’
But he arrived there, as his English teacher recalls, with ‘something of a reputation’.