‘Anywhere I end up, that’s where I want to go.’
Echo Burning, 2001
‘I don’t know where to begin,’ Carmen says at the start of Echo Burning, as they are riding in her front-wheel-drive white Cadillac. ‘At the beginning,’ Reacher answers. ‘Always works best that way.’
As he sat down to write his fifth novel Lee must have wanted options to play with while he figured out which road to take, which ride to accept, which driver he fancied. There are the three anonymous watchers with their dusty pickup truck. There is Reacher climbing out of his motel-room window with a back story about poor table manners in a bar the night before. There are the three anonymous killers in their ‘mud-coloured nothing car’, a Crown Vic. And there is Carmen, defined by her luxury car and a bunch of painfully controlling men.
Like Reacher, Lee never plans in advance. He goes where the story leads, hitching a ride on a strong first sentence and following where it takes him. So absolute is the integration of story and discourse that beyond that first sentence he leaves it all up to Reacher: if there’s a problem on page 387 because of something that ‘happened’ on page 38, then it’s Reacher’s problem, not his, and ‘Reacher has to deal with it’. Writing was like getting in a car at night and only being able to see as far ahead as the road picked out by the headlights. You couldn’t quite see where you were going but you knew you would get there in the end. It helped if you were an experienced driver.
Reacher asks a direct question: ‘You want to tell me where this is heading?’
‘This road?’ she said, nervously.
‘No, this conversation.’
It’s a conversation the author is having with himself: You want to tell me where this book is heading, Reacher?
In Echo Burning the three watchers aren’t going anywhere and are soon dispatched by the three killers. Reacher dispatches the four cops. Which leaves Carmen, to whom the writer adds a daughter, Ellie. After that it’s up to Reacher. What Reacher does is drive back and forth between Echo and Pecos and Fort Stockton and the mesa until – with the help of an old LeBaron and a ‘yellow four-cylinder VW import’ that has to be sacrificed and a Jeep Cherokee and a ‘tricked-up Crown Victoria’ that he commandeers from a bad guy – he figures out the connection between these two separate strands and does what he must to provide a satisfactory resolution, namely defeat Bobby’s pickup and save the Cadillac.
He solves the puzzle with a little knowledge of Spanish and French, his recollected readings of Balzac and Marcuse, some reflections on a historic photograph, and his forensic analysis of an entry wound and some bruises. But mostly on the basis of his expert reading of a Mercedes-Benz recently abandoned south of Abilene and an ancient Chevrolet long-since abandoned in the Greers’ hellish Red House barn, with the story of its evil past written into the million miles on its clock. ‘Probably hadn’t been started in a decade. The springs sagged and the tyres were flat and the rubber was perished by the relentless heat.’ No more bucking and wallowing and thrusting and bouncing. Inert, silent, guilty: a truck that had made a full confession and told Reacher all he needed to know.
‘This is my thing,’ Reacher tells his lesbian lawyer sidekick. ‘This is what I’m built for. The thrill of the chase. I’m an investigator, Alice, always was, always will be. I’m a hunter.’
It was a follow-up to an earlier conversation:
Then she asked him when he’d been in the Middle East and the Pacific islands, and he responded with the expanded ten-minute version of his autobiography because he found he was enjoying her company. The first thirty-six years were easy enough, as always. They made a nicely linear tale of childhood and adulthood, accomplishment and progress, punctuated and underlined in the military fashion with promotions and medals. The last few years were harder, as usual. The aimlessness, the drifting. He saw them as a triumph of disengagement, but he knew other people didn’t. So as always he just told the story and answered the awkward questions and let her think whatever she wanted.
Lee liked the idea of ‘a nicely linear tale’. Writing unfolded sequentially along a horizontal, metonymic axis, just as in English books are read from left to right. There had to be a sense of purpose, the promise of a final destination to keep you turning the pages. But if his stories traced a line it wasn’t a straight one. It was more like a fractal coastline, ‘a saw-tooth itinerary’ as Reacher describes it in Nothing to Lose, with twists and turns and detours and diversions and digressions, and even the occasional doubling back. It depended on which car stopped to pick Reacher up, or if no car did and he had to walk. Neither Reacher nor Lee wanted to arrive too soon. In the interests of a thrilling climax and a full word count there had to be some holding back or peripeteia first. Like in The Odyssey. Like a musician pursuing a far-flung improvisation before resolving back to his theme.
Led Zeppelin, like Aston Villa, was never far from Lee’s mind. ‘I love both the focus and the discursiveness of Jimmy Page’s solos,’ he wrote for the New York Times. ‘I know I’ll never play guitar like that, but late at night I think maybe at least I could write like that.’
It was because stories were linear that he couldn’t go back to straighten them out. A story had to follow its own path, in the same way that to get from A to X Reacher puts one foot in front of the other and for the writer, one word literally follows the next. The road not taken could always form the basis of the next outing in the series.
‘Everyone’s life needed an organising principle,’ the author writes in Nothing to Lose, ‘and relentless forward motion was Reacher’s.’ And a few pages further on. ‘Reacher hated turning back. Forward motion was his organising principle.’ It was Lee’s too, in writing and in life. ‘I can’t do “xxx” and go back later, because one thing follows on from, and must follow on from another.’
Lee’s objective was to capture the reader at the start and keep them going until the end. He would begin with a question, ‘then find a rhythm that trips forward, where the beat is always falling just ahead, that subliminally pulls people along by a chain, so it’s like riding a bike downhill’.
He liked to quote Henry James: ‘Easy reading is hard writing.’
This is why his minor characters are often not referred to by name, something critics sometimes took as a sign of him ‘dialling it in’. The opposite was true. He really cared about the reader.
‘It’s not laziness.’ Lee resented the tedium of books where thirty pages in you’ve forgotten who’s who. If he says ‘the old guy at the Post Office’ (at Mule Crossing in The Midnight Line) then the reader is reminded of that character’s function in the story. ‘Of course Reacher knows his name,’ he said. ‘He needs to know his name, because he’s looking for Porterfield and he needs to find out if this is Porterfield before he can talk to him.’ Not only was he looking out for his reader, it was integral to the characterisation of Reacher himself, his easy, familiar, vernacular style.
‘I work at this,’ Lee said. ‘I construct it with aims and purposes.’
But writing a page-turner didn’t mean hurtling along at breakneck speed. ‘All the Reacher books include episodes of quiet and calm, otherwise the book just batters you to death.’ If you had only one pace it was the same as having no pace at all. He explained it to me using two quite different points of comparison. It was like Chuck Berry’s song ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘which tells the whole story in super-compact form but still has time for redundancy and incidental detail, creating a feeling of expansiveness inside a fast-forward narrative’ (‘A log cabin made of earth and wood’). Or a Manhattan apartment where every square foot is worth $2000, so you make sure to build in the luxury of some unused open space.
Were it not for his dislike of pretension, he might have invoked what nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt called the ‘super-erogatory’ in Shakespeare, the luxurious excess of his style, the first-glance unnecessariness of details that on closer examination rarely were. Lee’s prose is seen as ‘lean’ and ‘spare’, and mostly (though not always) it is – at sentence level. But he can write whole paragraphs about the electric bell push and wiring and hand-lettered signs and peeling tape (‘many layers, applied in strips of generous length, some of which were curled at the corners, and dirty’) on the waist-high enquiry counter (‘like a miniature version of any government office’) of the county records department in Laconia, registered not merely for their own sake but for the snippets of insight they provide into the inner life of non-existent characters (‘as if picked at by bored and anxious fingers’). The digital world may be a foreign country to Reacher, but he has a quasi-robotic capacity for storing and processing information.
You want your prose to keep ‘tripping forward’, but not at the cost of sacrificing interior monologue, descriptive detail, sociological observation, philosophical reflection and poetic resonance. Hence Lee’s love of repetition and lists:
Jack Reacher caught the last of the summer sun in a small town on the coast of Maine, and then, like the birds in the sky above him, he began his long migration south. But not, he thought, straight down the coast. Not like the orioles and the buntings and the phoebes and the warblers and the ruby-throated hummingbirds. Instead, he decided on a diagonal route, south and west, from the top right-hand corner of the country to the bottom left, maybe through Syracuse, and Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and Oklahoma City, and Albuquerque, and onward all the way to San Diego. Which for an army guy like Reacher was a little too full of Navy people, but which was otherwise a fine spot to start the winter.
This is the opening of Past Tense. It doesn’t go a mile a minute. It lulls you dreamily into rolling along for the ride, like being wrapped in honeyed tones or rocked in a warm embrace. And since Reacher doesn’t go on to do any of these things, it is full of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ redundancy.
One reason Reacher goes slow is because Lee is a slow writer.
I’m dragging every word and action out of my head at the time of writing. It’s a kind of distributed planning that is very tiring. With a plan writing is boring. Without a plan writing is arduous.
But the stress of constant invention ‘totally engages’ him. ‘It’s going slow,’ he wrote to me in February 2019. ‘I really like going slow.’
‘Everything I do I base on my experience as a reader,’ Lee told Christopher Wigginton at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf festival in 2017:
What I love as a reader is that factor that makes you keep going. It’s a mysterious process: one more chapter, one more chapter, that sensation of immersion on page one that you can’t get out of until you finish.
He thought of structure as a retrospective delusion in the mind of the reader, an illusion of intentionality. ‘I start with the first line, then I think OK what’s the next line, then I keep going and one hundred thousand words later usually the story has worked itself out.’ The second half of the book was like a mirror held at right angles to the ink blot of the first, to create an appearance of seductive symmetry.
This aesthetic reaches its peak in The Midnight Line. The storyline has an archetypal simplicity, driven by a single specific object from the beginning right through to the end. Despite a string of random encounters, there is nothing Reacher does that is not motivated by his desire to find the owner of the ring. He wants to know the who, what, where, when and why, ‘for sure’.
Why? the pawn-shop guy asks him.
‘I can’t tell you exactly.’
A simple answer to a simple question, true to character and intrinsic to the plot. But also effortlessly, unpretentiously self-reflexive.
‘I guess I want to know the story.’
It’s Reacher’s voice. But it’s also Lee Child, telling us exactly how he writes.
In conversation with Megan Abbott at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on publication day, the two writers considered why Reacher finds it difficult to explain his motives. ‘Can he express himself?’ Abbott asked. ‘Probably not,’ Lee conceded: ‘I try to make him a twentieth-century guy, if not twenty-first, but he finds it hard to admit why he’s affected. Perhaps it’s because he’s a bit old-fashioned, sympathetic to the woman in a way he might not have been to a man, and to someone dramatically smaller than him.’
True to character, but also solving a fundamental technical problem for the writer. ‘He does it mainly because he’s got nothing to do.’ For which read: What the hell am I going to write about this time? How do I get him involved? ‘I have to find an aim within the aimlessness of his life.’
Not surprisingly, Reacher encounters scepticism: A buck gets ten there’s no story at all. The MacGuffin of the ring provides a brilliant beginning, but will the author make it through to the end? Or will this be the novel he most fears, where it all comes crashing down around him? What if this time I can’t pull it off?
‘I’ll follow the ring until I find someone who’s heard of her.’
There was something Lee said that was often quoted by his disciples: ‘The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.’ The Midnight Line is the ultimate case study of this theory in practice.
By the time he tracks down Rose Sanderson, Reacher no longer needs to ask for answers to his questions. He no longer needs to know ‘the end of the story’ because he’s already figured it out. This must have been the precise moment when Lee knew for sure – for the twenty-second time in the series – that he was galloping triumphantly down the home straight.
There is another way The Midnight Line sweetly marries form to content, through repetition: a series of musical motifs to which the writer returns again and again, tracing not so much a single line as an endlessly intertwining double helix. It’s a way of spiralling back and stitching things together and helping readers remember the themes and images that matter. But also playing the reader like some kind of musical instrument. It starts early and easy – unobtrusive, incidental, low-key. Then it becomes soothing, familiar, deliberate, comforting, insistent, demanding. Until finally it builds in metaphoric intensity to the reading equivalent of a mind-blowing opioid high.
He wrote the opening chapter in the Orkneys (using pencil and paper), but The Midnight Line is Lee’s Wyoming novel. Prompted by the fact that he’d bought a ranch there a few months before (though his lyrical description of a Wyoming sunrise had already impressed reviewers of Without Fail fifteen years earlier). ‘You have to remember,’ he told Abbott, ‘to me it’s amazing the size of this country. The East and the West are pretty much European in density, but the middle is freaky.’
[Reacher] liked Wyoming. For its heroic geography, and its heroic climate. And its emptiness. It was the size of the United Kingdom, but it had fewer people in it than Louisville, Kentucky. The Census Bureau called most of it uninhabited. What people there were tended to be straightforward and pleasant. They were happy to leave a person alone.
The first part of the state was high plains. Fall had already started. He gazed across the immense tawny distances, to the spectre of the mountains beyond. The highway was a dark blacktop ribbon, mostly empty.
Abbott liked ‘the care and leisure’ Lee took in getting Reacher from one place to the next. ‘It’s both a pleasure and a problem,’ he replied. ‘I like the long, meandering journeys, his observations along the way, but you don’t want it to read like a travel timetable.’ Did Homer worry about that too?
For Lee, the best stories were about character. ‘Plot is a rental car. You use it for a week. If it’s a Jaguar and not a Ford Fiesta all to the good. If I went to the Caribbean with Scarlett Johansson, none of my friends would say “what car did you rent?”’
But cars are a big deal, therefore the analogy intimates that plot is too. And it took him six months to finish a book, so the rental car had to last a lot longer than a week.
Every novel was a road trip and Lee’s job was to give the reader one hell of a ride. Easy, but also highly pleasurable. Chopper bikes were cool. But better still a Jaguar.