Like a condom crammed with walnuts, is what some girl had said.
Tripwire, 1999
The teenage Jim Grant signed on with a temping agency in search of paid work. Rock bottom was the wrecking crew: the damp, mouldy plaster dust spoiled his lungs for the superior substances he actually chose to inhale. Better was the annual bonanza of wakes week (a religious festival that turned secular during the Industrial Revolution), when local factories shut down for essential maintenance. While the working classes trooped off to Blackpool or Morecambe or Southport to take a salutary dip in the sea, eager, cash-starved school kids would move in to strip, clean and renovate the factories. These were union places: they wouldn’t get a look-in any other time.
The classiest job he got was on the basis of his first-class education at Cherry Orchard, where they made sure he could keep his numbers straight. It was in the summer of 1972, in an office on Gas Street, where he was responsible for booking strippers for working men’s clubs. His main takeaway was a laconic one-liner – ‘I’ve been around the agented professions all of my life’ – guaranteed to entertain future audiences of his own.
Jim liked earning a pound an hour for manual labour, a decent rate before rampant inflation set in at the end of the seventies, especially cash-in-hand in little brown envelopes, but not enough to build up any serious muscle mass. Unlike Reacher, who at the start of Tripwire is ‘in the best shape of his life’ from digging swimming pools under the hot sun in Key West and shifting ‘about four tons of earth and rock and sand every day’ with a shovel.
Jim didn’t want to work up that kind of sweat. Rob Reeves recalled him boasting he would never take physical exercise again, at most he would ‘walk from his car’. This was when Rob was going to the YMCA every day to train for the London marathon. ‘He’d come up to you, and he’d put his arm around you, slowly. Everything was slow.’
He’d been a strong competitive swimmer. He’d learned aged seven or eight in the Grove Lane Baths in Handsworth, a gracious old building with a gabled roof and first- and second-class baths and a raised wrought-iron viewing gallery. He was in the school swim team until he opted out in Sixth Form and had voluntarily joined Northfields Swimming Club, where he’d been scouted for the Olympic squad. In his 1969 pomp he could beat the time in which Johnny Weissmuller had won gold at the 1924 Olympics but, he said, so could a lot of other people. He had a natural swimmer’s physique, but these days was more svelte supermodel than condom crammed with walnuts.
So instead of digging pools he worked for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre at its new home on Broad Street. The original on Station Street had been Britain’s first purpose-built rep and was the acknowledged prototype for post-war companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National.
The production Jim was most proud of was a series of one-act plays for which he rigged up three separate sets of light. The plays were spare, and he wanted the lighting to be spare too, with no excess flesh on the bones. He used only seven lanterns. It was ‘very simple, very pure’. But the ‘Birmingham bourgeoisie’ responded crassly. The council had forked out ‘a shedload of money’ to get state-of-the-art lighting kit and it wasn’t being used. Jim liked simple lighting rigs. He still thinks a lot of stage lighting is over-egged and over-elaborate.
Once upon a time he had dreamed of a place on the stage. He was five years old, sitting in a darkened auditorium at Cherry Orchard Primary watching a group of children a little older than himself perform in one of Miss Lyster’s high-octane productions. The children were beaming happily. They were being beamed at by their ecstatic parents. It was hard to know who had started the beaming and who was happiest, but it was like breathing in love instead of oxygen. James wanted some of that surfeit of love for himself. He wanted to be one of those beatific children, basking blissfully in admiration and approval. But it never happened (something to do with being handed a lyric sheet and discovering he couldn’t sing). Instead, he was sent backstage to make things. It was a harsh encounter with the reality principle. ‘I was disabused of any illusions I may have had about my acting ability by around the age of six.’
Lee didn’t need someone else to psychologise him. ‘I was drawn to the theatre in my desire for that kind of approval,’ he told me. ‘I was looking for love.’
It was while working as an unpaid intern at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the summer of 1970, on the cusp of Sixth Form, that Jim first saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like the first time he heard ‘She Loves You’ on the radio, it blew his mind and changed his life forever. It was Shakespeare’s play, but in the radical version featuring Frances de la Tour and Ben Kingsley that became known as Peter Brook’s Dream. Jim was lucky to be there. According to the Sunday Times it was ‘the sort of thing one only sees once in a lifetime, and then only from a man of genius’.
Brook was on a mission to liberate the play from ‘encrusted bad tradition’. He wanted to put the emphasis back on the text, to create an atmosphere in which only the poetry mattered, so that audiences would hear ‘the sheer incandescent beauty’ of Shakespeare’s verse (as Lee would describe it) as if for the first time, relying on the power of words to generate a sense of location.
This extract is by John Barber in the Daily Telegraph:
In a production that will surely make theatre history, Peter Brook last night tore through all conventional ideas about how the play should be staged. He found new ways of giving form to its poetry and power.
For setting, he offers a dazzling white box. The only furniture is four white cushions. Trapezes hang from the flies. Iron ladders extend to a platform where musicians are stationed. The naked harshness of this environment is used by Mr Brook as a means to expose the actors’ words and emotions.
Titania’s bower was a giant red feather.
The costumes were eclectic, but neither Athenian nor Elizabethan. Oberon wore a purple satin gown and Puck a yellow jumpsuit. The mechanicals were dressed as factory workers. The young lovers were in tie-dye shirts and maxi dresses and the fairies were played by adult men. Brook doubled up roles to suggest that the Fairy King and Queen were the alter egos of the mortal rulers, and the conflicts and erotic adventures of the nocturnal wood the uncontrollable eruption of subconscious fears and desires. He emphasised sexuality as never before, in tune with the 1960s spirit of permissiveness.
It was around the same time that Jim saw Robert Altman’s satirical black comedy MASH, and watched his first adult movies at the cinema, though the only one he recalled was soft-core comedy Au Pair Girls. ‘The sixties didn’t really arrive until the seventies,’ Lee said. It wasn’t a monolithic thing, in lock-step for all people.
At the close of Brook’s Dream, as Oberon spoke his final lines about the sunrise, the house lights slowly rose, so that members of the audience became visible to each other. Upon Puck’s words ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends’, the entire cast overflowed into the auditorium to embrace the public in what one critic described as a ‘lovefest’.
The experience of that midsummer night had a profound impact on the sixteen-year-old Jim. But sometimes you can be inspired not to do something. It wasn’t until three years later that he got around to reading Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (based on four lectures endowed by Granada Television and published in 1968), which finally made up his mind, but what he had sensed, even before he was able to articulate it, was that for theatre, ‘all you needed was a script, a bunch of actors, and an empty space’. Everything else was an optional extra. He, Jim Grant, technician par excellence, was an optional extra. Redundant. Dispensable. De trop. He would have to look elsewhere for love.
In The Hard Way Lauren Pauling is curious about why Reacher left the army.
‘As soon as they said that leaving was an option it kind of broke the spell. Made me realise I wasn’t personally essential to their plans. I guess they’d have been happy enough if I stayed, but clearly it wasn’t going to break their hearts if I went.’
Jim Grant wanted to be essential to what was going on. So it would break their hearts if he went. As Lee Child he had signally achieved that goal.
Jim left King Edward’s in 1973 and went travelling in Europe with school friend Mick Cleary (who would become rugby correspondent to the Daily Telegraph). Or so he believed. He remembered being in Corsica. He remembered being in Switzerland. There was a train at one point – he remembered sleeping in the corridor. ‘It was a bacchanal that lasted all summer long.’
I wrote to Mick Cleary. He remembered being in Corsica with Jim. He remembered hitchhiking and getting lost and pitching a tent halfway up a mountain and going in search of food in the dark. He remembered seeing lights in the distance and climbing some steps to a hotel or bar and opening the door and a hundred shaven heads swivelling round to greet them. A gathering of the Foreign Legion, perhaps. He remembered more than Jim. But this was 1971. Or maybe 1972. They’d landed in Bastia. The Scout Master had told them to bugger off for a few days and reconvene in Ajaccio.
What about 1973? ‘Don’t remember hooking up with Jim on that trip, but to cite the Marianne Faithfull defence, if you can remember the seventies, you weren’t there.’
I went back to Lee. What about 1971 and the Venture Scouts? ‘Don’t remember that. But you know what they say about the seventies…’
‘It was 1972,’ said Nigel Clay, and showed me a postcard to his girlfriend (now wife) Pat to prove it. According to this report Jim was cross because a wild boar had pissed on his kit.
Jim returned from his grand tour of 1973 in late September. He’d almost forgotten about his A levels. The retakes were passable. He thought: Ha! I could go to university with these! But he hadn’t applied to any universities and the clearing process that mopped up any remaining candidates was already over and he hadn’t a clue. So he did what he always did when he needed answers, and went to the library. The prospectuses were worn and thumbed. One had a picture of a high-rise block against a clear blue sky that it boasted was the tallest university building in the country. It reminded him of that skyscraper he’d fallen for at Elmwood. There was a fantastic theatre that looked like a newly converted chapel. This place was speaking to him, but the front cover of the prospectus was gone. It was saying ‘we do this, we do that’, but Who the hell are you? Jim wanted to know.
He found the name ‘Sheffield University’ in microscopic print on the back. He rang up and said, ‘I got these results at A level.’ The woman on the other end of the line was kind and helpful like Susan Turner in 61 Hours. ‘What do you want to study?’ she asked. ‘What have you got?’ There was a momentary pause and then the helpful voice came back on: ‘We’ve got a space in Law.’ And that was it. Law covered it, so far as Jim could see – English, History, Maths, Language, Geography, the works. ‘It was a total accident.’ Canon R. G. Lunt would feel vindicated. Jim’s parents would be happy. Maybe he would even get to meet the owner of the voice.
Rex was envious. When he and Audrey moved to Harpenden he did a law degree himself, at night school in London. It was the only time he would follow in his second son’s footsteps.
‘To be honest,’ Lee said, riding roughshod over all sensibilities, ‘if you were white and middle-class you were going to get a job. It was inevitable. So I didn’t care about my grades. I felt safe. I could pick and choose.’
Really he was still half expecting to do something in the theatre. ‘But Peter Brook put an end to that.’ Which was when he made ‘a conscious intellectual decision’ to move into television. There was ‘less magic’ in film. It was less creative, poetic, romantic. But he would have a proper job to do, instead of just being ‘fluff’.
In the meantime it was like Reacher breaking up with Jodie at the end of Running Blind. They had a month, or in Jim’s case four years, which was more than most people got. Parting was such sweet sorrow. Going to university was one long afternoon off, a fond farewell to his first love. The drama studio was on Shearwood Road, next door to the Law faculty. He got a rave write-up in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph for his set for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. ‘It was very minimalist,’ Lee said. He was working with a thrust stage with a small amount of seating on each side and the technical problem was how to recreate a Victorian living room in such a way as to ensure visibility for all. ‘My solution was to do it only up to skirting-board height, about six inches, to suggest it by framing.’
The concept makes a comeback in Past Tense, when Reacher finally makes it to the spot where his father’s house once stood:
Nothing remained of the lobby’s right-hand wall except for stubs of broken brick, low down at floor level. They looked like teeth smashed down to the gum. In the centre was a stone saddle, no taller, but intact. The right-hand ground-floor apartment’s front door. Reacher stepped inside. The hallway floor had three trees growing through it. Their trunks were no thicker than his wrist, but they had raced twenty feet high, looking for the light. Beyond them and either side were low lines of smashed brick, showing where the rooms had been, like an architect’s floor plan come to life, slightly three dimensional.
It had been a very good set for A Doll’s House. Maybe his best ever. Worth reviving. He wished he had kept some photographs. But never mind. The power of his words would suffice to generate a sense of location in this empty fictional space.
Lee often went to the theatre with his daughter Ruth. Their approach was eccentric. ‘We usually see each show three times, from three different vantage points. Front-row seats, dress circle, mezzanine – because the kinetic presentation can’t be fully experienced from just one viewpoint, you can’t see it all.’
But three was nothing. Lee made a point of seeking out every new production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. By the time I met him he had seen it more than thirty times. It was a great play. He was still waiting for it to be really well done.
He had an early memory of a show on Broadway. The tickets were a gift from Jane’s parents and they had front-row seats. It was a musical that featured a black guy smoking weed, who at a certain point held out the joint towards the audience, ‘no doubt expecting to provoke shock, or a horrified recoil’. What he wasn’t expecting was Lee, ‘acting on pure muscle memory’, who held out his hand to take it, like he was hanging out with a bunch of his mates. He’d done that exact same thing so many times before, but this time his hand was slapped away.
Lee Child was made ThrillerMaster (by the International Thriller Writers association) at the ThrillerFest banquet in 2017, hosted by executive director Kimberley (K. J.) Howe. Guests were given mini packs of yellow-and-white M&Ms in which individual sweets were printed with the words ‘Lee Child’ or ‘Jack Reacher’ or with a line drawing of the author’s face. Heather Graham (2016 ThrillerMaster) said Lee was ‘a truly amazing man, the kindest you’ll ever meet, so giving, so smart’. Then she turned to him and declared ‘We pretty much worship the road you walk on’, before breaking into a version of Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’.
Next, the thriller-writing guitar-playing duo of Parks and Palmer stepped up to sing ‘Tiny Jack Reacher’, ‘Eight Blurbs a Week’ and ‘Reacher Eating Pie in Diners’ to the tune of three chart-topping Beatles hits. Lee was a Brit, so had a divine right to direct association with the Fab Four. But the theme tune he was hearing at that point was more likely a different one: ‘I’m fairly shy, so before appearances, in my head I play “Golden Boy” by Natalie Merchant, or “The Lemon Song” by Led Zeppelin – why we were born with ears’ (New Statesman).
‘How can I follow that?’ Lee said as he took to the microphone. He hadn’t written a speech because he wanted to say ‘how it feels to be standing here’ and he couldn’t do that till ‘right now’. He played to the stereotypes, saying he faced two structural handicaps when it came to talking about how he feels: ‘I’m English, and I’m a man.’ His wife and daughter often urged him to talk more about his feelings, and his response was always: ‘If I ever have one, I’ll let you know.’
Then he said that ‘right here right now’ he had a ‘warm feeling’. That he was among friends. That writers were the nicest people ever, except for readers (‘If you are a reader you are a person of tremendous charm and quality,’ he said a week later in Harrogate). That it was astonishing ‘to finally find my tribe after so long’.
Lee Child, the artist formerly known as Jim Grant, was standing alone and centre stage. Lean and hungry and very very tall, like he had raced up six feet four inches looking for the light. He was beaming, or as close as he was likely to come. He didn’t want to expend too much energy. There were throngs of people beaming back at him. The applause was thunderous and prolonged. There were cheers and whistles and the occasional scream. Maybe someone fainted. It was like breathing love instead of oxygen.
It felt a bit like being a Beatle or a Rolling Stone.
There was only one word to describe the atmosphere in that stifling Manhattan ballroom on Saturday 15 July, 2017.
Lovefest.