‘You’re young, to be married.’
Nothing to Lose, 2008
When Jim met Jane she was just another girl on his ‘to be shagged’ list. One of two girls he had in his sights the day after Valentine’s Day in 1974. He was into his second term at Sheffield. Of the two, ‘it turned out to be her’. After the party he went back to her place. She said are you staying and he said may as well. It was a great night. So great that Jim gave the relationship a solid couple of weeks. But the next week it was still great, and the week after that. She was ‘unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably exotic. It was no hardship at all.’
He kept two black-and-white photographs in the entrance hall of his Manhattan apartment. The twenty-year-old Jim is bearded with long hair and sideburns and looks like the young James Taylor. Jane has big dark eyes with strong straight brows and sleek dark hair, like a smouldering Cleopatra. They both have the same outsize features. He is lighting a cigarette. Neither of them is looking at the camera.
The photographs had been taken by Adrian Mudd, a drama-studio friend, ‘in the first flush of romance’, and were mounted in mottled mirror frames illuminated by Gothic silver candlesticks. Others were in an album Ruth had made. Lee pointed to one and said, ‘that’s my emaciated drug addict look’. He’s standing by a cairn in the Lake District with a cigarette in his left hand, wearing a dark plaid shirt, tucked in to flares but unbuttoned to the waist, sleeves rolled up to his biceps. His wavy hair is curling up at the ends. On another page, a triptych of black-and-white images shows Jane seated at her desk, posters tacked to the floral wallpaper behind her. In the first she is pensive, looking down at a book; in the second she has turned slightly to face the camera; in the third she is smiling, her head resting on her left hand, her severely parted hair draped like a heavy silk curtain against the sleeve of her silky dark shirt. Her strong face is partially illuminated; her eyes are in shadow.
Jane reminded me of Andy Saunders’s older sister, who had the same haircut and dressed the same, and who just a year before had been rolling spliffs for Jim because he couldn’t roll them himself.
In August 1975 Jim and Jane were married.
Jane had just graduated. They went to Bravingtons in Piccadilly to choose their matching gold wedding bands and have them engraved with their initials: ‘All the good stuff was in London.’ Jane’s grandma Claire came over from America. Jim’s grandad and grandma Scrafton came from Otley, but not his granpop and granny from Belfast: John Grant hated to be seen in a wheelchair. The two fathers had dinner together in a ‘wincingly retro way’, but neither set of parents thought much of their offspring’s choice of life partner. Jane was ‘invisible’ to her future in-laws, and Jim was a ‘wastrel’ with no obvious prospects.
They tied the knot in the morning and had a lunchtime reception at the Dam House restaurant in Crookes Valley Park. Jim wore a broad-collared white shirt, dark blue tie and white carnation with a light blue windowpane-check three-piece two-button suit by Jonathan Silver. The trousers flared out over his brown shoes, the six-button waistcoat was fitted, the jacket was never even intended to be buttoned and had deep pointed lapels as wide as his shoulders. Jane wore a full-length empire-line pale-pink-and-green floral dress she had made herself, with a sweetheart neckline and softly puffed sleeves and a smocked front that her grandmother had shown her how to do. Her accessories were a single pink rose, a pendant necklace and white block-heel sandals. Her hair was centre-parted and tied back in a low ponytail. Jim has a short chin beard. His hair is thick and slightly waved. Jane’s head barely reaches his shoulder. His right hand rests on her right hip, and looks twice the size of hers, hanging loose by her side.
The deed was done in the Sheffield Register Office, known as ‘the Wedding Cake’ because it was circular and white with a flat top. From above it looked as though it had been scored with a knife, ready for slicing. There were red padded seats for guests and white satin-covered chairs placed side by side in front of a polished wooden table for the bride and groom. There was a sign that read: ‘Marriage according to the law of this country is the union of one man with one woman, voluntarily entered into for life, to the exclusion of all others.’ For their honeymoon they went to Greece and Yugoslavia.
The ‘Wedding Cake’ was built in 1973, the year Jim moved to Sheffield, and demolished again by a ‘muncher digger’ in 2004 (according to local newspaper, the Star). I doubted Lee would be overly sentimental about its demise. Four decades later his marriage was still going strong, and in interviews he was wont to specify the number of years like he was marvelling at the ever-mounting total: forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four… It seemed unlikely he would forget their anniversary, but the wedding day itself was not a big deal. ‘I was happy with Jane, is all. Satisfied. There wasn’t a switch that was flicked.’ They got married so she wouldn’t have to go back to the States.
And so she could take him with her when she did.
The first time Jim and Jane went to America they got a student fare with Air France to Montreal, then flew down to La Guardia on Eastern Airlines. They circled Manhattan for half an hour before landing and Jim thought he had ‘died and gone to heaven’. The only thing missing was the soundtrack from all the movies he’d seen.
Lee’s abiding memory of that seminal visit was the shock of seeing his soon-to-be father-in-law reading a hardback book he had actually bought new from a shop.
Jane Hope Shiren was born on 24 January 1953 in Mount Vernon in New York State, an upwardly mobile blue-collar city just north of the Bronx. Their neighbours were the Dolans, later of Cablevision and Madison Square Garden Company. When Jane was three years old the family moved north to Schenectady, on the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. The town had been founded by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century on land belonging to the Mahican tribe and had evolved into an industrial city. It was the base of the American Locomotive Company and General Electric, formerly the Edison Machine Works, billed as ‘the city that lights and hauls the world’.
Jane’s father was a research physicist with General Electric until he joined IBM five years later and relocated back to Westchester County, to Mount Kisco. He did not suffer fools gladly. ‘He was blunt to the point of rudeness,’ said a friend from Granada; and another, ‘Her father was very forceful.’ Lee could hold his own and they got on well enough, and anyway, he was used to difficult parents. He was becoming used to losing them too. It seemed only right, in 2018, to dedicate Past Tense to John Reginald Grant, Norman Steven Shiren, and Audrey Grant, deceased.
An obituary was published in the New York Times on 15 August 2017.
SHIREN—
Norman S., born 7th February 1925, beloved husband of Edith, father of Leslie (Joel Litoff) and Jane (Jim Grant), loving grandfather of Ruth, died peacefully in his sleep on 30th July 2017 in Sleepy Hollow, NY, aged 92 years. Norman was an esteemed research physicist, late of Bronx Science, Tufts, the US Navy, Columbia, and Stanford, where he earned his PhD, and where, with his colleague Richard Post, he did crucial early work on the first electron linear accelerator. He went on to a career at Hudson Labs, GE, and IBM, where he worked on semi-conductors and crystal theory. He was an ardent supporter of liberal causes and cared deeply for the arts and his dogs.
The Shirens made a political point of sending their daughters to the more diverse Fox Lane High School in Bedford rather than Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, which was reputed to be better academically but whose students were all white.
Professor Shiren spent the year 1969–70 on leave in Oxford. Jane graduated from high school a year early so she could accompany her parents to England, and she and her older sister were enrolled at Oxford High School for Girls for a taste of English educational life. They left within weeks. But Jane was ‘a classic kid seduced by the Academy’ and captivated by England, and when it was time to take up her place at the University of Miami she did so reluctantly. She badgered her parents until, at the end of her first semester, they allowed her to return to Oxford. Norman and Edith were ‘trepidatious’ as she was still so young, but they couldn’t fault her lofty aspirations.
Jane signed on at independent sixth-form crammer St Clare’s to get the A levels she needed to study archaeology and prehistory at an English university. She resumed her friendship with Angus Alton, younger brother of Roger Alton (of the Guardian, Observer, Independent and Times) and son of Reggie, an English don, and Jeannine, a modern linguist. Angus was Oxford born and bred. He advised Jane against Cambridge, one of only three places to offer the course she wanted, and to choose between Southampton and Sheffield instead. Jane chose north rather than south, which meant leaving Angus behind. When Jim met her she was going out with a guy called Nigel.
In the story of the little boy looking out from his Manhattan tower block at the Empire State Building there had never been mention of a little girl looking back at him. Yet it seemed inevitable that Jim should plight his troth to an American girl. Especially one from New York. Even if she didn’t live in a skyscraper. Perhaps it was the unacknowledged feeling that it was somehow meant to be that made it conceivable to marry so young.
‘They were always “Jim and Jane”,’ said Rob Reeves. ‘I found it weird that he was married.’ Rob was a few years older but still flamboyantly single in the Granada days.
This is Reacher talking to Lucy Anderson in Nothing to Lose (dedicated ‘to my wife, Jane, with a lot of thanks’):
‘You’re young, to be married.’
‘We’re in love.’
Jim had started out roughing it in Hillsborough before getting accommodation in Thornsett Road, where Jane’s boyfriend was living. When he and Jane began dating he moved in with her at 34 Wadbrough Road, and when they got married they had a ground-floor flat at 329 Crookesmoor, a six-bedroom Victorian terrace with bay windows and shared bathrooms and kitchen and a lounge that opened out onto a wilderness back garden that looked like an abandoned building site. No. 329 is still listed in the Student Housing Guide as having ‘a great position’. It was close to the centre and a short walk to Shearwood Road via Crookes Valley Park, and from the footpath there were views over the Pennines. Sheffield was hilly enough to keep even a refusenik like Jim pretty fit. According to the Tab in 2016, Crookesmoor was ‘what the uni experience is all about’.
In a land far away, at the top of a magical hill in Sheffield, lies Crookesmoor, where the streets are paved with gold empty pizza boxes and smashed bottles of Lambrini. A short walk from Upperthorpe Tesco, and the glittering lights of Walkley, it’s been said by some that it’s similar to St Tropez, just without the beach, or the sea… or the hordes of glamorous people.
The fast-food outlets may have changed since the seventies, but not the hedonistic spirit. Jim was still a committed all-rounder.
I used to say I was a bad student. Now I just say I was a seventies student. Not only did you not have to pay, you were actually paid to go. University was different back then. You didn’t do any work. You just had fun.
‘I was nineteen years old,’ he told me. ‘How can you not have a good time?’
Only about 12 to 15 per cent of school leavers went to university in the 1970s. It distinguished you from the crowd. Once you were in there was nothing left to worry about. You accrued no debt. There was full employment. You could go anywhere on any bus for four pence ‘so everybody did, including the white-collar workers’, because they were ‘cheap, clean and comfortable’.
‘Everything is the opposite now,’ commented Lee.
He was still desperately in want of cash. In 1974 he spent four weeks in Birmingham as an ice-cream vendor to raise money for that first transatlantic trip. He didn’t need a commercial licence, just rocked up at the depot to pick up van and supplies, cranked up the music box (fitted out with a guitar pick-up for amplification) and set off on his rounds, dropping it all back at the end of the day and pocketing the profits. The next year he did the same in Sheffield, parking up outside the Botanical Gardens on Ecclesall Road. Perhaps it was there he got used to people lining up to speak to him. But as he handed over a cone or choc-ice in exchange for a few coins and some chat about the weather or football, what he noticed was how many of his customers were maimed in some way. Between the heavy industry and the legacy of war, missing fingers were routine.
He did a few short stints in factories. Bread and jam were OK. Worst was Batchelors, where they were drying peas. It was seasonal work because of the harvest and already hot outside the shed, but as the peas rolled down a conveyor belt of fine steel mesh over the fearsome flames below the temperature would hit 140 °C. Free orange juice was laid on so workers could rehydrate. It was a brutal job, but at a pound an hour with unlimited shifts was a great earner.
The cardboard-box factory was a breeze. Jim had read an article about how to improve conditions for workers by playing five minutes of rock and roll over the Tannoy at the top of the hour – long enough to reward but not so long as to deflect or distract. The cardboard-box guys were doing it and it was paying off. It felt like by working harder you were making time pass more quickly, and as the countdown began your mood lifted and productivity increased. There were a few dozen middle-aged women on the production line whose job was to cut and fold and glue all the boxes, but carting around the big blanks of cardboard was a job for a man, but only one man, so between five-minute bursts of music Jim would spend fifty-five minutes listening to ‘the filthiest crew’ he would ever encounter. Before long he had heard ‘every sexual fantasy it was possible to have’, almost none of it suitable for a novel to which he would willingly put his name. Still, it made light work of the lifting.
‘Batchelors was a good job to get,’ said Martin Brown, who had drifted back into Jim’s life after a year at teacher training college in Winchester. He’d given up on his boyhood dream of working in the Birmingham car industry and was studying to become a mechanical engineer. ‘Better than Bassetts and Liquorice Allsorts.’ At Lyons you got covered in sugar. Lyons had relocated from London to Barnsley for the cheap site and labour. It was staffed by miners’ wives who were members of the Bakers’ Union, but in holiday periods the student population took over, maximising their earnings by working double shifts seven days a week. ‘We were clearing £100, which was good money back then.’ When management tried to put a stop to it they all banded together and said, We’ll bring everybody out. ‘You didn’t need a union to do that,’ Martin said. ‘You just needed student solidarity.’
After Sheffield, Martin got grants to do his MA and PhD then took a job with the Health and Safety Executive as an inspector of Her Majesty’s factories.
When Lee returned to Sheffield in 2017 to appear at the Off the Shelf festival he said it was a dream come true to appear at City Hall, where forty years before he had heard David Bowie and Rory Gallagher. He recalled how he would take the night bus out to the moors to watch the sun come up, how both his younger brothers had followed him there as students, and how as a kid the drive north from Birmingham to see his grandparents in Otley would take them right through the centre of Sheffield. It was at a picnic stop on one of those trips that at the age of five he first tasted coffee. ‘Hated it with milk – tried it black, and loved it.’
Now he was also a benefactor. The university had got its teeth into him at the same time as King Edward’s, around the time he was first making it big in the charts. He’d given Sheffield fifty-two ‘Jack Reacher Scholarships’ worth £2000 each and they had given him an honorary doctorate and a visiting professorship and brewed a local ale in his name. His father wrote a letter addressed to Prof James D. Grant (instead of James Grant, Esq, LLB) and congratulated him on being ‘a great success right from the word Go!’
‘If I’d known you could buy a degree I wouldn’t have bothered going to university at all,’ Lee said laconically, but it wasn’t true, because it wasn’t the degree he’d gone for.
It wasn’t just the dizzying heights of the Arts Tower, which English Heritage called ‘the most elegant university tower block in Britain of its period’ and was said to be inspired by the Seagram Building in New York. It wasn’t just the redemption of the old Glossop Road Baptist Church by its conversion to a theatre. The Birmingham scuffler was attracted to the Steel City for its down-and-dirty affinity with his roots.
‘He would like to be thought of as strong and reliable,’ neighbour John Leighton said. ‘Like a piece of steel.’
‘It was part of his dirty protest,’ commented ex-Chief Master John Claughton. Birmingham plus. Doubling down on his origins out of a stubborn sense of pride.
Sheffield was more Toledo than Saint-Tropez. Its knives were getting five-star reviews from Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. By the seventeenth century it was the biggest centre of cutlery manufacture outside London, overseen by the Company of Cutlers of Hallamshire from their pillared and porticoed building opposite the cathedral on Church Street. When it was incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1624 the guild was given jurisdiction over ‘all persons using to make Knives, Blades, Scissers, Sheeres, Sickles, Cutlery wares and all other wares and manufacture made or wrought of yron and steele, dwelling or inhabiting within the said Lordship and Liberty of Hallamshire, or within six miles compasse of the same’. Its motto was: Pour Y Parvenir à Bonne Foi – To Succeed through Honest Endeavour.
No need to look further to know it was Lee’s kind of town.
It was the home of crucible and stainless steel and Sheffield Plate. Thanks to the consequent pollution (and rapid decline of its back-to-back factory housing into slums) it was also, according to George Orwell in 1937, three years before the Sheffield Blitz, ‘the ugliest town in the Old World’.
Perhaps those cruel words were still ringing in Sheffield ears. When the coal and steel industries collapsed in the 1980s the city set about planting trees. Soon it was as famed for its green spaces as for silver. But it couldn’t win. Now another big-name writer was running it down. Lee missed that raucous prosperity and mourned the loss of the heavy stuff. He regretted that Sheffield now relied almost entirely on retail and dealt mostly in picture postcards, ‘like most British towns’. The honest endeavour of making things well had been reduced to an emasculated exercise in period nostalgia.
I thought of Lee’s words when I picked up a black-and-white postcard from a city-centre store. Thirteen slender chimneys soaring above as many squat cooling towers and silhouetted against the twilight, the sky festooned with puffballs of sooty smoke drifting smudgily from east to west. The image was captioned ‘Beautiful Sheffield’. And it was beautiful, in its dark, Satanic, romanticised way.
It could be that Lee’s harsh judgement was in part an ad hoc rationale for his ruthless rejection of his home country. Not everyone would agree with him. Because out of the crucible of destruction arose the new creatives, just as Lee Child himself had arisen from a broken Granada.
In 2013 Chris Watson (of post-punk group Cabaret Voltaire) was commissioned to produce a sound map of the city for the new Millennium Gallery. He told the Guardian how the remaining steelworks had been changed by automation: ‘The steel mills are still active, to some extent, but they are now much quieter.’ Writing for the same paper in 2018, Dave Simpson recalls how in the seventies the ‘big hammer’, which could be heard for 30 miles, directly inspired Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League’s early electronic music: ‘it was literally the sound of Sheffield’. The Arctic Monkeys made their first recordings in a disused cutlery finishing room, and when in 2006 their debut album became the fastest-selling record in British pop history they had the same galvanising impact as the Beatles in Liverpool forty years before.
In 2016 BBC journalist Peter Day went to visit the Magna Science Adventure Centre, created out of the old works at Templeborough known locally as Steelos:
It’s far larger than a cathedral or an airship hangar, and once housed six monstrous electric arc furnaces making steel from scrap. It was the biggest concentration of them in the world.
The centrepiece of the vast space is a recreation of the steel production process called the Big Melt. Every hour […] there’s a show of simulated sound and gushes of fire from the extraordinary electric arc process that turns scrap metal back into steel.
Lee might see this as a glorified postcard, but it wasn’t far removed from his own fabrication of a metal recycling plant in Nothing to Lose:
The line of lights on the far wall ran close to a mile into the distance and dimmed and shrank and blended into a tiny vanishing point in the southwest corner. The far wall itself was at least a half mile away. The total enclosed area must have been three hundred acres. Three hundred football fields.
[…] The ground was soaked with oil and rainbow puddles of diesel and littered with curled metal swarf and where it was dry it glittered with shiny dust. Steam and smoke and fumes and sharp chemical smells were drifting everywhere. There was roaring and hammering rolling outward in waves and beating against the metal perimeter and bouncing straight back in again. Bright flames danced behind open furnace doors.
Like a vision of hell.
Or Lee’s homage to Sheffield.
In his first term at university Jim was listening to Van Morrison (Saint Dominic’s Preview, released July 1972), Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, March 1973) and Mike Oldfield. Perhaps there was no heating in his digs, because ‘even now I feel cold when I hear Tubular Bells’ (May 1973).
Sometimes he would help out at the new Crucible Theatre. It was there that he first used a pseudonym. By the time he arrived at ‘Lee Child’ he had tested out at least three: Troy Granite, Tony Jackson and Richard Strange. New job, new name – it seemed normal to him. Stage managers belonged to the same union as actors, and Equity had a rule that if you had the same name as an existing member (like James Grant) you would have to change it. Then when he was under contract at Granada, moonlighting on other jobs, he was compelled to go undercover.
‘Troy Granite’ was a spoof name. But not unconnected. To Homer and Odysseus, like Reacher a man of outstanding wisdom, shrewdness, eloquence, resourcefulness, courage and endurance. The town of Troy wasn’t far from Schenectady. Author Kurt Vonnegut lived there and after the Second World War had worked at General Electric. In 1973 he told Playboy magazine that his first novel, Player Piano, inspired by the introduction of a computer-operated milling machine, was about ‘the implications of having everything run by little boxes’.
To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn’t a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.
Troy was also the site of the first Bessemer converter in the States, an innovative blast furnace that its inventor originally brought from London to Sheffield in the 1850s. It was the Bessemer that had ushered in the industry’s age of mass production.
‘Tony Jackson’ was a musician. Or rather two. One was bass player and lead singer for 1960s Merseybeat group the Searchers. The other was an early twentieth-century jazz pianist from New Orleans who in 2011 was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. A third Tony Jackson was a valiant ex-member of the First Parachute Regiment in The Hard Way, ‘not quite SAS, but close’, and a fourth was a Cold War secret agent in the story ‘Grit in My Eye’, who though civilised and urbane ‘could reach back and still be a caveman’. ‘Richard Strange’ could have been Richard ‘Kid’ Strange, frontman of mid-seventies art-rock band Doctors of Madness, but turned out to have been inspired by Ariel’s song from The Tempest, Lee’s favourite, or second favourite, Shakespeare play:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.
Lee thought everyone should choose their own name when they turned eighteen. The names our parents gave us were a joke. They didn’t know us when they named us, and we didn’t know them either. You could use whatever name you liked from a legal point of view, so long as there was ‘no intention to mislead’.
Jim was such an outstanding all-rounder that he failed his second year at Sheffield. It didn’t matter. He just got one more year in the theatre. Jane was now two years ahead of him, and after a year of teacher training at Sheffield City College took a job in a village primary school in Beighton. They bought the red Beetle and, in 1977, ‘a brand-new flat for £7,500 on an awful greenfield housing estate in a town called Halfway’. It was a place of their own with wheels of their own, and like the optimists of Nothing to Lose they were setting out on life full of vitality and vigour:
The wagons had rolled out of Despair with only the optimists aboard, and the town of Halfway reflected their founding spirit. […] There was no real reason why one nearby town rather than another should be chosen for investment and development, except for inherited traits of vibrancy and vigor. Despair had suffered and Halfway had prospered, and the optimists had won, like they sometimes deserved to.
It seemed inevitable that there should be a twist in the tale. ‘I had been labouring under a terrible misconception,’ Lee said. ‘I was in love with America but she was in love with England.’ Jim, like Reacher, needed a big empty frontier landscape. Jane felt perfectly at home in a country that would fit snugly inside the state of Wyoming.
They loved each other. But not to the exclusion of all others, not if you counted countries. ‘She was a rabid Anglophile,’ he said, ‘and it took me twenty years to get her out of there.’ Not that he ever entirely did.