The kitchen and living room were spotlessly clean and immaculately tidy.
The Hard Way, 2006
They all agreed that Jim had stolen Jane from Nigel. The two friends were sharing a house at the time, along with Mike.
Nigel was obsessed with Jane. He was 6 foot 2 with a 28-inch waist, and she was dark and delicate and sloe-eyed and foxy and all of 4 foot 11. He’d sat next to her in lectures during her first year as an Archaeology student, which was his second, or maybe his third, and the night before she flew back to the States for the holidays they found themselves in bed together. Later that summer they met up again at a dig in Orkney, which was when he fell for her head over heels.
Nigel Hallam was a couple of years older than Jane Shiren. He might possibly have been taken for Jim’s less feline older brother, and like Jim had ‘done too much of everything’. As a consequence he too had flunked a year of his degree, in his case the first. He spent his second on social security, which was when he moved into 20 Thornsett Road. Twelve months later he was joined by Mike Gibbons, and the year after that Jim, who was seeing a girl called Lucy – small and wealthy and generous and always laughing.
‘I pursued Jane relentlessly,’ Nigel said. They argued constantly, but she was the only woman to whom he ever proposed marriage. His eventual wife proposed to him.
No. 20 Thornsett Road was a three-storey Victorian house. On the ground floor lived Miss Grünberg, a Russian Jew in her nineties who claimed a connection to the Romanovs and could remember seeing Lenin on a soapbox. Her family had been evacuated from St Petersburg but wound up in Berlin. Only she and her sister survived the war. Miss Grünberg learned English and took a job as a shorthand typist. She was short and plump and had jet-black hair, which when it wasn’t tied back in a bun reached nearly to the floor. She loved having young people about, less so at three in the morning or when neighbours called the police because they were dancing naked on the garage roof, and was a willing confidante. When she invited them down for tea she would give the boys a pack of cigarettes, though she herself didn’t smoke. ‘A man should smoke,’ she said, ‘and I like having a man about the place.’
Nigel kept a cat, Sam, who had taken to Miss Grünberg. One weekend the friends had no money for food and all that remained was a mouldy loaf, which they planned to toast. There was a knock at the door: it was Miss Grünberg holding a plate of freshly cooked chicken. She herself was a strict vegetarian. ‘I’ve cooked this for Sam, can you give it to him later?’ It took Nigel milliseconds to wrestle with this tricky moral dilemma. Chicken on toast! Why thank you kindly, Miss G.
Jim’s staple diet consisted of two set menus. At the university cafeteria it was a tub of cottage cheese and a helping of baked beans. At the chippy it was rice and mushrooms. The cheapest options on the board but a step up from Birmingham, where he had been known to suck tomato ketchup off a paper napkin at the Kardomah with a cup of tea on the side.
It was coming out of the chippy one day that he last used the headbutt. He had his dinner in one hand and his change in the other, saw he was about to get mugged, didn’t want to lose either, so ‘just took a step forward and laid the guy out’. He didn’t even have to break stride.
Thornsett Road reeked of Player’s No. 6 or Embassy. They all had the same full ashtray. The beds were legless, just frames on the floor. But at least you could sit on the bedroom carpets without catching some virulent disease. The lounge carpet was a serious health hazard. Maybe it had once contained fibre, but now it was nothing but a noxious mix of grime, fag ash, dirt, spilt coffee and beer. To match it they painted the walls purple and brown with orange trim and split the light fittings so the rooms were festooned with pendant lamps and live wires.
Miss Grünberg’s rooms were pristine and she kept the front garden full of flowers. But the upstairs digs were squalid. Rubbish and half-built theatre props blocked the landings, attracting the occasional hibernating hedgehog. Washing-up was done before a meal, not after. There was an argument about whose turn it was to wash a pan, which sat under the sink for two terms before someone hurled it out of the window into the garden below. Sometimes the rubbish smelt so bad it would be removed to the first-floor fire escape. ‘We never cleaned,’ Mike Gibbons said. The wall behind the cooker was covered with mould.
There was a single bathroom with a tub but no shower, and the bath was used for printing posters so the drains were clogged and it was garishly stained, foreshadowing the nightmarish modus operandi of the serial killer in Running Blind. But at least the sink was still viable. Once a week Mike would sneak back to his first-year hall of residence to take a shower, on Sunday mornings when it was quiet. Gyms didn’t exist. As Lee liked to remind fans squeamish about Reacher’s personal hygiene, it wasn’t an era when people bathed every day. He himself was proof of humanity’s ability to procreate in conditions of imperfect cleanliness, and could clearly remember the days when putting on a fresh set of clothes was still seen as a big deal.
Mike and Nigel met at the Student Union on Western Bank, the base for clubs and societies. Nigel, an ex-cathedral chorister, was chairman of the theatre group, and Mike, a bassoonist and counter-tenor, was chairman of music and debates. Historically the two committees had been deadly rivals, but the two friends chose to bury the hatchet by living under the same roof. All their housemates were recruited the same way. Which was how Jim wound up there, despite being a couple of years younger. It was the golden age of Thornsett Road, said Mike, ‘overflowing with creativity’. Nigel went on to form a children’s theatre company, and soon after Jim joined Granada both Nigel and Mike were working for the BBC. ‘We didn’t just print posters. We used to sit around writing music and plays.’
Like the Cannon Hill Arts Centre in Birmingham, the drama studio was a symbol of expansionist sixties dreams. It had a full lighting grid so you could walk across at roof level and when a production was in full swing you could stay on through the night. The manager was Bill Royston, previously of the Welsh National Opera, who took his young company on tour to other cities. Mike got to conduct Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with dancers: ‘You had the chance to explore what was possible.’
Jim worked backstage with Martin Brown. Martin hadn’t known his old friend was at Sheffield, but Jim was the first person he saw when he walked into the Union restaurant on his first day and after that they were together the whole time. ‘He was definitely my best mate at university,’ Martin said. Martin was a rare non-smoker but happy to roll spliffs for Jim like Andy Saunders’s sister used to do. ‘It was a technical skill,’ he said. ‘I was always good at making things.’ ‘He would never smoke,’ Lee said, ‘but he was a great roller.’
‘Jim and Martin were the go-to guys for mad solutions to weird problems,’ said Jenny Neesham, a former English student from the drama-studio crowd. ‘Like when the park rangers wouldn’t lend us a bench and they put on boiler suits and carried one off from under their noses.’
Ticket prices averaged thirty pence. The university archive reveals that make-up for A Scent of Flowers and Loot was done by Jane Shiren, who partnered with Nigel on publicity and provided ‘gymnastic advice’ for Cinderella. But it was Jane Grant who did make-up for The Crucible. Jim was on the technical crew for Loot, did lighting for Peer Gynt and both set and lighting for Tiny Alice. For Cinderella he trained the elephants. Lee had blotted the elephants from his memory but there was evidence of the two productions he was most proud of, which judging by their programmes were a cut above the average. The notes for A Doll’s House were handwritten over four pages of heavy cream parchment paper sealed with wax, in flowing italic script. Nigel made the posters, Martin was technical director and Jane Shiren was manager. Publicity was by ‘Richard Strange’ and the designer was Jim Grant. ‘I thought it looked more professional than having one guy doing two things,’ Lee explained. ‘It was a signally beautiful production,’ recalled Jenny, who later made a career in theatre. Jim was principal designer for Oh, What a Lovely War! too, billed on the stylish red and black programme as a ‘Robin Petherbridge – Jim Grant’ production.
Jim wasn’t a typical lawyer. He had the mind, but not the demeanour. He wasn’t studious, but no one was (being in the theatre group made you a libertine by definition). It didn’t matter whether you got a first (which almost no one did) or a 2:1 (which few did) or a third. ‘We had three years to grow up at the taxpayer’s expense,’ said Mike. ‘We may not have been very hygienic but it was a golden time.’
But the law hadn’t done Lee any harm. It gave you ‘a healthy relationship with the world’: you knew what was likely to be true or not and developed a certain self-confidence. Lawyers often made good writers. There was a precision to their use of language and they could see the big picture too. A litigator was telling a story to a jury of ordinary people and was ‘fifty per cent of the way there’.
He’d never intended to go into practice but was sorry to let down his parents. It was ironic, and sad, that his success as Lee Child so transcended the aspirations of Rex and Audrey, so astronomically exceeded their expectations that they couldn’t grasp it, almost as though it had nothing to do with their son at all. Lee Child was an alien. Jim Grant, barrister manqué, was a disappointment.
It wasn’t just Jim who was in thrall to America. ‘If you grew up in the fifties and sixties America was all over the place,’ Mike said, ‘that big clean John Wayne-Lone Ranger-Wells Fargo thing, big cars and big ranch-style houses.’ ‘Buicks,’ Lee added, ‘with large fins and loose suspensions.’ Not forgetting actual archaeological traces left behind by GIs – a stick of gum or a pack of Lucky Strikes, or the back half of a Superman or Batman comic, with ads that evoked an unimaginably different, reckless world. And it wasn’t just Jim who was in thrall to Jane. ‘I had the same view of her as he did,’ said Mike. He still remembered the day when, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Nigel suddenly introduced his exotic partner into their lives. ‘She sparkled,’ he said. ‘We were all incredibly envious when he rocked up with her.’ But she could be sharp too, he added. ‘I would have loved to get to know her, but she was with Nigel.’
Which hadn’t bothered Jim. He had two inches on Nigel and the self-belief to go with it.
All his life, to be taller had been to be better. More dominant, more powerful, more noticed, more advantaged. You got credibility, you got treated with respect, you got promoted faster, you earned more, you got elected to things. Statistics bore it out.
You won fights, you got less hassle, you ruled the yard.
To be born tall was to win life’s lottery. (61 Hours)
‘There was never any animosity,’ Nigel said. Jim had done him a favour, steering him towards his wife Bridget Lokes (who did wardrobe for A Doll’s House) via a brief reunion with former flame Christine, dumped for Jane on the night of that end-of-term party. Lee was relaxed about it. ‘Relationships were so short they were changing all the time.’
‘We were the first pill generation,’ Jenny said.
AIDs was still well over the horizon, and antibiotics were effective, so we didn’t think much about sexually transmitted diseases. I suspect we presented as sexually and socially confident, dominant, if not actually aggressive. We had a lot of sexual control and the whole contraception thing was still new. Men hadn’t got used to it and hadn’t begun to think of sex as a right, and any lad who might have hinted to that effect would have got slapped down pretty sharply.
It was another golden moment, when it seemed women had finally achieved some kind of hard-won liberation which they thought would be enduring and could never again be lost. Lee remembered Jenny and Bridget wandering around the flat, ‘revelling in their own nakedness’.
Jenny came late to Reacher, on the back of talking about her old friend’s life. Immediately he reminded her of Beowulf, an abnormally strong man who comes from outside into a beleaguered community and saves it by ripping monsters apart with his bare hands. She told me that the words ‘Thaet waes mothig secg’ translated as That was a brave man, but that Seamus Heaney had rendered them as That was a considerate man. ‘Reacher is kind and considerate. I think that may be a bit of Jim. I remember Jim as being gentle in his dealings with other people.’
‘He was a gentle bloke,’ said Martin Brown; ‘a gentle, arty bloke’, said Chris Springall, who had shared the stage with him at King Edward’s. ‘He could be hard with it too,’ countered Rob Reeves.
Kind, considerate, gentle and protective: these qualities didn’t prevent Reacher from indulging in a little Beowulf-style bragging. ‘A brag should be faintly preposterous,’ said Jenny. ‘I’m going to kill Grendel with my bare hands. And his mother. I’m going to stuff Arthur Scorpio into his own tumble dryer. However preposterous, the true hero fulfils it to the letter.’ Just like Jim and the flick knife in French class.
Jenny thought the sex in Jim’s novels was very seventies, ‘no trendy descriptions of sexual athleticism but plenty of post-coital intimacy and tenderness’. Reacher loved and left women who loved and left him; they parted on equal terms. She couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of small, delicately built women who were as competent and tough as the men. What did she remember about Jane? Small, competent and tough covered it pretty well. Jane was both reserved and forthright. Not a ‘gasbag’. She didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve.
‘The girls Jim went out with were all petite,’ said Alison Yeomans.
At Thornsett Road Jim had the first-floor bedroom next to the lounge, where stairs from the balcony led down to the back garden. The other bedrooms were on the top floor under the sloping roof. Until he moved in with her, Jane moved in with him. One night they were having a party. Nigel and Bridget had turned in early after a long run of screenprinting, and at some point Nigel staggered out of bed to ask them to keep it down. Turned out they were playing knots, standing in a circle holding hands and trying to get into as big a tangle as possible without breaking grip. They were all naked. Nigel crept back upstairs to Bridget but they couldn’t sleep. Not only was it still noisy, but they were missing out. So they stripped off and went downstairs, threw open the door and leapt into the frivolities, whooping merrily. By which time the others were all fully clothed. ‘It was probably the most naked I’ve ever felt,’ Nigel recalled.
They took sex casually and relationships seriously. But relationships took over quickly. There was a lot of short-term serial monogamy.
Which made the early marriage less surprising. ‘We were a centre-left house,’ said Mike.
Centre by upbringing, left by youthful ideals. Centre in our descent into middle-class life – married house-owners with kids quite soon, with the eventual paradox of a socialist millionaire living on the Upper West Side.
It was all about Jane getting a visa, said Lee. ‘It was so she could stay once she’d finished her degree.’
Mike was from Bath. Like Jim he had gone to a direct-grant grammar school, part of the same foundation as King Edward’s in Birmingham. He had never seen anything like the steel towns of the north-east. There were leafy oases around Ecclesall Road and Fulwood and out on the moors, in the poetically named Hathersage, Ladybower and Snake Pass. But venture downhill into industrial Attercliffe, south of the River Don, and ‘the steel works were going full pelt. It was like Tolkien could have envisaged the set for Mordor.’ Attercliffe was on Jim’s bus route from Hillsborough, and Mike went there to sell the student rag magazine. ‘We used to walk off the street into the bell factories where the steel was being forged, right on the roadside.’ The 1960s image of Coronation Street back-to-backs was real. ‘Poverty levels were horrendous.’
But there was a sense of vitality too. Sixties tower blocks alongside Victorian terraces, the Arts Tower and paternoster lift (a chain of open chambers moving continuously in a loop), reputed to be the largest in the world, and the Hole in the Road. Built in 1967 under what used to be the market square (obliterated by German bombs in December 1940), the Hole in the Road was a network of underpasses and shops with a central area open to the sky that featured a fish tank with carp and goldfish and bream and rudd and roach. Demolished ten years before the Wedding Cake, the two follies were remembered with the same ambivalent affection.
In Sheffield Mike heard Dvor˘ák and Brahms for the first time.
I fell in love to the third movement of Brahms’ Third Symphony. I saw the biggest bands in the world. I found out how to look after myself. I saw Pelé play for Santos at Sheffield Wednesday. We learned how to deal with people, because we were living close-up to them – their mood swings, their ups and downs. It was a vibrant, slightly risqué, off-the-wall community, and probably the most important part of personal development.
No one remembered Jim talking about books or writing (in The Hero he recalls reading Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins and The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan and Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott). He was always on about Aston Villa. He wasn’t involved in politics. He was seen as detached, with that persistent reputation for being a cynical observer that he would never quite throw off. It all struck him as faintly absurd, like the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It wasn’t the real thing like at Granada, where the unions affected people’s livelihoods. ‘People always say I’m cynical, but I just think I’m realistic.’
The first time Mike heard about Lee Child was at his wedding anniversary in 2003. Nigel and Bridget were sitting in Mike’s conservatory when Nigel said: ‘You know Jim is a millionaire author, don’t you?’ What? ‘Yeah, he’s won all these awards.’
Since then Mike had read all the Reacher books. He liked their obsessive detail and vivid imagery. He had become claustrophobic from living through Reacher’s narrow escapes in Die Trying and 61 Hours, which, exceptionally, explored the downside of being tall. Reacher was bigger and harder than Jim, but Mike could hear Jim in his voice. He thought there was a point between One Shot and The Hard Way where the publishers stopped promoting Lee Child as author and by moving his photograph from the inner flap to the back cover began hinting that he was his hero instead.
Mike thought writing had got Jim exactly where he wanted to be: far away from the Ridgeway Avenue house with the outside toilet, far from Handsworth, Birmingham and Sheffield and across the ocean to another social dimension. When the Grants emigrated to the States in 1998 they sailed on the Queen Elizabeth II because Jim wanted to experience that mythic moment when you see the Statue of Liberty silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline, a symbolic marker of the fact that he was consciously setting out on a new phase of his life, putting Thornsett Road behind him forever. His apartment on Central Park West was the kind of place that looked exactly the same from one visit to the next. Though compared to the condo on East 22nd Street (where he lived from 2004 to 2014), which had the wiring embedded in the walls, it was positively cluttered.
In the Wall Street Journal (‘Reacher’s Minimalist Roost’, 2010) Lee admits to fantasising about a lifestyle modelled on that of his ascetic, ‘possession-free maverick’.
So if a button falls off his shirt, Mr Child casts the shirt in the garbage, as he doesn’t want to store a sewing kit. He doesn’t cook, so he sees no need for pots, pans or ingredients. […] ‘In principle if I could not have a home I wouldn’t. But not having a home would be too difficult procedurally, going from hotel to hotel, the gap of three hours where you’re hungry and tired.’
Which didn’t explain why he then needed four apartments in the same building (one for living in on the twenty-fifth floor, one for working in on the seventh, one for Jane on the thirtieth, and one for guests on the sixteenth, south-facing, without the views), nor why he later needed four different homes (one in Manhattan, one in France, one in Sussex and one in Wyoming).
The entire left-hand wall […] is a plane of glossy white laminate cabinetry. Inside the cabinets are some 3,000 books, as Mr Child believes books make a room visually chaotic and that displaying them is pretentious. The books are shelved randomly; Mr Child says his photographic memory allows him to know exactly where each one sits.
By the time I met him the books were back on show, neatly aligned in beautifully crafted white bookcases. Not to display them would have seemed pretentious. But it was true he knew where each one sat, and you messed with them at your peril.
The source for colour: A large Tom Christopher painting of a New York street scene looking down on Fifth Avenue. The red traffic light in the painting is echoed by a red ashtray on the small balcony outside, where the view up Fifth includes Madison Square Park, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Metropolitan Life clock tower.
Lee could detail these iconic landmarks as only the convert could. As a measure of how far he’d travelled, they meant more to him than to a born-and-bred native of his adopted city. According to the New Yorker, Christopher ‘is to Times Square what Monet was to water lilies’, which seemed right for someone en route to investing in the French Impressionists.
Perhaps he bought the paintings in the burst of displaced creativity that came upon him each September, as with the gold bands he wore, which like his dwellings had also multiplied. Now Lee wore three on each ring finger. Two of yellow gold and one of rose, six in total, so he could choose freely between the Fabergé and the Patek Philippe without fear of a fashion faux pas. The five new rings, purchased together to ensure a perfect match, were also engraved, three for his nearest and dearest – Jane 1974, Stanley 1978, Ruth 1980 – and two for milestone events: J.R. 1111 2008 2011 (the two times he’d scored four no. 1s simultaneously, on both sides of the Atlantic) and 8 July 1998 (the date he became a United States resident). ‘I like gold,’ he said. ‘It’s a nice chunk of wealth.’
The rose gold bands for Jane and Ruth lay either side of the wedding band, and on his right hand the order of metals was reversed, with Stanley the springer spaniel in the middle.
Extreme minimalism is easier for a fictional vagabond, the Journal remarks.
Mr Child bought the 990-square-foot apartment in this doorman building for $1.5 million in 2005. It then took two and a half years, $800,000 and interviews with twelve architects to satisfy his need for precision.
Consciously or not, this passage from The Hard Way could have been written for Nigel and Mike.
The kitchen and living room were spotlessly clean and immaculately tidy. The décor was mid-century modern, restrained, tasteful, masculine. Dark wood floors, pale walls, thick wool rugs. There was a maple desk. An Eames lounge chair and an ottoman opposite a Florence Knoll sofa. A Le Corbusier chaise and a Noguchi coffee table. […]
‘Very elegant,’ Pauling said.
‘An Englishman in New York,’ Reacher said.
The items of furniture were all things Lee had owned, though not in the same place at the same time. It was like a coded message: Top of the world, Ma!
Not that Lee was doing any more cleaning than Jim had. He had staff to do that now, and first-world problems like how to recruit them. He didn’t know where to find his broom or his ironing board. But he was fussy. No one really ironed things right (‘you should press it on both sides’), and one argument for minimalism was to mitigate against the generally poor standard of housekeeping.
At Sheffield they had been relaxed in their habits, but that post-war legacy was driving them to achieve. They would be judged on whether they’d been able to climb the ladder and move on, especially the men. His friends speculated that notwithstanding his outward composure Jim felt this burden more than most, because of his parents. From the day he turned up at Thornsett Road he appeared to have a ‘more active’ relationship with his family than the others. ‘Not close, but busy.’
The Mike of the early 1970s, in a crumpled snap from the Union photo booth, looks like a guy without baggage. His hair and beard are abundant, framing his face in a glorious afro-inflected halo. His smile lights up his face and reaches his eyes. Just to see it makes you cheerful. He’s holding a thin-stemmed Falcon pipe.
Had Jim ever looked that carefree, I wondered? ‘Never!’ said Mike. ‘He always looked carefully if happily cautious. Maybe a little youthfully uncertain.’ Mostly he was reserved and understated and emanated self-control, but sometimes he would talk ‘over a cigarette or something less legal and endless coffees long into the night’. They all drank coffee endlessly and Mike, like Reacher père et fils, still did. ‘Jim was a good friend and companion and as a younger arrival did well to settle in with the flat.’
I wasn’t sure you could call it settling. More like an albatross alighting briefly, just long enough to snatch up the prize.
Few remembered Jim fighting, none beyond his school days. But he was capable of dishing out a verbal beating and many sensed a subdued angry streak in him that would find its voice at Granada. Jim told the same stories of boyhood bundles Lee was telling four decades later. There was a perception he could spool back quite easily. ‘Contra mundum, babe,’ read an anniversary card from his wife.
When Nigel spooled back it was to the good times, back to when Bridget was still alive and they just had fun. He recalled the wedding in Crookes Valley Park and how the best man had put his foot in it by letting slip that Jim and Jane had lived together out of wedlock. ‘It’s true,’ Martin said. ‘It was about the first thing I said.’ He didn’t remember much from the big day except that as usual Jane’s older sister Leslie was ‘a bit prickly’. ‘There’s a lot to think about when you’re best man.’
There was no music or dancing at the reception. But some time late into the afternoon the friends may have drunkenly re-enacted the Battle of Salamis on the adjacent boating lake. Nigel had done ancient history as a subsidiary subject, and Jim had read about it in a book.
‘The Jim I knew was very cool,’ Nigel wrote. ‘The most laid-back guy I’ve ever met.’
Except for those cruelly parted by death, all three couples were still married.
But only Jim and Jane were still wedded to nicotine.