Being a father seemed both straightforward and infinitely complex.
Never Go Back, 2013
The day Ruth was born was the day everything changed. From the moment he held her in his arms, he knew two things more clearly than he had ever known anything in the twenty-five years of his life. From that moment onwards all he would ever want was for her to be OK. And from that moment until his dying day he would feel responsible.
Maybe it would be difficult, but it wasn’t complicated. Nor was it new. Like the desire for revenge, what he was feeling was something humans had felt since the beginning of time. But it was a first for him. And even though he was feeling something universal, it was also uniquely personal, in the same way his daughter herself was unique. Uniquely his and Jane’s, but also uniquely herself.
‘Sadie’ came from the Jewish tradition of naming a baby after the last family member to have died, which happened to be Jane’s grandmother. ‘Ruth’ was the only first name they could agree on.
Jim was present at the birth. All twelve hours of it. ‘Stanley [the springer spaniel] was at home on his own and didn’t even pee on the carpet. He did really well.’ The year 1980 was ‘on that glorious cusp between old and new’, and Jim chain-smoked in the delivery room. He recalls three visceral responses on first seeing his new daughter: relief, joy, and ‘the almost auditory sensation of the prison door slamming shut’.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he told his anxious wife throughout the pregnancy. He was being supportive, but statistically he also believed it to be true, despite the medical profession categorising his twenty-seven-year-old wife as an ‘elderly primigravida’. But as the baby’s head crowned he experienced an instant of heart-stopping panic. The statistics had let him down: ‘There was purple goo everywhere and the top of her head looked exactly like an exposed brain.’ It wasn’t going to be fine at all. He cradled the newborn in his arms and wondered how he was going to break the news to Jane. Then the midwife cleaned Ruth up, revealing a full head of long black hair, ‘like a style, like she’d just come out of the salon’. She was perfect.
Only trouble was, he felt like he’d been sent down for the next eighteen years. Till later, when he realised it was a life sentence.
He hadn’t looked forward to becoming a father. He hadn’t not looked forward to it either. It just wasn’t something he had planned for. Nor had Jane. For him, the switch had been flicked on that fateful day in St Mary’s Hospital. For Jane it had happened a year earlier, when she had gone to visit a friend who had recently become a mother. She left the house as one person and came back another. But once that wire had been tripped there was no going back, for either of them.
Luckily he felt equipped ‘with the minutiae of being a parent’ thanks to the arrival of his youngest brother Andrew in 1968, when he was fourteen years old (and Stanley, ten years later). The birth of Rex and Audrey’s third son, three years his junior, had mostly passed him by. The only thing he remembered was that his parents had asked Richard and James what to call the new addition to the household, and when they said ‘Goliath’, had promptly named him David instead.
Audrey was in her early forties when her fourth child was born. She legitimately qualified as an elderly primigravida and in those days her situation was deemed ‘grotesque’. But Andrew was ‘a cute kid’ and ‘a happy experience’. Even at the precognitive stage his personality seemed set. He was stubborn and obstinate and chafed against his parents just like Jim did, as though it was innate, rather than merely wilful. Which was a relief to both of them, but especially Jim, who had felt so estranged from the family that he sometimes wondered if he could be a changeling. Andrew was proof, physically and psychologically, that they really did share the same DNA. Rex and Audrey came to fear the return visits of their renegade second son, because Andrew so stubbornly and obstinately copied all his habits.
When Andrew grew up he studied English at Sheffield and hung out at the drama studio and got married and ran a touring theatre company before getting divorced and moving to Chicago to marry an American historical novelist and become a full-time thriller writer. The two brothers remained close and from 2016 shared adjacent properties in Wyoming, like a couple of out-of-state guys come to find themselves: ‘We get those, from time to time. Maybe they’re writing a novel’ (The Midnight Line). ‘It’s tough to evaluate,’ Lee said, ‘because I am very self-reliant, but that question of who you would turn to if the chips were down – if you needed a thousand dollars and an unregistered handgun and a trip to the border – that would be him.’ Conversely, he felt responsible for Andrew, like he did for Ruth, who was two years closer to her uncle in age.
‘I remember when Jim got a new baby,’ said Alison, his barn-dance date from Handsworth Wood. She wasn’t talking about Ruth. It was like she’d been thrown back fifty years and was even then acknowledging his fatherly disposition. It was true that Jim had tried to compensate for the lack of warmth in his own boyhood by lavishing plenty on his baby brother. He remembered taking a ten-year-old Andrew to see Star Wars in 1978, in London’s Leicester Square, never imagining that one day he would return to attend not just one, but two red-carpet premieres of movies based on books he had written.
A photograph taken outside Underwood Road shows a fifteen-year-old Jim wearing a maroon polo shirt and sea-green fisherman’s jumper and an infant Andrew in a cable-knit cardigan, both beaming. But it’s Richard, wearing a tweed jacket and also smiling (but not beaming), who’s holding the baby. A second, taken four years later under a hazy blue sky against a background of wooded mountains in Switzerland, shows a taller, lankier Jim, wearing a slim-fit blue T-shirt with some kind of Hawaiian-vibe all-over pattern and aviator-style sunglasses, still smiling, his hair turning up on his shoulders, his right hand resting on Andrew’s gleaming golden head. The five-year-old, who would grow to the same height, stands level with the top of his big brother’s low-slung jeans. It was a Grant family holiday, Lee said, except Richard wasn’t there.
Andrew calls Lee, Jim. Richard and David still call him James, like their parents did.
When Jim became a father for real he brought a box of American Baby Ruth candy bars into work. The Snickers-style bar had been named after President Cleveland’s daughter and launched when baseball hall-of-famer Babe Ruth was at the top of his game. Jim, like Reacher, was well versed in trivia about the American presidents, though he had never used one of their names as an alias.
The Gallaghers gave ‘Lee Baby’ an inscribed book of fairy tales, and when their own daughter was born the Grants reciprocated with an illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland. Steve recalled the new father telling the story of how on a trip to America to show off their precious new acquisition to relatives the flight attendant had run through the safety routine about what to do if the plane ditched in the ocean and then blithely announced, ‘and for your entertainment, our in-flight movie is Jaws’.
Reacher had ‘never fathered any children’ (Tripwire). ‘He knew very little about children’ (A Wanted Man). Until Never Go Back.
Fatherhood was up there as one of the most commonplace male experiences in all of human history. But to Reacher it had always seemed unlikely. Just purely theoretical. Like winning the Nobel Prize, or playing in the World Series, or being able to sing. Possible in principle, but always likely to pass him by. A destination for other people, but not for him. He had known fathers, starting with his own, and his grandfathers, and his childhood friends’ fathers, and then some of his own friends, as they got married and started to raise families. Being a father seemed both straightforward and infinitely complex. Easy enough on the surface. Underneath, simply too immense to worry about. So generally it seemed to come out as a day-to-day thing. Hope for the best, one foot in front of the other. His own father had always seemed in charge. But looking back, it was clear he was just making it up as he went along.
Much like writing a book. Lee was once asked at a Q&A whether being a father would have changed Reacher. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘he would have felt responsible.’
It was clear that Reacher didn’t know about children the way he didn’t know about cars. He wasn’t a car owner or a father, but he knew someone who was.
In a 2018 interview for The Big Thrill Lee cited biographer G. K. Chesterton’s argument as to why Charles Dickens ‘wasn’t just a hack’: ‘“Dickens did not write what the audience wanted. Dickens wanted what the audience wanted.”’ Lee felt an affinity with his nineteenth-century forebear: ‘I’m a completely normal person in every possible way – except that I can also write. Whatever interests other completely normal people – of which there are billions – interests me too, and I write about it.’
The claim to normality is always suspect. But presumably here it encompasses all those people who are born without having asked to be born, who mostly die in ways over which they have little or no control, who to a greater or lesser extent are motivated by lust, lucre or loathing, and who at some stage are likely, perhaps without having planned it, to become parents.
The fact is that a Reacher novel has never been written by someone who wasn’t a father. Such a thing simply doesn’t exist. So the unmistakable quality of fatherliness that permeates the novels is not only not surprising, but inescapable.
Most of the books place children at risk, and most of those children are daughters – as in 2019’s Blue Moon.
It starts at the beginning, with Killing Floor.
‘It was a nightmare,’ Hubble said. […] ‘He said it wouldn’t be just me who got cut up. It would be Charlie too. […] Then after we were dead, which of the children would he start with? Lucy or Ben?’
Hard reading for Lee’s old Granada colleague, Ian Gerrard.
Ian had sent me a photograph of the title page of a UK first edition of Killing Floor, with a dedication by the author. The book was inscribed: ‘For Ben and Lucy, the origin of the names, Lee Child’ (an accompanying note read: ‘Feel free to buy hundreds of copies, love Jim’). One day at work Jim had asked what Ian’s son and daughter were called, ‘because he always had a problem with names’.
‘They were a nice pair of kids,’ Reacher said, when he met Lucy and Ben in Margrave. ‘Polite and quiet.’ You know it’s only a matter of time before he has to save them. Twenty-three more chapters of reading time, to be precise, when he finds them fast asleep on the floor of the bad guys’ warehouse, ‘wide open and innocent like only sleeping children can be’.
The children had been worrying the hell out of me. […] I’d thought it through a thousand times. […] I’d always come up with some kind of bad outcome. What the staff colleges call unsatisfactory results. I’d always come up with the children splattered all over the place by the big shotguns. Children and shotguns don’t mix.
In Reacher’s world children and shotguns mixed far too often.
It all ends well. No ghoulish splattering, just happy verbs exploding on the page like celebratory confetti. Ben and Lucy are ‘scooped up’, like little children always are, except when they’re ‘swung up’ instead, and there’s a collective outbreak of hugging and kissing and laughing and dancing and back-slapping. The closest Reacher gets to ice creams in the park.
When children are involved, it’s all right to express emotion.
He kept his eyes wide open so he wouldn’t have to see it, but he saw it anyway. Not Marines this time, not hard men camped out in the heat to do a job, but soft people, women and children, small and smaller, camped out in a city park to watch fireworks, vaporising and bursting into a hazy pink dew like his friends had done thirteen years before. […]
They were all staring at him. He realised tears were rolling down his cheeks and splashing onto his shirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
The closest Reacher gets to PTSD. This is Die Trying. The plot is driven by the imperative to recover a kidnapped daughter.
Tripwire is dedicated to ‘my daughter, Ruth. Once the world’s greatest kid, now a woman I’m proud to call my friend.’
David Highfill was Lee’s editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons for the first six Reacher novels, his first editor ever. For him, the scenes with the ageing parents in Tripwire, desperate for news of their long-lost soldier son, are among the most poignant Lee has written. It breaks Reacher’s heart that they may have to ‘live out the short balance of their lives with whatever dignity they could find in being just two out of the tens of millions of parents who gave up their children to the night and the fog swirling through a ghastly century’. Spooling back two decades these two characters were still achingly present in David’s mind. ‘I know these people,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there, I’ve seen them, I care deeply about them.’ It was only a handful of short passages in a manuscript of 148,629 words, but when David told Lee how he felt, Lee said: ‘Yes, that’s exactly what the book’s about.’
Reacher is ‘huge, gorgeous, clever’, Highfill said. ‘You think Sherlock Holmes is smart? But there’s always a point at which his emotions are engaged, and that’s what grabs the reader, when Reacher’s emotions come into play.’
His emotions are fully engaged in Echo Burning, especially by Ellie, Carmen’s six-year-old daughter, with her little short steps and her hair lit from behind, glowing ‘gold and red like an angel’. The first time Reacher sees her she is being picked up from school, and her mother ‘skips’ round the car to greet her.
[Carmen] scooped her up in a wild hug. Spun her around and around. Her little feet windmilled outward and her blue lunch box swung and hit her mother on the back. Reacher could see the child laughing and tears in Carmen’s eyes.
Ellie immediately adopts Reacher. She insists on him carrying her up to bed. ‘She held up her arms, more or less vertical. He paused a beat and then swung her into the air and settled her in the crook of his elbow. Kissed her cheek, gently.’
Asleep, she is vulnerable, ‘innocently barrelling on toward the day’ when her ‘little life’ would change forever.
[The nightlight] showed the child sprawled on her back with her arms thrown up around her head. She had kicked off her sheet and the rabbit T-shirt had ridden up and was showing a band of plump pink skin at her waist. Her hair was tumbled over the pillow. Long dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks like fans. Her mouth was open a fraction.
The book writer may be six-foot-four and a man, but must be able to see through the eyes of a little girl who, when trying to escape her kidnapper, has to stand on the points of her carefully buckled shoes and strain and stretch to ‘reach’ the door handle. Or deduce from the absence of toy bears with their stuffing out and chipped dolls with their arms off that the eight-year-old Jade from The Hard Way had not been abducted at all.
Here is Reacher reading clues in the kidnap vehicle of A Wanted Man:
There was a sparkly pink hair band on the floor. Not the kind of thing an adult woman would wear, in Reacher’s opinion. There was a small fur animal in a tray on the console. Most of its stuffing was compressed to flatness, and its fur was matted, as if it was regularly chewed. One daughter, Reacher figured. Somewhere between eight and twelve years old. He couldn’t be more precise than that. He knew very little about children.
What he knows is they belong in the category of small creatures that need protecting.
Ellie Greer is ‘a smart kid’, and like Reacher, good at hide and seek. Ruth was a smart kid too. When she was twelve she made her first solo trip by rail, from Oxenholme in the Lake District to Wilmslow, south of Manchester, to visit a friend. Two hours after he put her on the train Jim got a call from the friend’s mother to say she hadn’t arrived. The train had decided to skip a load of stations and go straight on to Poole or Bournemouth, way off on the south coast. In that split second Jim thought: I would give anything for another day with her. He rang the rail company saying What the hell? The staff said not to worry, they’d made an announcement telling passengers to change at Preston and then at Manchester Victoria. When it turned out she was fine, his euphoria was commensurate with his fear. Not just because he would get another day with her, but because he knew ‘she was smart, a survivor’.
Eleven years and twelve books after Tripwire, Worth Dying For is again dedicated to ‘Ruth, my daughter’. In context, this is the most explicit of Lee’s titles.
Here Dorothy Coe recalls the day her child went missing:
There’s a kind of crazy period at first, when everyone is mad and worried but can’t bring themselves to believe the worst. You know, a couple of hours, maybe three or four, you think she’s playing somewhere, maybe out picking flowers, she’s lost track of time, she’ll be home soon, right as rain. No one had cell phones back then, of course. Some people didn’t even have regular phones. Then you think the girl has gotten lost, and everyone starts driving around, looking for her. Then it goes dark, and then you call the cops.
Reacher ‘figured there was nothing worse than the Coe family story. Nothing at all.’
In Never Go Back Reacher endures his own what-if parental nightmare:
Reacher dreamed about the girl, at a much younger age, maybe three, chubby not bony, dressed in the same outfit but miniaturised, with tiny laceless tennis shoes. They were walking on a street somewhere, her small hand soft and warm in his giant paw, her little legs going like crazy, trying to keep up, and he was glancing over his shoulder all the time, anxious about something, worried about how she was going to run if she had to, in her laceless shoes, and then realising he could just scoop her up in his arms, and run for her, maybe for ever, her fragrant weightless body no burden at all, and relief flooded through him, and the dream faded away, as if its job was done.
It helps to be father-sized.
The author draws parallels between the teenage Sam and Reacher to tease his hero (and reader) with the semblance of a genetic relationship. But she’s more like Lee himself. Thin and bony with a ‘quizzical half-smile, as if her life was full of petty annoyances best tolerated with patience and goodwill’, and a mother defined by ‘her whole stressed-out martyr shtick’.
Reacher watched her as he walked. All legs and arms, knees and elbows, the jean jacket, the pants, the new blue T-shirt, matching shoes, no socks, no laces, the hair like summer straw, halfway down her back, the eyes, and the smile. Fatherhood. Always unlikely. Like winning the Nobel Prize, or playing in the World Series. Not for him.
But there is something that binds Sam to Reacher more intimately than any accident of birth. Like him, she doesn’t fear ‘the howling wolf’. The hobo demon is calling her, just like it called Jim Grant to write Killing Floor and Jack Reacher to head to Georgia in search of Blind Blake. The kinship of the clan.
Millions of years ago, Reacher hypothesises (as Lee Child might), ‘a gene evolved where every generation […] had at least one person who had to wander’, so as to mix up the gene pool (Major Turner is unimpressed).
‘I think ninety-nine of us grow up to love the campfire, and one grows up to hate it. Ninety-nine of us grow up to fear the howling wolf, and one grows up to envy it. And I’m that guy.’
Fathering, possibly. Fatherhood? Like being able to sing. Not for him.
Gone Tomorrow isn’t dedicated to Ruth. But she makes an anonymous appearance, twice, as the girl with the rat terrier walking south on Broadway towards 22nd Street. She enters the high-rise apartment building where the Grant family used to live just as the police turn up in the black Crown Vic the Grant family used to drive. But this time it’s the girl who saves the father figure rather than the other way round: it’s when Reacher turns around to reassure the barking dog that he spots the car in the corner of his eye, and he knows when he sits on the low brick wall in front of the building that the police won’t shoot for fear of collateral damage. Ruth really did have a rat terrier, called Mr B., so oblivious to rats that they ran right underneath its belly without it turning a hair. Sometimes Mr B. would send Ruth’s dad Father’s Day cards, thanking him for the treats and tummy rubs.
People are weighed in the balance by reference to children. In Without Fail there is nothing more important to cleaners Julio and Anita, which puts them in the clear; Nendick and his wife don’t have any, which flags up a warning. Carmen’s wicked mother-in-law gave Ellie to her kidnappers. ‘My grandmother would have died before she let her grandchildren get taken away,’ Reacher said. But Lee’s great aunt Hettie got taken away as a girl. She was the oldest of eight and the parents were struggling to make ends meet. So when childless relatives came calling, the Scotts gave them Hettie and one of her siblings – ‘it was common practice at the time’. Hettie ended up living with her cousin Millicent Vandeleur, known as Millie; neither of them married, because after the war there weren’t enough men to go round. They’d been given up to the night and the fog.
Motherhood done right conferred a special quality on a woman, gave her ‘a weight […], a gravity, a heft, not physical, but somewhere deep inside her’ (The Hard Way). Made her someone you might spend more than a day with, maybe even a week. Which was all Jim had envisaged spending with Jane, back when the two of them first met.
The domestic fantasy is evanescent but seductive, linked to sowing seeds and growing things.
He liked California. He figured he could live there, if he lived anywhere. It was warm, and no one knew him. He could have a dog. They could have a dog. He pictured Turner, maybe in a back yard somewhere, pruning a rose or planting a tree. (Never Go Back)
And there was Kate Lane’s dream to think about, the new extended family farming together, growing hay, leaching the old chemicals out of the Norfolk soil, planting wholesome vegetables five years in the future. (The Hard Way)
The conjunction of Lee and a vegetable patch seemed as likely as that of Reacher and a sparkly pink hair band, though he had once taken a chainsaw to a tree that was blocking his view of Colorado’s Diamond Peak from his mezzanine office in Wyoming. But Jane loved gardening. Perhaps Lee had Jane Grant’s dream to think about when in 2012 he bought a 1920s arts-and-crafts-style house with a farm and a bluebell wood in Sussex, and employed a land manager to do ‘the agricultural work’: ‘Organic wildflower hay mostly. Also hedges, paths, ponds.’ His anniversary card that year was simple (and looked distinctly like he’d written it with a ruler):
37 years!!
32 acres!!
The acreage had since been increased to 45, so as to incorporate a whole postcode.
Lee’s dream was to retire to a beach and grow a beard (he hated having to shave, but felt he owed it to his readers to look smart).
Jim and Jane decided against having a second child. They liked being parents, though it was hard work. But they hadn’t much liked being siblings. Why inflict one of those on their beloved daughter? And Ruth was perfect. Why tempt fate?
But Lee liked kids. ‘I used to have one of these,’ he said, posing for a photograph in Harrogate with a mystified little girl in his arms and managing not to sound like a politician. His face lit up when he heard news of his friends’ children and he never forgot their names. Names mattered. There were plenty of dogs and babies called Reacher, but it worked both ways. Lee had named a barely literate motel owner in Never Go Back after the erudite John Claughton, and I couldn’t help wondering if he might also have named Reacher’s putative daughter after Claughton’s autistic youngest son. He hadn’t. But the metaphoric resonance was there all the same, so then I thought it must be writerly empathy at a subconscious level or some kind of sixth sense. John had sent me a contemporary photograph and the hair like summer straw and the new blue T-shirt and the quizzical half-smile were firmly in evidence. ‘Sam worships Lee,’ John said. Lee had got on his wavelength from the moment they met and had sent him a card describing him as his ‘favourite Englishman’. ‘I really like Sam,’ Lee said. ‘He’s the only person I know who says exactly what he thinks.’
‘One’s first response,’ Claughton said thoughtfully, ‘is that Lee is quite austere and remote and difficult, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.’
When Ruth Sadie Grant was born Jim bought his first camera. There’s a picture of Grandma Scrafton from Otley cradling the newborn, peaceful in a pink babygro, her eyes firmly closed, a serious, half-frown on her face, and one of Rex in a festive red shirt and patterned tie, where Ruth is lying in his arms and waving her open hands about, as though on the point of waking to her grandfather’s dazzling smile.
Janet Brown had visited Jane at St Mary’s when Ruth was one day old. She sent me a faded photograph of the young family grouped around the table of her former cottage in Worsley. Little Ruthie, as Janet called her, is nestled on her father’s lap, in the crook of his elbow, his arms locked loosely around her, her chubby left hand on his big left paw, her right raised as though in greeting. Not even Jim was bony then. Their faces look similar in shape, and their hair is similarly styled. He is looking down at his smiling daughter as though about to kiss her on the cheek and his beard is brushing against her head. Ruth is wearing a red-and-white checked summer frock with little puffed sleeves edged with ribbon or braid, with a built-in open collar and knotted red tie. She has trust and merriment in her eyes. She was worth dying for.
Jane is seated opposite, in a checked shirt with straight elbow-length sleeves over a white T-shirt, with a weight and a gravity and a heft about her, looking across at her husband and child, smiling. His hair and beard dated the photo, Lee said. It was late in the fall of 1980. They were preparing to shoot the army scenes of Brideshead Revisited and the make-up team needed to practise 1940s military-style haircuts. ‘I was so busy I decided to volunteer, and ended up almost bald.’
‘I’m very sentimental about my daughter,’ Lee told SAGA magazine in 2016.
I love her. I think she’s the best ever, like any father. She’s always entranced me, partly because obviously she’s DNA-related to me, but what I always loved, even from the earliest months, was the sensation that she had a private existence that I didn’t know about, which, of course, escalates exponentially once they start school and stuff. She is me, in a way, but is also so radically different and knows things that I don’t.
‘Like Spanish,’ he told me.
Privately I suspected he would have passed on his own fair share of knowledge too, like Reacher, who in Never Go Back figured that ‘if the kid had been his, he would have had a discussion. No point in being a pedant, unless you got it exactly right.’ This when inwardly critiquing Sam’s description of Shrago’s ears as hexagons when ‘they were irregular polygons, more accurately’.
Little Ruthie, aka ‘Toot’ to her father, is sentimental too. ‘Doof’ is her ‘best buddy’, ‘the world’s greatest father’; he teaches her ‘boy stuff’ and she restocks his larder (Rice Krispies, tinned peaches, pineapple chunks, Coke) – ‘Welcome back! Come see me whenever you want. Love you!’
On day one, Jim knew his daughter ‘100 per cent’. He knew ‘everything about her’, everything there was to know. But with each day that passed she blossomed into an independent being and gradually ‘it tailed off’, and then more quickly, and he knew her less and less and she became more and more of an entrancing mystery. It was the inverse of all other relationships. He wasn’t sad about it.
Sometimes it felt like sitting out in the sun. Sometimes like looking out through the bars. But he’d sown the seed. And now he would watch it grow.