I looked out of the window. Georgia.
Killing Floor, 1997
In 1991 the Grant family moved away from Alderley Edge to Kirkby Lonsdale in Carnforth, in the South Lakeland district of Cumbria.
Maybe Jane felt more at home there. Her parents had lived at Stoop House on Back Lane when Professor Shiren spent his sabbatical year of 1983–4 at the University of Lancaster and they liked the place so much they rented it again in 1998, for Christmas and New Year. They saw it as a typical English village, like something off a chocolate box or postcard. They loved the brass band. Lee liked the brass band too, but thought Kirkby Lonsdale belonged in EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) at Disney World in Florida.
The Shirens were not alone in being seduced by Kirkby Lonsdale, documented in the Domesday Book as a ‘cherchibi’ – a village with a church. The view over the Lune Valley from Church Brow, a short walk from 10 Abbotsgate where Jim and Jane lived, was described by art critic John Ruskin in 1875 as ‘one of the loveliest in England, therefore in the world’. The tourist information plaque lauds ‘a gentle panorama of river, meadow, woods and hills in almost perfect balance’, as though the natural landscape were already a work of art. Ruskin first encountered the scene in a watercolour painting of 1822 by Turner, which became known as Ruskin’s View. He deemed it ‘priceless’, but in 2012 it sold at auction for £217,250. ‘I do not know in all my own country, still less in France or Italy, a place more naturally divine.’
It was looking out over this idyllic landscape that Lee Child wrote his debut novel, set in fictional Margrave in real Georgia, roughly four thousand miles away and a place he’d never been. It was a feat of imagination that still amazed his New York editor David Highfill.
I looked out of the window. Georgia. I saw rich land. Heavy, damp red earth. Very long and straight rows of low bushes in the fields. Peanuts, maybe. Belly crops, but valuable to the grower. Or to the owner. Did people own their land here? Or did giant corporations? I didn’t know. […]
After maybe a half mile I saw two neat buildings, both new, both with tidy landscaping. The police station and the fire house. They stood alone together, behind a wide lawn with a statue, north edge of town. Attractive county architecture on a generous budget. Roads were smooth tarmac, sidewalks were red blocks. Three hundred yards south, I could see a blinding white church steeple behind a small huddle of buildings. I could see flagpoles, awnings, crisp paint, green lawns. Everything refreshed by the heavy rain. Now steaming and somehow intense in the heat. A prosperous community. Built, I guessed, on prosperous farm incomes and high taxes on the commuters who worked up in Atlanta.
The use of the first person stakes a claim to authenticity. More audacious is the admission of ignorance – I didn’t know – and invention: I guessed. It was one reason Reacher was born to a displaced military family. He was and he wasn’t American, he did and he didn’t know.
Passing through San Francisco ten years later, Lee would have lunch with Martin Cruz Smith. ‘He was a huge inspiration for me,’ he wrote in his One Shot tour blog. ‘When I was in England starting to write about America and wondering if I could get away with it I would think back to Gorky Park and say, hey, for sure I’ve been to the States more times than he’s been to Russia, and it worked for him.’
Lee calculated that between his first trip in 1974 and the day he got his US residency in 1998 he had visited America precisely one hundred times.
From Church Brow I walked down the Radical Steps through the wooded valley to the fourteenth-century Devil’s Bridge. Most likely the work of monks from St Mary’s Abbey in York, according to legend the devil had appeared to an old woman and promised to build a bridge in exchange for the first soul to cross over it. When the bridge was finished the woman threw bread over it and her dog set off in pursuit, thereby outwitting the devil while still gaining a crossing.
I saw more dogs in Kirkby Lonsdale than I’d seen in my life, often outnumbering their walkers three to one, and I doubted their owners would be so willing to sacrifice them. There were bowls of water and biscuits outside every other shop and home. From the canine point of view there was surely no place more divine.
It wasn’t hard to find ideas, Lee said. Stories were all around us, written on the wind.
Like Rex and Audrey, like Stan and Josie, Jim and Jane cared about education. One of the big attractions of Kirkby Lonsdale was Queen Elizabeth School, a former grammar turned secondary comprehensive. Not that there weren’t equally good schools in Manchester, but Queen Elizabeth was free. Since negotiating the punitive deal in 1988 Jim had known his days were numbered. He preferred to anticipate his straitened circumstances rather than see history repeat itself and Ruth yanked out of school as a traumatic consequence of redundancy as her grandmother had been before her.
Abbotsgate was a new development minutes from the centre of town, a right turn off picturesque Mitchelgate, where the flower boxes were made from recycled French wine crates. The houses had been sympathetically built of local stone, paler in colour than their historic counterparts. No. 10 was on a corner, the first house on the right-hand side. No blue plaque, yet. You could see over the side fence into the downward-sloping back garden and out to the sweeping views towards Casterton beyond. I knew Jim had carved two miniature headstones and installed them at the far end, one for Ruth’s guinea pig, Giz, and one for Stanley. But the garden had been recently landscaped and I doubted they were still there.
It was while I was knocking vainly on the door that Dave appeared on his driveway at no. 8 and told me the occupants were away. He volunteered that the low stone wall protecting the patch of lawn outside the dining room where Killing Floor had been written was new, and that in days gone by people would randomly park there, and Jim Grant would open the window and say, Do I know you? When the answer was ‘no’, he would add: Well then fuck off out of my garden. The next day I had happy-hour drinks with Dave and his wife Mary at Plato’s on Mill Brow, near where the road plunges dramatically down into the Lune Valley.
The Sapsfords had moved in about four weeks before Jim and Jane. When the Grants stopped by to introduce themselves they discovered they had daughters of the same age. Ruth and Nicky started school together, along with Anna Leighton, and practised juggling in the Sapsfords’ back garden, and when the girls finished their GCSE examinations the Grants took Nicky with them on holiday to Florida.
There were only about fifteen hundred people in the town back then and when he went to pick up fish and chips for supper the day they arrived it seemed to Jim that most of them already knew who he was. According to Mary and Dave, the Grants had always wanted to live in Kirkby Lonsdale. They wanted to stay there ‘forever’.
By the time I left the locals knew who I was too: Are you the lady I gave directions to yesterday, to Abbotsgate? asked a helpful gentleman wheeling his bicycle past the open window of the Royal Hotel where I was sitting with my notebook. This was after I had walked back from Lower Biggins and stumbled across Queen Elizabeth School. There were pupils milling about in the street and I stopped to ask an affable young teacher whether the girls’ uniform had changed since the nineties. It hadn’t: green pullover and tie over a white shirt with a knee-length pleated plaid skirt. The teacher turned out to be the son of the local doctor and a former pupil, from the same year group as Ruth.
Dave was a Professor of Economics at Liverpool University, and then Lancaster, where Jim attended his inaugural lecture on ‘Econometricks’. Sometimes they would go to gigs together at Kendal Brewery, or in Manchester, where they saw American blues guitarist Buddy Guy, and for a while Jane and Mary went to bridge classes. On 1 May 1997, six weeks after the publication of Killing Floor, the Grants went next door to celebrate the election of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. Dave played in a covers band and owned forty guitars.
Their local watering hole was the Snooty Fox, just off the market square next to the Tourist Information Centre, but once a week the two couples formed a team of four at weekly quiz nights at the Pheasant, in the adjoining village of Casterton. There were half a dozen regular teams but their only real rivals were the teachers from Casterton School, dourly described in its school song as ‘the grey child of an ageless fell’. Its claim to fame rested on having educated the first four Brontë sisters, but this was an ambiguous distinction since the two eldest had died of tuberculosis aged ten and eleven as a direct result of the cold and hunger suffered there.
Publicans Mel and May Mackie ran quiz nights on winter Thursdays in aid of Guide Dogs for the Blind. One time Jim’s team got to name a dog, which they called Otis. Dave did music and culture, Mary geography, Jane history and architecture, and Jim sport and television, though books must surely have got in there somewhere. The arch rivals were segregated by the bar, bad guys on the right, good guys on the left, with the other teams occupying the neutral zone in between. ‘We won about eighty per cent of the time,’ said Dave, a wiry guy who shared Jim’s compulsion to emerge victorious from a fight.
There was a happy hour at 8 p.m. before the quiz at nine. Which was why Jim and Dave had stuck in May’s mind. They double-ordered, buying twice as much as they could drink of the house red at bargain prices. ‘The two lads would stand at the bar together and walk away with two bottles and four glasses,’ she said, still sounding a little annoyed, then go and sit in the corner next to the fire. They got free food too, because it was traditional to ‘wheel out the chips and sandwiches’. Dave and Mary were chatty, Jim and Jane quieter. ‘He kept himself to himself, he didn’t spill himself all over the place.’ The way May remembered it Jim wore a green sweater and did all the scribing.
There was debate around the bar but no one fell out. Mel recalled canvassing during the general election and ‘running into the two lads with their left-wing lapels’. Why don’t you join us? they cheeked him, but there was no animosity. ‘Mind you,’ said Mel, who was into his eighties when I met him, ‘if I hadn’t been landlord of the Pheasant I probably would have said F-off.’ We were drinking tea from dainty china cups. On a side table by his winged armchair was a well-thumbed copy of Make Me.
Mel liked the Reacher books and thought ‘those scenes’ were ‘quite tasteful’. Sometimes you wanted Reacher to get more serious about a girl, but ‘you didn’t want too much detail’.
As I took my leave May Mackie said: ‘Now friends are always amazed when we say we used to have that Lee Child in our pub.’
In Kirkby Lonsdale every prospect pleases. I felt I could have spent the rest of my life sitting in the rear garden of the Pheasant gazing out over the sun-kissed meadows and watching the sheep safely graze under the spreading oak. Even Reacher might have enjoyed it, for a day.
According to John Leighton, Jim was ‘never the noisiest person in the room’ but could be ‘bolshy at times’. His default position was to be anti-management on principle, irrespective of circumstances. Politically, John was at the opposite end of the spectrum. He and his Birmingham wife Jacquie had lived in London in the 1970s and ‘suffered from the strikes in a way Jim never did’. ‘It was hell on earth,’ John said, especially on the Underground, and in his view tube drivers were pretty well paid. But Jim saw them as ‘defending their rights’ and participating in ‘the workers’ struggle’.
John remembered Jim’s ‘scientific approach’ to his first book, how he had chosen the market and was writing for ‘the airport business’, using short, sharp sentences for readers with ‘a short concentration span’. One night over dinner at his house with the Grants and the Sapsfords there had been discussion about what the title should be. Jim had come up with ‘Killing Floor’, but ‘most of us thought it was too brutal’.
John was a Lee Child fan and had bought every book he’d written. He liked to alternate Reacher with books about history and politics and the Second World War. He was gratified to be cast as a likeable prison governor in Running Blind. Jim had explained how he liked to use real names for authenticity, and that he had chosen ‘John Leighton’ because he wanted something ‘solid and dependable, representing authority’.
The captain […] was a head shorter than Reacher had ever been, but he was broad and he looked fit. Dark hair neatly combed, plain steel eyeglasses. His uniform jacket was buttoned, but his face looked open enough. […]
‘Come in out of the rain,’ the captain called.
His accent was East Coast urban. Bright and alert. He had an amiable smile. Looked like a decent guy. […]
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the captain said. ‘I’m John Leighton.’
Next time, he asked Jim, ‘could you make me chairman of the joint chiefs of staff?’ He thought he could make the cut in matters of strategy.
He could see his old friend in Jack Reacher: ‘they’re all his values’.
Bruce Woods Jack had lived in Kirkby Lonsdale since 1971 and for many years ran the Art Store on the High Street, which doubled as a Christian Science bookshop. He once sold Jim a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which he stocked because it ‘included and acknowledged the seven synonyms for God’. He had been about to instruct his customer on this point when Jim got in ahead and recited without hesitation: ‘love, spirit, substance, truth, life, soul, principle’. His father had been a Christian Scientist, so he already knew them. Which meant Reacher would know them too. (‘Is Jack Reacher a communicant?’ Rex asks his son, in a letter written shortly after book one.)
Bruce took a proprietorial interest in Killing Floor. One day Jim had walked into the shop with a bunch of pages typed up and ready to go. This was when he and Highfill were faxing page edits back and forth between Kirkby and New York, but the technology was slow and the process lengthy so there had been plenty of opportunity to shoot the breeze about religious and other matters in the back office. Then there was that chance meeting in New Zealand, when Bruce and his wife were visiting family. They were walking past a bookshop in Wellington when Gina called out, ‘Come and see who’s here!’ So Bruce back-tracked and ‘there was Lee Child signing books in the store’. They joined the queue and then Jim looked up and did a double-take and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ And announced to his assembled fans: ‘Here’s Bruce – without him and his Webster’s dictionary, without Bruce and his fax machine, I wouldn’t be where I am today.’
‘I fell in love with Jack Reacher,’ Bruce said. ‘Here I am with five children and seven grandchildren, a business to run, church and care work – it was a form of escapism.’
Gina – who made a traditional afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches laid out on a hand-embroidered runner – had a soft spot for Jim because her father, like his, had been present at the liberation of Belsen. She and Bruce bought a chaise longue from the Grants (when he’d lost his job, they thought, and was strapped for cash), and were invited to dinner at Stoop House by Professor and Mrs Shiren. Jane’s father was forceful, they said, uneasy at the memory, and not very tolerant of their rejection of the Beaujolais nouveau on the grounds of being teetotal. ‘You know where the kitchen is, get yourselves a glass of water, he said. So we did.’
David Firth used to run the Lunesdale Pet Stores next to the Spar supermarket, across the market square from the Art Store, where he also had a job dropping off textbooks to local schools. Ruth would pop in on Saturday mornings to get food for her guinea pig. Sometimes her father would come with her. Jim put him in mind of an accountant or solicitor. ‘He wasn’t at all swashbuckling.’
David was from Lytham St Annes. He had a degree in Geography from Liverpool, where he had been president of the Geography Society, and had taught at schools in Dunstable and Portsmouth before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He took photographs and wrote poetry and one day Jim Grant had paused from looking at the pictures and poems pasted on the pet-shop wall and remarked: ‘I can see you’re an educated bloke.’ He was ‘caring and quiet, a nice, modest man’, and they would have long conversations about upstate New York and minimalist music, or John Updike and Steinbeck and Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. Jim had a Gibson and David had a Fender Gold Stratocaster.
‘It was like meeting a bloke at the university again,’ said David, wistfully. ‘You see the best side of people if you have a pet shop.’
David had a glossy black-and-white border collie called Stella that he took on long walks, wearing a flat cap and carrying a stout cane. He gave me a smart photograph of Stella to pass on to Lee. ‘Dogs are therapy for me,’ he said. He was happy to learn from an article he’d read, and cut out and kept, that Ruth had ‘continued her love of animals’ and that rather than going into the secret service, as had been an early wish, was working with dogs as an animal behaviourist.
One day Jim had come into the shop and said: ‘Granada has folded up. I’ve got to write a bestseller, an airport-style bestseller.’ David was struck by his friend’s clarity of purpose. ‘It was this new genre that was taking off,’ he told me. Jim had explained how he was writing for people who can’t concentrate: ‘if you do subordinate clauses you’re a bit old hat, aren’t you,’ said David, again a little wistful.
On one of his visits Jim might well have seen this extract from Robert Browning’s ‘Shop’ that David sent me:
Because a man has shop to mind
In time and place, since flesh must live,
Needs spirit lack all life behind,
All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive,
All loves except what trade can give?
I want to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or, haply mute,
Blows out his brains upon the flute!
Like David, like Browning, Jim knew instinctively that being one thing didn’t stop you from being – or becoming – another.
David loved landscape and ‘understanding the world’ and wasn’t much of a reader, ‘certainly not of thrillers’. His own poetry was tender and subtle and spiritual, about coastal lowlands and sandstone and the mind of God. But Jim had got the book done and David had read it and thought, ‘There’s a lot of Kirkby in this, the small town life with dark secrets and machinations.’ He appreciated Jim’s sense of location: ‘He likes detail, and I like that.’ David’s favourite book was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He had lived a stone’s throw from Abbotsgate since 1979, but now it seemed to him that everyone was selling the same thing and it had become ‘tinselly’. Too Disney. Too many nostalgic postcards, just like Sheffield.
David was present at Lee’s first book signing and had taken a picture of the debut author in John Lennon glasses and a blue jacket and blue-checked shirt signing his treasured first edition of Killing Floor with Ruth – also wearing blue, and with her father’s jawline and features – standing proudly by his side. The shop at 9 Market Street was aptly named the Bookstore, and behind the signing table is a poster headed:
LOCAL AUTHOR
LEE CHILD
It was ‘a real rags to riches tale’, David told me, happy for this kind and courteous man’s stellar success. Later he sent me a photocopy of the autographed title page, which read: Your friend Jim Grant aka Lee Child, June 1997.
While I was in Kirkby Lonsdale I took a side trip by bus to the Asda Superstore in Kendal, famously the place where Jim had once accompanied his wife shopping and they came up with the name of his hero. Or rather she did: ‘It was a gift from her to me.’ Whenever he went to a supermarket (and that must be at least, what… a dozen times by now?) a little old lady would approach him and say: You’re a nice tall gentleman. Would you reach me that can from the shelf? On this occasion Jane had quipped: Well if this writing gig doesn’t work out, you can always be a reacher in a supermarket.
Jane Grant gave her husband a year to pursue his quixotic dream (Ruth had the insouciant faith of a daughter in her father). Twenty-three had passed since that historic encounter with an innocent old lady in the Kendal Asda that helped unleash Jack Reacher on an unsuspecting world. The shelves were still stacked unfeasibly high with cans and cartons and rolls of kitchen towel, and almost the first thing I saw was a reacher, then another, two reachers, standing on custom-built aluminium steps and even so, stretching and straining like little Ellie Greer. I couldn’t resist snapping them on my iPhone, which brought security running. I explained myself to the store manager. ‘Shall we see if there are any Lee Childs on the shelf?’ I asked brightly, as though it were possible there might not be. And there they were: handsome blue-and-gold paperbacks of Gone Tomorrow on a £4 promotion, between James Patterson’s Haunted and Wilbur Smith’s The Tiger’s Prey. Lee’s name was also dotted liberally over the Patterson–Clinton collaboration The President is Missing, on bright red stickers reading, ‘The political thriller of the decade.’ Lee Child. Soon the store manager would be telling his friends, that Lee Child used to shop in our Asda.
Jim wasn’t especially motivated by money, said John Leighton. He ‘just wanted to provide for his family’. But ‘he did once say he’d always wanted to turn left on the plane’.
So I told John about the first time Lee had hired a private jet, in 2005, for a flight from New York to the south of France. He wanted to shield his nervous lurcher-Labrador Jenny, a rescue dog, from unnecessary separation anxiety.
It was during a quiz night at the Pheasant that the call came through. Thursday 7 December, 1995. Lee’s agent, Darley Anderson, who’d phoned home first and been informed by Ruth that her parents were out at the pub.
‘There’s a call for a Lee Child,’ May said, or maybe it was Mel. Everyone looked around blankly. They didn’t know any Lee Child.
Then Jim Grant stood up and walked to the phone.
After a while he came back. It had finally happened. Darley had received an offer from G. P. Putnam’s in New York for Killing Floor and a follow-up book. Jim told his wife and friends about the deal. Then asked: ‘Should I take it?’
On 18 December he opened his first business account with the Midland Bank: ‘Mr J Grant trading as Lee Child.’