Long years of training, absorbed right down at the cellular level, permanently written in his DNA.
The Hard Way, 2006
Lee calculates that during the totality of his time at Granada he was responsible for over forty thousand hours of programme transmission. His skills were highly specialised and not directly transferable. He wanted to retire – I’m a Brit, and the point of life is to retire – but he was thirty-nine years old and had only seven house payments left in the bank and couldn’t make the numbers work.
It was ‘the usual 1990s downsizing thing’. He was an expensive veteran and as union organiser had been making his presence felt, just like in Mr Rigby’s classroom. He wasn’t going to be on any employers’ wish lists. He became a writer ‘because he couldn’t think of anything else to do’. As luck would have it he’d come up with this idea for a character who had suffered a downsizing experience but was taking it completely in his stride. All he had to do was bring the same total commitment to his audience that defined the television industry and maybe he could get something going.
Mostly he argued there was little crossover between his consecutive careers. But those forty thousand hours had ‘taught him a thing or two about telling a story’ and ‘the rhythms and grammar of storytelling had been imprinted on his DNA’. He’d written thousands of links, trailers, commercials and news stories on deadlines that ranged from fifteen minutes to fourteen seconds. The thought of a novel a year didn’t faze the controller.
He’d seen how to engage human curiosity and control suspense.
When I was working in television there was something no one had in 1980 that everyone had in 1990 and it changed everything. Notice I haven’t told you what it is? And you’re all wondering… What is it? That’s how you create suspense. The remote control. It used to be that having to haul yourself off the sofa was a major disincentive to changing the channel. Capture your audience at peak time and you’d keep them for the rest of the night. Suddenly you could change at whim and you’d run into very vulnerable times. Like heading into a commercial break. So we started asking a trivia question – like, who was the first choice to play Dirty Harry? – and at the end of the break we would answer it.
The psychology was that people would stick around for one of three reasons. If they know the answer, they enjoy the gratification of being right. If they don’t, they’re curious. And even if they don’t care they still stick around, because we’re hardwired like that. (ThrillerFest)
With television you had a big audience and fast feedback. There was ample opportunity to learn what audiences wanted, and how to please them. ‘The entire purpose of story is to manipulate,’ he would later write in The Hero.
Lee measured success by numbers. How many copies does the book sell? Not because he was greedy for money, but because the only true measure was: are real people actually reading this book? Or are they changing the channel? If you’re not selling, you’re just not doing it. Writers were there to entertain the audience, like the Anglo-Saxon gleeman. If you lost sight of that, you were sunk.
If readers were coming back for more, so too would publishers. If readers were talking to their friends, publishers would talk louder. Increase of appetite grew by what it fed on. It made sense to invest in a winner.
Most of what Jim learned at Granada he learned from the people around him, and what he learned most about was people. Their joys and their sorrows, their hopes and their fears, their crazy ambitions and their failed dreams and their secrets and their scandals.
Like Rob said, he remembered all the stories, even years afterwards. How Elspeth died of cancer and Candy had Huntington’s chorea like her mother and Rita had been beaten up by her husband. The man whose wife had been killed in an accident when an exhausted stage manager crashed his minibus after a twelve-hour shift and the one who insisted on a surprise party for his spouse even though she hated surprises, only for her to faint from shock and hit her head on the kitchen table and die in hospital the very same night.
There was the attractive married woman who worked in the office who’d been to Florida on holiday and met another man and started an affair and agreed to go out there and live with him. She had everything packed and ready and one day when her husband went off to work she flew to Florida and never came back. Jim admired her courage. Not many would follow through like she did, leaving behind her happy-but-dull life and everything she had, including her children.
There was the woman from management who’d driven Jim to the point where he told her he was going to say he’d had an affair with her and he was going to spill the beans and even though none of it was true he was going to do it anyway and she wouldn’t be able to disprove it, so she would have to back down and he would win, which he must at any cost, because he was right and she was wrong. You don’t think twice about crushing a cockroach, says Reacher in Echo Burning, and human beings often made cockroaches look good.
Sitting in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, Lee told me the one thing he felt seriously guilty about.
The hardest thing I’ve ever done was something I didn’t do. It was my turn to interview for an in-vision announcer. People sent in old VHS demo tapes, mostly amateur things. My favourite was a woman with a perfect face and voice, warm, with great presence. The tape started with a close-up on her face, a very tight zoom. Gradually, as the demo progressed, the camera pulled back and I saw she was sitting in a car. Then the camera kept pulling back and I saw she was a thalidomide victim, with little hands poking out of her shoulders. I was afraid it would make viewers feel uncomfortable, so I gave the job to a black woman instead, trying to compensate. She had beautiful liquid eyes and she was good, but not as good, not so fluent, and she stumbled over some words and pronunciations. She lasted a couple of years before going back to Trinidad, where she was greeted as a celebrity like Trevor McDonald and her family home was robbed and all of them were shot dead.
And then there were the Janet and John stories.
Janet’s partner Conrad picked me up from Eccles station in Manchester. Janet told me about her job as loggist and how Jim was so cool under pressure.
Then she told me about her life. I’d heard some of it already, when Lee was explaining how different the world had been when he was growing up. Janet was not so lucky as Jim. She hadn’t been able to dodge the bullets the way he had, and her story deeply moved him.
Janet Brown (née Speers) was born to working-class parents in Hope Hospital in Salford. She was the oldest of three daughters. Her father worked shifts for the Manchester Ship Canal Company, on the Locks and then as Bridgemaster on Barton Swing Bridge. Money was scarce, but they were well fed and cared for. Janet had piano lessons. Her mother had a part-time job in a mail-order warehouse. Her grandfather would take her for walks in the pushchair.
The summer of 1947 was a hot one (just as winter had been exceptionally cold). Janet had recently started school. She spent the afternoon at the park and when she got home she fell suddenly ill with flu-like symptoms. She was put to bed and when she got up again her legs gave way and she fell to the floor. It was the time of the polio epidemic and the doctor sent her straight to the local fever hospital. This hospital was called Ladywell.
Janet was placed on the ‘free-list’, which meant she wasn’t expected to make it. Once, she dreamed she was falling down and down into blackness, and afterwards wondered if this was the moment the fever broke, and she was really ‘coming up instead of going down’. She wasn’t ready to shuffle off her mortal coil. She didn’t want to be set free.
Her mother and father could look at her through the glass of her isolation cubicle. Janet still remembers that cubicle. She still remembers the pain when they tried to straighten her legs by forcing them into splints, bandaging them to keep them immobilised, which only helped the virus do its damage. There was a button at the side of her bed and sometimes she pressed it. She was only five years old. Then a nurse threatened her with another enema if she ever did it again, so she didn’t. A ‘nice nurse’ told her she would soon be able to dance on the lawn outside her hospital window.
Janet was in isolation for eight weeks. Back home in Salford neighbours would cross the street when her mother went shopping.
When she was no longer infectious she was sent to Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire. The ward was separated by age group into a ‘big end’ and a ‘little end’ and contained about thirty beds. Sister Burgess had an all-glass office at the centre, where she could see everything that went on and ruled with a rod of iron. If a child misbehaved – hopped out of bed when she shouldn’t or didn’t do as she was told – she was put under a restrainer, a canvas sheet that was stretched across the mid-section of the body and fastened tightly under the bed so that she couldn’t sit up.
They were woken at six with breakfast at seven. They had to eat everything that was put in front of them. The day staff arrived and remade the beds. The bedridden were lifted onto a trolley, the rest sat around a table waiting for lessons to start. The ward was scrubbed and the wooden floor polished. Bed pans were provided after each meal and to ask for one at another time was a form of not behaving. There was no toilet paper, only tow (a coarse fibre used in upholstery stuffing). After tea an enamel bowl was brought round, with warm water for the girls to wash their hands and faces.
When Matron did her round, or the consultant, the beds were lined up perfectly, with the corners tucked in just so. ‘We had to keep very still. It was like a military operation and these people were treated like gods.’
Visiting was one weekend a month for adults only, so Janet never saw her sisters. Her parents didn’t have a car but so many children were afflicted that a coach was laid on. The doors opened at 2 p.m. Janet still remembers the thrill of anticipation, and her mother’s loving hugs. She remembers how she hated it when they had to leave. But crying was a form of misbehaviour too. Any sweets the visitors brought were taken away and doled out one by one. She had no toys of her own.
Janet made friends with Marjorie in the bed next to hers. They came from the same part of town and maybe when they were better they could go to the park or dance together on the lawn. One night she heard a strange noise and called the night nurse. Marjorie, unable to sit up or raise her head, had choked on her own vomit. The next morning the bed was empty, and Janet was told she had gone home. It was only later she realised that her friend had died.
At Biddulph Grange Janet learned to walk again, with the aid of two callipers, two walking sticks, and two stiff legs. In those days callipers didn’t have knee joints to enable them to bend. John Grant senior would have empathised. On summer nights the beds were pushed outside, but it wasn’t exciting or fun. The gardens had been divided into themed areas inspired by China and Egypt, and many years later Janet would visit them again with her best friend Jane Grant, but for a sickly child they were full of shadows and ghosts and Buddhas that seemed to glow red in the dark.
Janet wasn’t bitter. She didn’t feel abandoned or unwanted. When she was home again her mother took her on a coach trip to see a faith healer called Percy, who put his hand on her back and spoke some words over her and made no perceptible difference but at least they had tried. Marjorie’s family came to visit. Janet continued to go to hospital three times a week, travelling on her own by ambulance, and her grandfather paid for someone from the local football club to come to the house for physiotherapy. Janet liked that, because it meant she didn’t have to go to bed so early and afterwards her father would carry her upstairs, because without the callipers she couldn’t walk. She was still full of hope.
Janet spent eighteen months at Biddulph Grange. Then a further nine months in hospital when she was fourteen and three when she was seventeen, for operations on her feet and legs. When I met her she was in a wheelchair. Bright, bubbly, glowing, and with Conrad, flirtatious. Jane Grant had taken her horse-riding, she told me, and made her feel that ‘anything was possible’.
‘John Brown wore a calliper too,’ Rob said. ‘I can still hear the click, as he adjusted it.’
Janet and John had met when they were seventeen years old at St Loye’s College in Exeter – ‘for the training and rehabilitation of the disabled’ – where they were doing a course in Pitman shorthand, typing, English and general office procedures. John’s parents owned their own home and car and his mother had paid help twice a week. His father was a clerk in the Assistant Magistrates’ office and wrote a column for the Bournemouth Echo.
John’s father was cold and hard. John had to go to church three times on Sundays. He was made to catch a bus and take the long walk up the hill for singing lessons he didn’t want, even after he too contracted polio at the age of ten and spent ten months in hospital, one for every year of his life. John struggled to accept his disability, ‘though it was slight compared to many’.
They were both determined that polio should not define them. The strength of that determination came from the polio itself.
Jim often thought about what it must have been like for a boy to be deprived overnight of his freedom and mobility on the cusp of adolescence. He rejected Rob’s notion that he had been in thrall to John Brown. But it was true that he had been fascinated by him. Looking back, he thought it was his writer’s brain beginning to crank up.
He’d always done ‘the Walter Mitty thing’. As a kid he daydreamed, drifting through vaguely heroic stories that were shifting and fluid. As he grew older the stories became obsessively detailed, plausible, and correct. Commuting to and from Granada he would think of what he should have said at the meeting he’d just come out of, and say that thing in his head or even aloud, and pretend it had happened that way, and rewrite history from that point on. He’d mentally write complex narratives about how to break some manager’s leg. How to contact the tough guys and where, and what sort of place it was, what to say to them and how to pay them off without revealing his identity. He edited reality in a way he wouldn’t dream of editing his fiction.
It was like he’d always been a writer, but hadn’t yet made the connection between his brain and the page.
Once Jim said he’d been breathalysed on the way back to Stalybridge after dinner with the Browns. ‘I was well over the limit and somehow I summoned myself to breathe in a certain way and I passed it.’ You can’t do that, Rob thought, but it was ‘classic Jim’.
Jim had a great turn of phrase. Rob remembered him saying the snow on top of a brick wall looked like the crust on a loaf of bread, and how a moustachioed footballer resembled a First World War officer and four hens emerging from a shed reminded him of a bunch of old ladies going out for a walk. But he hadn’t expected Jim to become a writer. Rob was a Hemingway fan and not uncritical of Lee Child, but thought he was better than Grisham. He especially liked the first few pages of 61 Hours and ‘the skid-panning of the coach as it slews out of control’.
This is how Jim responded when, out of the blue, Rob emailed him in September 2014:
So great to hear from you. I’m not very nostalgic or sentimental but, like you, those times we shared have a huge place in my memories. A lot of random fun. I remember being bored one day and writing endless versions of ‘It’s our title, says Big Ron’ on the Aston caption generator. Might be the first fiction I ever wrote.
He wasn’t owning up to 10-inch Cyril. Rob too remembered writing spoof headlines about Manchester United and their manager Ron Atkinson but on the cruder Riley, which preceded the Aston (which became the industry standard). The new character generators allowed you to type words in and superimpose them over anything, where previously the graphics department would mock something up with white letters on black board. This was around 1981, when a brand new cutting-edge Quantel Paintbox was parked outside the CCR and like the big kids they were Jim and Rob would go out and play with it.
It was easy to make things up or tell other people’s stories. The greater mysteries were closer to home. How well had he known his own father? Lee wondered, when he set about writing his twenty-third book, Past Tense. How well did he know his brothers? In a 2019 interview with the Sunday Times in South Africa, Lee revealed that with the surprising character of Mark Reacher he wanted to provide ‘a bit of moral colour for Jack’. ‘If you start looking at your family, you might not like what you find.’ Not all stories could be told, not all could be known. Had he ever really seen beyond the tip of the iceberg? ‘There was a list of things never to be talked about,’ Lee told me, looking back on life with his parents, ‘and number one on the list was the list itself.’
David Grant was the fittest of the four brothers. ‘He was a better Scout than Jim,’ recalled Mr Rigby, Scoutmaster as well as Biology teacher. But he got no obvious aesthetic joy out of the countryside or sensual pleasure from fresh air. It was all about challenge and endurance and self-punishment. He belonged to the Brecon Mountain Rescue Team, but if he spent days trekking Reacher-like through the snow or trawling the waters of the Severn it wasn’t, so far as Lee could tell, because he derived any deep human satisfaction from saving lives or restoring the missing to their grieving families. He was in it ‘for the geeky stuff, the vehicles and equipment’. David taught Chemistry at a local secondary school. He owned a Porsche and like Lee had a weakness for cars. But he and Richard, who after Cambridge had rejected a job at Pratt & Whitney (the US manufacturer of jet engine turbines) and gone to work for the Central Electricity Generating Board instead, ‘had no concept of human emotions’. Yet correspondence suggests that Richard, like Rex, read each of the Reacher books as they came out, and he never forgot a birthday card: ‘Many happy returns of your birthday’, read his annual message to brother James, only exceptionally hinting at toy cars once played with, or long-lost episodes of Doctor Who.
In 2012 Lee (who had recently become the first British author to sell a million ebooks for Kindle) donated £10,000 towards a £65,000 replacement vehicle for the Brecon Mountain team when their existing one was written off in a collision. ‘[They] wouldn’t dream of singing their own praises,’ he told BBC News Mid Wales, ‘but the truth is they’re real experts – intrepid on the mountains and innovative in river searches. Their control vehicle was world class […] and copied by the police and the military.’ Mr Child’s brother would help design the new interior.
It was as close as Lee would come to acknowledging that the almost invisible third son, often omitted by acquaintances when listing the Grant brothers, and of whom at time of writing I had seen no photographs, could be said to be doing in the real world just a little of what he, the second son, was only writing about.
The first time Jim mentioned his intention to write a book to anyone outside his immediate family was at a New Year’s Eve party in 1989. He’d recently discovered John D. MacDonald in an airport bookstore (starting with The Long Silver Rain) and was talking to Anne Wilkie Millar, then shop steward to his deputy. It was soon after they’d negotiated the twenty-four-hour deal, ‘like printing our own money’. Not only had they screwed the company on pay but Jim hadn’t let up. Shift workers would miss TV programmes and phone calls so would need answerphones and video recorders, one each for every employee, all on the company dime. He didn’t just know the writing was on the wall, he’d put it there. ‘What are you going to do afterwards?’ Anne asked him under the mistletoe. ‘I’m going to write a book.’ MacDonald was like a how-to manual, for plot but also for character, and Jim thought, I’d like to do this too. He’d always been that way. This music is incredible – I want to play the guitar. This show is great – I want to be on stage.
It would take another five years for Jim to act on those words and pass on to Reacher that ‘strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism’ that had so attracted him to Travis McGee (as he later wrote in his introduction to the reissue of The Deep Blue Good-by). But in his final months as an underemployed underappreciated senior presentation director he started taking the draft manuscript into work and typing it up on Ruth’s laptop, a monochrome Lexmark 486/25 given to her by Jane’s father, lazily extending a paw now and then to flick the occasional switch at the control desk. Colleagues would ask questions, maybe tease him a little; one fell in love with his hero Jack before he became famous and named her first-born son after him without the published author ever even knowing. Others said no way would he make it and were duly logged and slated for a nasty run-in with Reacher’s skull or the sharp end of his elbow.
Jim Grant’s last day at Granada was 21 June 1995 (‘Jack Reacher’s birthday, in a very real way,’ he blogged ten years later). He left with a severance package of £30,000 (half of which went on settling debts) that with frugal living would give him just about long enough to negotiate a life-saving deal for his first two books. The family thought about relocating to the Loire Valley. But instead Ruth got a Sunday job as a waitress and Jane joined the Tourist Information Office, and when they began to run out of money Jim took on some highly paid work as a freelance transmission controller at NBC in London. He did twenty-one shifts, staying in the cheapest hotel he could find near the Central line so as to get to Tower Hill or Bank and connect with the Docklands Light Railway to the Isle of Dogs. By coincidence, Rob was drafted in to produce some tennis one Sunday and they said: ‘We had this other guy from Granada in here recently, Jim Grant. He’s writing a book and we all think it’s going to really take off.’
The year 1994 was one of new beginnings.
But this rebirth took place in the shadow of the valley of death, and 1994 was also the year that broke Jim’s heart. First, Stanley the springer spaniel died of old age. Jim and Jane had two rules for Stan: wait two days, and was he still eating? After two days he still wasn’t eating and they called out the country vet. Then Giz the guinea pig contracted cancer and the vet couldn’t locate a vein and had to inject straight into the cavity. Lee still remembered how the tiny animal took twenty excruciating minutes to die, all the while looking helplessly into his eyes.
Most of what Jim learned at Granada he’d learned by staying alive. It was what Lee told creative writing students who asked for advice. The essential thing was to read. Other than that, all they could really do was go away and live a bit longer, wait until the gas tank was full.
‘Nineteen ninety-four was a terrible year,’ Lee said, gloomily. ‘My Otley grandma died too [in November], at the same time I was getting it in the neck from Granada.’
No wonder he wanted to escape to Georgia.