Where he matched his talents with unrelenting hard work and made himself a star, in a shadowy, black-ops kind of a way.
Personal, 2014
‘I know, I’ll write a book. I’d read a few. How hard could it be?’
It was lunchtime. Thursday 1 September, 1994. Jim Grant left the building. The sun was shining. He wasn’t hungry. He was heading for WHSmith at the Arndale Centre. He didn’t want a magazine. He wasn’t planning to come back with yet another book. Instead, he bought three pads of lined paper, one pencil, one pencil sharpener and an eraser for a total of £3.99. He was thinking of William Styron. Twenty years later he would nominate Sophie’s Choice for the Wall Street Journal Book Club. Five years after that he would tell me that the red house in Echo Burning was an echo of the pink rooming house where Stingo embarks on his writing career. Stingo is a recent émigré to New York with a threescore-a-day Camel habit who records in his diary:
My first morning – a Saturday – I rose late and strolled over to a stationery store on Flatbush Avenue and bought two dozen Number 2 Venus Velvet pencils, ten lined yellow legal pads and a ‘Boston’ pencil sharpener…
Contrary to popular mythology, Lee Child did not begin writing Killing Floor on 1 September. He didn’t even begin working on it. He’d already done a day’s work. Same on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were out too. He was on the weekend shift.
‘September 1st just made for a better story,’ Lee said. Like Reacher being born on Friday instead of Tuesday or Wednesday.
It wasn’t until Monday 5 September that Jim Grant sat down at the round chrome-and-glass dining-room table and wrote the first sentence of his first novel.
Anything was possible. He wrote:
CHAPTER ONE 1st draft
I had slept on the bus right through the long haul from _____ . It had rained all night. It was cold. The bus droned and hissed and vibrated. The passengers dozed and snored and stank. I knew none of them. I hated them all.
He stood and paced and smoked. Something didn’t feel quite right. His I’m heading down a blind alley detector was already twitching. Later he could rely on picking up on it within seven words. He sat down again, crossed out each sentence with a horizontal line and then a single diagonal cutting across the middle.
Then he wrote:
CH 1
I was arrested in Eno’s diner.
That felt better. Looked better too. He read it aloud. It sounded good. He wrote:
At twelve o’clock.
The third sentence – ‘I had ordered lunch but not eaten it yet.’ – had been crossed out and replaced with:
I was eating eggs [‘lunch’ is crossed out], drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. // This was a small diner, but bright and clean. Looked brand new. Built to resemble a converted railway car. // I was at a window.
The fragmentary, choppy style was deliberate. It seemed right for a hero who would use words sparingly, but with precision: naming the diner, stating the time, caring which meal it was. It was also deliberately exaggerated. He needed to attract attention, stand out from the crowd. He figured he had the length of a television commercial to make himself unforgettable, unputdownable. To grab his audience and hold on to it. According to Philip Pullman, it worked: Killing Floor was his first Reacher too, sometime around 2009, and a year or so later he’d caught up with them all. What he especially liked was the way ‘nothing comes between the reader and the story’.
But it took a while to get that first paragraph right. Here is ‘new para 1’, undated (and still not final), written up in red ink on a separate page:
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. They came for me at twelve noon. I was eating eggs, drinking coffee, and reading somebody else’s newspaper about the campaign for a president I hadn’t voted for last time and wasn’t going to vote for this time. Twelve noon, but it was breakfast, not lunch. I was late and wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way down into town from the highway.
Then he began to compress his sentences. It was subtle. ‘Looked brand new’ (replacing ‘New, I think.’) became simply ‘Brand new’; ‘This major operation had to be for me’ became ‘This operation was for me’. At the same time, he introduced more on Reacher’s point of view, more descriptive and sensory detail – about the lunch counter bumped out back and the booths and the rain pebbling the windows with red and blue light and the car hissing over smooth soaked tarmac. Reacher gradually becomes less explicit about his feelings, cooler and less hot-headed. He stops saying he hates people, and muttering ‘smug bastard’ under his breath. He stops analysing his shortcomings and agonising over his failures.
Lee had thought hard about his hero. Character was top of his list of priorities. It literally came before plot on the first page of his planning notes (British Archive of Contemporary Writing KF1011A). He’d written a whole paragraph about it, notable for its use of urgent, imperative verbs:
Character of H –
This is vitally important. It will be make-or-break. Must be such that it arouses envy in male readers. They must admire him & want to be him. Women readers must be fascinated by him. They must want to be with him. Must be some moral base albeit probably bleak & cynical to a degree. Needs to be alienated, outsider, loner, tough, resourceful. There must be a very subtle portrayal of superman powers. Must be unfeasibly tough & strong & invulnerable, to provide escapist identification. Gets away with things, possibly unrealistic but serious & convincing. Always knows better. Things turn out OK.
That would do. Quite enough to get him started and propel him through to the end. At the foot of the same page he has written:
H had tried it their way. Now he is trying it his way. To hell with them.
I had tried it their way. To hell with them. Now I am trying it my way.
And on the flip side, an emphatic note-to-self: ‘H can’t just be an investigator, too clichéd. H must establish alienation, oppression etc.’
He settled on first-person narrative. It was the natural way of telling a story. It was intimate and beguiling and seductive. But there was another compelling reason: at this point he still had no idea what ‘H’ – the hero – was called. Jane hadn’t yet dragged him off to Asda to help with the weekly shop. He hadn’t yet answered the cry for help from that little old lady. He’d been toying with ‘Franklin’, but he wasn’t convinced. Somehow Franklin didn’t feel quite right.
It wasn’t until 2272 words into chapter two that he wrote:
‘My name is Jack Reacher,’ I said. ‘No middle name. No address.’
It was purely accidental. But the subliminal echo of ‘Richard’ was resonant. With a touch of Richard III thrown in – by no means a good man, but undoubtedly charismatic. The only one of Shakespeare’s major characters to open his own play and capture the crowd through soliloquy.
Lee was his own sternest taskmaster. After he’d completed the first draft, and written it all out a second time, again by hand, and typed it up a first time, single-spaced, he decided to run a check. He sat down at the laptop and typed:
Reacher was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. He was eating eggs and drinking black coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. He was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way down into town from the highway.
He retyped the whole of the first chapter in the third person, read it aloud and dismissed it. Tossed it into a box he was using for filing stuff. Which is how I came to read it twenty-five years later.
Apart from the wholesale deletion of the opening paragraph it was a remarkably clean first-draft first page of a first-time novel. At this primal stage only six more words were cut, and a couple of dozen inserted. It was like the three-year-old sitting on that beast of a tricycle or the seventeen-year-old getting behind the wheel of a car: he was off and running, and nothing and no one was going to stand in his way. About four days in he experienced ‘a frisson of disappointment and irritation’ when his wife reminded him they had to go out and do something. It was then he knew he was doing the right thing with his life. It was the same feeling he had when he was obliged to tear himself away from reading a good book.
That was the last time he would scratch an opening paragraph. ‘I’d rather hang myself than waste the start of a novel,’ he said. First sentences set the tone and raised questions: ‘They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August’ (Without Fail). Who? Why? More, they would come to dictate where the novel was going. Like in Past Tense, where felicitous mentions of ‘Maine’ and ‘birds’ told Lee his twenty-third book would couple a spooky Stephen King-style strand with the back story of Reacher’s birdwatching father. Or Blue Moon, where the simplicity of ‘The city looked small on a map of America’ determined the architectural feel of the whole.
From the outset, Lee knows what he ‘must’ do. Here are his first-time plot notes (KF1011A):
Features of plot –
Must be action, adventure, ingenuity, unbeatable self-defence. Must be a surrogate, vicarious, escapist mood but deadly serious. Integral action & adventure necessary, ingenuity & self-confidence in all predicaments vital to provide escapist feeling. Need to appeal to powerless, unconfident readers who would secretly like to enact fantasies e.g. survive outside a job, beat up their boss, be unafraid etc. etc.
At the top of KF1013 is this short paragraph:
Barest possible outline: H is an alienated loner, redundant from job, becomes involved in some kind of [activity] which provides a determined loner the opportunity of appropriating large amount of cash, which he does, after dangers and contests, subsequently leaving the area, revenged against oppression, and enriched.
On the flip side, in a darker pencil, are some sketchy thoughts around chapter two. Williams hasn’t yet become Morrison and Jones hasn’t yet become Baker, but X (Hubble) and H have now been named:
Jones did it.
Tapes are important. Removed with files Fri pm by Williams. Finlay and Roscoe can’t find them Sat. Eventually they are found in Williams’s house – doctored re confession from Reacher, Hubble re hit. Also report written by Williams re death of Hubble & Reacher in prison i.e. Reacher strangled Hubble, Reacher killed by intervention of other prisoners.
Mon am Williams is found killed. Hubble disappears. Finlay is not promoted. Mayor makes Jones Chief.
Lunch at Eno’s – two waitresses, one wears glasses.
Hubble’s tape cannot be found therefore no pursuit of Hubble.
KF1014 begins with a selection of possible titles. The second makes ‘Killing Floor’ seem positively upbeat, and the third suggests that Reacher, at this point, is more cursed than blessed:
Bad Luck and Trouble
No Luck at all
Born under a Bad Sign
Down to the Crossroads
Got no Place to Go
The reverse is pure structuralist theory. Like Canon R. G. Lunt had once said, Jim Grant was showing signs of being a real intellectual. The untitled list has its origins in Vladimir Propp’s thirty-one narrative functions in Morphology of the Folktale (1928), mediated via Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which articulates the seventeen stages of the ‘hero’s journey’, and Christopher Vogler’s Hollywood manual, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2007), which reduces the seventeen to a more manageable twelve.
Ordinary World / Status Quo
Call to Adventure / description of problem
Refusal of the Call / reluctance
Meeting the Mentor / i.e. what is the motivator
Crossing the first threshold / i.e. precipitator
Tests, Allies, Enemies / initial alignment of characters
Approach to the Innermost Cave
Supreme Ordeal – climactic danger
Reward
The Road Back – not without difficulties
Resurrection – reaching the uplands
Return with elixir – happy & enriched ending
Lee was laying the foundations for his signature brand of mythic realism.
There are pages and pages of painstaking calculations. It was almost like he was missing school. Only a few have to do with plot:
A dollar bill weighs 0.94 gram (≏1)
1064 dollars = 2.2 pounds
1,083,345 dollars = 1 ton
1 pound of single dollar bills = $480
1 ton of single dollar bills = approx $1 million
30 dollars = 1 oz
$480 = 1 lb
airconditioner box = ? 200 lbs = $96,000
Most, densely covered, are obsessively concerned with the internal economy of the text. A ‘schedule’ lists page counts for each chapter across different drafts. There is a comparison of his own pen draft with books by James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell: overall number of pages, number of lines per page and number of characters per line. A note reads ‘257 words per page (on my draft)’.
On the facing page Lee has written:
What the writer needs is a sixty-two character line
What this page needs is a line of sixty-two characters
What this page needs are lines of sixty-two characters each
*What these lines need are lengths of sixty-two characters each
Patterson’s lines were typically 63 characters long. Lee notes that Grisham’s The Firm has 62 characters x 40 lines, whereas his ‘Bad Luck and Trouble’ (‘Bad’ for short) has 79 characters x 28 lines. He is happy with the ratios. He tots up the total number of letters in 189 words (ranging between 1 and 13 characters in length) and calculates an average word length of 4.15 characters – ‘call it 4’. He concludes: ‘Aim for 472 pages or more of my m/s.’
Finally, in March 1995, he is satisfied. Jane reads it. Ruth reads it. Andrew reads it. They are all satisfied. Lee types up chapters one, six and nine and sends them off to two literary agents. Darley Anderson bites immediately. Blake Friedmann, like Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College, misses out.
Then comes the to and fro of consultation with agents and editors. Summaries of objections from readers. Responses to those objections: an ‘x’ in the margin where he thinks they’ve got it wrong, the single word ‘think’ when he thinks it’s worth thinking about. There are maps of Margrave and ‘to do’ lists and itemised accounts of proposed changes, both planned and executed. There are synopses batted back and forth. Jim practises writing the word ‘Lee’, initially opting to form the vowels in the style of the lower-case epsilon.
Most revealing is the correspondence from Putnam’s David Highfill: critical, demanding, insistent, encouraging, cajoling, nurturing. His seven-page letter of 22 February 1996 in response to the first major redraft concludes thus:
I know some of these issues are complex, but I’m confident you can write thrillers with the best of them. I mean that. You have enormous talent. I know I’m spending more time here with what I don’t like, but you know what I love in this.
With the tiniest reservation, the debut author takes it on the chin (4 March). ‘Excellent points, no problems at all with most of them. I’m about halfway through the edit, your suggestions are in place, and I’m on course to lose around 125 pages.’ And: ‘You’re the boss, and as you know, I’ll do whatever it takes.’
This is the same Lee Child who twenty years later would say: ‘I tell my editor she can make three comments and I’ll act on one of them.’ For Reacher no. 7, Persuader, Transworld’s Marianne Velmans was still valiantly covering slips of A6 paper in detailed handwritten notes. On one she has written thirteen carefully reasoned lines on continuity issues, to do with time phrases and plates of food and ‘the best way to create clarity’. At the foot of the page Lee has added three words in block capitals: ‘KEEP AS IS.’
Highfill’s main concern is with pacing. He wants to sell the book as a thriller, not a mystery. Chapters need to be shorter, more like Thomas Harris. Reacher needs to be more active. He needs to stop telling us his plan in advance of executing it. ‘This is a habit of yours. Watch it in other places too.’ There is too much dialogue. ‘If the total now is 625 pages and we’re cutting 150 pages, then most scenes should come down about 25%.’
Here is his note on p. 547:
R sits down to eat at Eno’s with Picard guarding him. R figures out how he can beat the clock and Kliner. This is brilliant deduction on Reacher’s part […] but it’s a step back from the action. Can he think about this in half the number of pages? While he’s driving with Picard? Can he just think about one challenge at a time instead of ticking them all off in his mind over 10 pages? He doesn’t leave Eno’s for 10 pages. This has all been thinking. It’s slowing it down.
Judiciously, he throws in the odd carrot of praise: ‘p. 526: Kliner is the “Henry Ford of counterfeiting”. Love it.’ Or ‘p. 544: Wonderful scene […]. Kliner’s dilemma is delicious. […] Very, very smart plotting on your part.’ And ‘p. 584: R. breaks Finlay out with the Bentley! Terrific.’
Lee cuts eight pages of dialogue between Reacher and Charley Hubble in chapter eleven down to one. His conversations with Finlay are similarly abbreviated.
On 19 April Highfill writes that the streamlined version is ‘so much stronger’. Lee has done ‘a terrific job’. But… it could be stronger still. This letter is a mere two pages, but accompanied by brutal line-edits. ‘I’ve cut down some of your section and chapter endings.’ Highfill wants the action to ‘speak for itself’. He doesn’t want Lee ‘leading the reader too much’ (‘let me know if you disagree’). He is most ruthless towards the end, where ‘the plot really needs to get cooking’.
They’ve clearly spoken on the phone. In his response dated 27 May Lee’s final paragraph reads:
I totally agree with you about the attraction of a more resonant, more up-scale, bookstore-rather-than-supermarket-rack type of title. Having said that, I think Killing Floor has a number of virtues… it’s terse, hard-edged, slightly quirky, menacing. Main problem is, right now I can’t think of a real alternative except possibly The World All Changed… which relates well in terms of the upheaval in Reacher’s life, his brother dying, the nature of the counterfeiting method, the international source, the changes in the other characters’ lives, etc. etc., but it’s a bit soft perhaps…
Third go round (16 July), just prior to the production of galley proofs, Highfill shortens some of the sex scenes, which are a touch ‘melodramatic’ and ‘make the book look more “downmarket”, as we say’. He wants Killing Floor to be read as ‘an important hardcover debut’, not ‘a down and dirty paperback original’.
Lee responds promptly, on 18 July, after another phone call, his first letter on headed paper, including an early adoption of American spelling. ‘Meanwhile, back to the T-word […] Anything here you like?’
TITLES WHICH TRY TO SUM UP THE BOOK:
Over the Line
The Threshold
Exact Retribution
Hard Currency
Method of Payment
Provocation
The Toll
The First Rule (… this is Jane’s favorite – I like it too… poses the basic read-on question, what is the first rule?)
Loaded
Circulation
Dead Line
The Velocity of Money
TITLES WHICH TRY TO SUM UP JACK REACHER:
Unconditional
The Unconditional
Unconditional Loyalty
The Troublemaker
The Uncompromiser
Uncompromised
No Compromise
The Adjudicator
Really, how hard could it be? There is no response archived, but elsewhere I came across other signs of Jane’s unobtrusive input, like the handwritten list of birds she supplied when Lee began writing Past Tense.
Four days later anxiety levels are running high. Lee writes a two-page letter that can only be described as impassioned. He is bitterly annoyed at a dilatory courier, who embodies all the shameful failings of ‘merrie olde England’: ‘We’re stuck in the post-industrial, pre-service-industry quiet zone. I guess they understand the concept of service, like they know there are such things as poisonous spiders or decent burgers, but it’s all theoretical, it’s something which exists in other parts of the world, nothing to do with them.’
But this rant is all displacement. ‘I’m still moderately agitated about the title.’
His UK publishers feared the title might be off-putting to women readers, who might ‘never pick it up’. Lee had done some ‘seriously flawed anecdotal research’ among his female friends, who tended to agree they might pass.
I’ve tried hard to think of alternatives. It seems to me there are two routes to go down. The first is to try to sum up the feeling of the whole book – which I think ‘Killing Floor’ does pretty well. It captures the violence, the thrills, the hard edge, the tight location, as well as being an intriguing pair of words, somewhat musical, even slightly poetic. The only alternative would be something like ‘Reasonable Force’ or ‘Justice Zone’.
The second route is to try to sum up the character of Reacher, to capture the tough-guy-with-attitude, latent-danger type of thing. My favorite would be ‘Forbidden Door’. From p. 106, ‘… tough shit. He started it, right? Attacking me was like pushing open a forbidden door. What waited on the other side was his problem. His risk. If he didn’t like it, he shouldn’t have pushed open the damn door…’. I like this approach. I think it’s equally valid to try to sum Reacher up as it is to sum the whole story up. Maybe more valid, if Reacher is to be a serial character.
All those he asked favoured ‘Forbidden Door’ over ‘Killing Floor’.
The final paragraph is raw and emotional: ‘Anyway, to save my brain from exploding, I’m going to stop worrying over it.’ Whatever the final decision, he would support ‘the boss’ 100 per cent. Transworld would just have to ‘suck it up’.
It’s very, very important to me that there is no misunderstanding between the two of us – my position is that your view is binding, and I need you to understand that I am totally happy with that situation, and I definitely wouldn’t want it any other way. OK?
This (possibly unique) expression of need was reassuring. As was the reticent request for reassurance in turn at the end. He was human after all.
Somehow, over the course of his illustrious career, Lee Child had done what the best musicians and ballet dancers do: make a truly staggering amount of hard graft look easy. It was excellence, but not without effort.
He had written the whole of Killing Floor in seven months, on his days off, while holding down a full-time job in the pitiless face of imminent redundancy. He’d written it out twice by hand, in pencil and blue ink and red ink, Tippexing and revising and annotating. He’d produced at least two typewritten drafts.
‘The work you put in was epic,’ I wrote to Lee after my first week in the archive. ‘I know,’ he answered. ‘Unimaginable now. Got very lazy.’
I was reminded of his old form master: ‘Only his own efforts can ensure success.’ But Jim Grant didn’t really care what the masters thought. They were the educational equivalent of newspaper critics. The motivational words he harked back to came from one of his sixth-form contemporaries, S. D. ‘Sid’ Jones. Sid wore a cravat. He liked to flaunt his manhood on the diving board of the outdoor swimming pool, and would don a fresh pair of ironed, neatly folded, sparkling white Y-fronts after every shower. He smoked John Player Special cigarettes. His mother had a green Triumph TR4A and Sid himself drove an orange MG 1100. All in all he was the kind of guy who left a lasting impression. He was only a middling rugby player, but had once given a terrific team talk that had stuck with Jim for ever.
‘My motto,’ Lee wrote to me, quoting Sid: ‘I can’t grow any more talent, but I can out-work you.’
‘It’s something they teach you in the army,’ said Reacher in Blue Moon.
The only thing under your direct control is how hard you work. In other words, if you really, really buckle down today, and you get the intelligence, the planning, and the execution each a hundred percent exactly correct, then you are bound to prevail.