Then he felt the roof soar away above him.
Die Trying, 1998
It took more than an American wife for Jim Grant to escape. It took him longer than the Beatles. But on Friday 3 July, 1998, Jim, Jane, Ruth and Jenny the lurcher-Labrador set sail on the Queen Elizabeth II from Southampton, bound for the New World. Five days later, having supplied the obligatory X-rays to prove he was free of tuberculosis, Jim was granted residency and became a legal immigrant. It was a forty-four-year-old dream come true. He was no longer trapped in the wrong body, even if he would have to wait another six years for a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan. Jane had been missing her family and Ruth was looking forward to starting at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she had secured early acceptance for a four-year degree in linguistics (to be funded by Reacher film options) and would soon meet Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The picture-postcard perfection of Kirkby Lonsdale had worn thin. ‘The weather was crushingly bad.’ They’d sold the house and its contents for £165,000 to a couple who, like them, were starting over, and Lee had begun work on his fourth book, Running Blind. He wasn’t sitting at the dining table any more. They had used some of the Killing Floor money to provide Ruth with a bigger bedroom and Jim had taken over her playroom for his office. The room with the view. The final line he wrote before shutting down his computer for the last time on Abbotsgate was Jodie Garber scolding Reacher for engineering the demise of a local gangster: ‘“I told you not to do that,” she said.’
This is Lee’s account from the introduction to the Mysterious edition of Running Blind:
We went by ocean liner for two reasons: we had a dog, and we didn’t want to put her in an airplane hold, and because insurance on container consignments was compulsory, expensive, and pro-rata with the value of the contents. The ocean liner allowed unlimited baggage […] so we bought trunks and hand-carried the most expensive stuff, thereby lowering the container insurance to the point where the saving more or less paid for the liner tickets. And it was a perfect emigration–immigration experience – very reminiscent of history, very relaxing, and a very well-defined transition between old and new. We watched England disappear behind the stern, and then five days later we saw the Statue of Liberty approaching through the morning mist.
It is characteristic of his autobiographical writing that he should focus more on the minutiae of travel than the poetry of the journey. When they docked on the west side of Manhattan, Jane and Ruth waited on deck with Jenny while Jim dashed off to hire a truck.
A day after disembarking, Lee set off on his first ever promotional tour, for Die Trying.
Crowds were small, and events were intimate. But I loved every minute. I saw places I hadn’t been before, and I realised the lovely truth of book touring: no one shows up who doesn’t already like you. It’s a warm bath.
The ‘warm bath’ would become a go-to metaphor for the pleasures of the writer’s life, even though in real life it lost out to a hot shower: ‘the full 22-minute routine, including brushing my hair’, he blogs for The Hard Way, channelling the Reacher of Tripwire. As with habits of dress it wasn’t clear if this was life imitating art or the other way round.
There had been no tour for Killing Floor. Lee signed stock at Partners & Crime bookstore on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village (one of the partners, Maggie Griffin, would soon become his personal assistant and website manager) and at the Deansgate branch of Waterstones in Manchester, but the only sit-and-sign public event had been at Kirkby Lonsdale’s Bookstore, attended almost literally by one man (David Firth) and his dog (back then a sheltie collie cross called Lucky). But these were all firsts, with a charm all their own, and the thrill of seeing his book on the shelves.
After that ‘it was quite rapid-fire’. It felt ‘new and fresh and exciting’, getting a new house and new cars, ‘frothy and extremely lovely’. Home was now 110 Upper Shad Road, Pound Ridge, in Westchester, about one hour north of Manhattan (not far from West Point), which Jane had found in February that year and they’d bought for $475,000. (‘Shad’, Lee instructed me, was Old English for ‘boundary’.) It was a four-bedroom detached house, to which they added a heated pool, built in 1980 and set in 2.4 acres of wooded countryside, not far from Jane’s parents and their private beach on Stillwater Lake in Ossining. A photograph taken by Janet Brown at the Shiren family home shows Jim stretched out on a pillowed lilo smoking a cigarette, a blue-painted rowing boat tied to a wooden jetty in the background, surrounded by weeping willows.
Pound Ridge gets eight mentions in Tripwire (finished the previous December). Its function is to signify affluence:
A rich woman living in Pound Ridge like Marilyn has many contacts in the real estate business.
‘We were happy to move to that house,’ Lee said. ‘We’d come from the UK with a very conventional idea of living in a house with a garden. It would never have occurred to us to live in the city.’
Lee went back to Running Blind, stopping each evening for the first pitch in the baseball game. It was an amazing season. The Yankees had been his team ever since Norman and Jane had first taken him to the original Yankee Stadium in 1976. In 1998 they won the World Series – and in 1999 and 2000 too, like a lucky charm, until 9/11 came and the world was upended and they went down at the last gasp to the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was easy to work in his office overlooking the pond, even with the family about, and writing ‘was kind of idyllic’.
Graham James from Granada came to stay. It was his first trip to New York. He’d always wanted to go. Jim picked him up at JFK and, casting his mind back to his own first time, as they drove across the Whitestone Bridge and Manhattan came into view he pushed a button on the radio and Sinatra’s voice poured out of the speakers. The Pound Ridge house was ‘fabulous’ and Graham was thrilled ‘to see such a successful writer’s office’. Jim took him to a diner – ‘he knew I loved diners!’ – and Graham wanted to pay, but Jim stopped him, laying a hand on his arm and saying: Graham, I’m a millionaire now. ‘He wasn’t boasting. He sounded like a little boy, enjoying the moment.’
It had taken a while to adjust to their newfound wealth, Lee admitted, and for a long time Jane refused to fly first class with him. Two years after Graham’s visit he told the ‘Money’ section of the Sunday Times that six books in he now had twenty-one credit cards (though for practical purposes used only two), ‘simply as a reaction to the times when I could not get one’. ‘I definitely think,’ he added, ‘that the amount you earn has nothing at all to do with your quality as a person. At various times I have had some, none and a lot of money, but I’ve always been the same person.’ Wasn’t there a risk of becoming the ‘big man’ he so railed against? I asked. No, he would reply: he was ‘a poor man with a lot of money’.
In October 1998 Lee attended genre festival Bouchercon XXIX in Philadelphia, scooping the Anthony Award for Best First Novel and the Barry Award from Deadly Pleasures magazine. He recalled sitting around with a bunch of other nobodies – Harlan Coben, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos – thinking obscurity would be a step up, but if they just kept showing up maybe one of them might make it big (in five years’ time he would be toastmaster). Back in England he had scored an invitation to the Authors of the Year party at Hatchards, ‘the Ritz’ of London bookshops next to Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly.
The plan was working, and he was feeling lucky.
‘You have a loving, close-textured feel for America,’ Stephen King said when the two friends did a joint event for the Harvard Book Store in September 2015. ‘You really understand nowhere.’ From the start Lee had been seduced by the unaccustomed emptiness of the country, ‘thousands and thousands of square miles of it, mostly in the west’ (Daily Mail, 2010). The distances travelled were reflected in attitudes too.
The US is home to some of the world’s most eminent scientists, and they have studied radioactive half-lives, and they have proved that the world is almost four billion years old. Other people say no, it’s only 6,422 years old – exactly – because they’ve worked through the Bible and added it all up. And both sides of the debate are utterly, implacably, immovably serious. And neither side is hidden away on the fringes.
Some visual constants were suggestive of homogeneity – dollar bills, road signs, cars – but in fact ‘the nation is a mosaic, a crazy patchwork quilt, insanely scaled from end to end, in every dimension, both physical and intellectual’.
When Lee wrote this he’d lived in New York for eleven years, longer than half his neighbours. As well as a beach house on Long Island he now had the four apartments on East 22nd Street (which he’d persuaded the taxman to treat as a single dwelling) and officially was that rather large little boy sitting on the window sill gazing out at the Empire State Building beyond the almost Parisian Madison Park. He spoke a version of English. He blended in fine. He loved the diversity of the people he saw around him, their vividness, so much more vital than his memories of the inbred, pasty-faced people of Britain. Outside New York he didn’t stand out any more than anyone else on the road. To the ‘leathery lizard-lady’ who had to travel 250 miles to the store for anything she didn’t kill or grow herself he came across ‘as a funny-looking guy with a strange accent. […] To her, a guy from Oregon or Ohio or even Oklahoma would have seemed just as foreign.’
For a writer it was immensely liberating. ‘Every crazy thing happens here. I could just make everything up and inevitably it would all be true in some far corner of America.’
His favourite example came from A Wanted Man, where he’d made up an involuntary witness-protection facility that one of his FBI contacts later inadvertently confirmed was real: How did you know about that? But in a small way I’d seen it for myself. In 2017 I’d read ‘My Rules’, his story about a silver-tongued scammer who fleeces a couple of middle-class managerial types on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, relieving them of their wallets while purporting to mediate a dispute on smoking in the workplace. A year or so later we were standing on West 3rd Street just up from 6th Avenue when a silver-tongued scammer with a strong Irish accent approached us (we weren’t arguing) and told Lee how he looked like Peter O’Toole, or maybe Robert Redford, and what a pleasure it was to engage in cultured conversation with such a fine gentleman from the old world, and how no thank you, he didn’t smoke and therefore had no real need of a light, but yes he was down on his luck as it happens, and might this fine gentleman be able to spare him enough to buy a Big Mac?
Lee admired a skilled operative in any field, and liked to acknowledge talent when he stumbled across it. ‘That’ll get you several Big Macs,’ he said, handing over a crisp $5 bill.
‘I definitely checked I still had my wallet after he’d gone,’ Lee said.
In a narrowly biographical sense, he was indifferent to the old world. Emigrating was all about ‘shaking the dust of Britain off our feet’. Coventry had no hold over him. Birmingham – traditionally anti-royalist, non-conformist, home to the first free traders and trade unionists, dedicated to the automobile and to commerce – ‘was almost American’. The anti-Irish feeling he’d grown up with had only alienated him further.
But aesthetically and intellectually, his heart was with the ancients. Among his greatest treasures was a 250,000-year-old Neanderthal hand axe. At Granada he and Gallagher left notes for each other in Latin, and much later he would have the Latin translation of his most renowned catchphrase, ‘Reacher said nothing’, carved into a sundial in his Sussex garden. He regretted not being in Classical A at King Edward’s, which meant you would study Greek (they’d written him off because of his background), except when he regretted not being in Science A (‘for one question in O-level Physics they asked for your workings and I took it right back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle’). He resented the two cultures divide that frustrated his Renaissance instincts and applauded the visionary Claughton, who helped with the sundial, for having the plain good sense to introduce the International Baccalaureate.
It was possible to discern a trace of romantic nostalgia in his acquisition of a rare copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer (considered one of the world’s most beautiful books), illustrated by William Morris and old Edwardian Edward Burne-Jones, who also donated to Birmingham’s St Philips its exquisite red-and-blue stained-glass windows. When I visited King Edward’s in 2019, acting chief master Keith Phillips told me how he’d based an assembly on the unexpected juxtaposition of Burne-Jones and Lee Child at Reading railway station, one poster advertising an exhibition at Tate Britain and the other Past Tense: Reacher never looks back… Until now. The autumnal shades of the book harmonise with the rich orange-reds of the pre-Raphaelite painting (Venus pining for her lover), positing a secret kinship.
To Americans Lee was the quintessential Englishman, and he played on his accent just as he once had as a schoolboy in France. They were flattered by his adoption of their country and in awe of his ability to write American. How did he do it? First, Lee would credit his wife, and her house committee on un-American activities, which when he was starting out vetted every word he wrote. Then he would note that it was natural for a writer to be attuned to variations in language, and the job of a fiction writer to write fiction. You were already leaping into an invented world, so to leap into a world you didn’t live in made it easier. That way you had to think about everything equally intently, which made for a more organic whole, rather than grafting fictional action onto a factual environment, which would seem ‘very uneasy’.
Sometimes it felt uneasily like he was grafting a largely ‘factual’ character onto a fictional environment. Reacher was heavier and no longer smoked, but they had more in common than not. Lee had never been in the army, not even the cadets, but he had been a high-ranking member of an elite unit who had then been downsized. Neither liked running. They were both classicists and mathematicians manqués who had their heads full of once-heard-never-to-be-forgotten esoterica. They listened to the same music and supported the same teams. They shared the same birthday. They both had nerdy big brothers in need of protection, drank copious amounts of black coffee and liked peach pie. They were both restless loners who would travel in search of the sun.
Like Lee, Reacher was more old than new. Forget recent partial precursor James Bond (Lee had twice turned down the offer to take over the franchise), the melancholy issue of his Mayfair-born Eton-educated creator’s sense of post-war irrelevance, who Lee eloquently defined in a 2012 essay for the Daily Mail as a boiled-down lone-man single-operative personification of a lost imperial England. Forget the new-fangled johnny-come-lately Western. Reacher went right back to the origins of Western civilisation.
Only Reacher would make a connection between ‘xeric’ or ‘xerophilous’ desert plants – ‘from the Greek prefix xero-, meaning dry’ – and Xeroxing, or ‘copying without wet chemicals’. Only Reacher would think of Zeno as he gears up for a fight:
Dum spero speri. Where there’s breath, there’s hope. Not an aphorism Zeno of Cittium would have understood or approved of. He spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism.
The allegorical Nothing to Lose was a philosophical meditation poised between Hope and Despair. Reacher was not a stoic: ‘I take challenges personally.’ But he appreciated a woman he could talk stoicism with, like small-town cop Vaughan.
This was not idle self-indulgence. The subtext was the bedrock of Lee’s existential and literary aesthetic. As a species we were only recently modern. The lizard brain was only thinly papered over by the veneer of civilisation. We were closer to the Stone Age than the stars.
He considered himself a modern man, born in the twentieth century, living in the twenty-first, but he also knew he had some kind of a wide-open portal in his head, a wormhole to humanity’s primitive past, where for millions of years every living thing could be a predator, or a rival, and therefore had to be assessed, and judged, instantly, and accurately. Who was the superior animal? Who would submit? (Blue Moon)
According to Lee there was only one genre, and only two stories, deriving directly from Plato. The thriller was not a genre, but the genre, not one in a series of parallel streams, but the river itself. Stories took place either inside or outside of the cave. You were either inside, worrying about what was going on outside (serial killer on the loose), or you were outside sorting it out (avenging hero). The thriller was ‘the central way that humans tell stories’. Everything else was decadent accretion.
My guess is that early fiction was about perils survived. As everything has got more civilised, then all these other genres grew up alongside it, including literary fiction, as a luxury, as a kind of barnacle on our boat.
Inside the cave was Europe – as cramped and claustrophobic as the tunnel in Die Trying or the disused military bunker in 61 Hours – where for want of space and freedom it was all going on inside your head.
Outside the cave was America, which still had room for the old-world heroes – for Odysseus and Beowulf and Don Quixote, for Lancelot and Gawain and Robin Hood.
When Lee explained his innate affinity for America on the back of growing up in ‘progressive’ Birmingham it didn’t quite ring true. No one would place Reacher at the cutting edge of technology. What Lee wanted from America was its primitiveness. When he caught the ship out of Southampton to the new world he was heading back in time to the old, to the world of myth and legend.
It was only out west he could walk into a store and buy pants and shirts that fitted him. But it wasn’t just clothes. For all his formative years Jim Grant had been forcing himself into a space that was way too small for him. Like Reacher he needed room to move, space to wander, a chance to spread his wings. His character ‘couldn’t work anywhere except America’. When he said those words he was referring to Jack Reacher. But Reacher wasn’t his only fictional character. He might as well have been talking about Lee Child.