He had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to being nobody.
Tripwire, 1999
Lee Child started writing his third book before the launch of his first. The response had been promising, but so far he had zero sales by which to begin measuring his success.
Strictly speaking I was writing it on spec – I had no contract for anything beyond Die Trying. But whereas publishers were always gloomy (like farmers, no year is ever a good year, and next year will probably be worse) this was still early 1997 and the industry was nothing like it is now, so I saw no real reason to anticipate insecurity. (Mysterious edition)
Two books in he was effectively invisible. Despite his ambition, despite his ‘creative and combative’ personality, part of him – the part wounded by Granada – welcomed that invisibility (and missed it when it was gone). In adopting a new name he was retreating inwards as much as fleeing outwards. But he didn’t want being invisible to become a habit, as it had for Reacher. Not least because he couldn’t afford it.
Two years ago, everything had turned upside down. [Reacher] had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to being nobody. From being a senior and valued member of a highly structured community to being just one of two hundred and seventy million anonymous civilians. From being necessary and wanted to being one person too many. From being where someone told him to be every minute of every day to being confronted with three million square miles and maybe forty more years and no map and no schedule. (Tripwire)
When asked ‘what next’ during an interview in 1998, he says: ‘Book 4 is Reacher again,’ like it could have been something else.
Perhaps he was only just starting to believe it himself. Early drafts of book two, ‘They, The People’ (‘I think that putting a comma after the first word sometimes works well,’ Lee wrote, comparing ‘Walking on the Country Road’ and ‘Walking, On the Country Road’, hearing the words in his head like music), introduce the character of Trent: John Trent. Colonel John Pemberton Trent (‘just some name I made up as a kid’) is a Special Forces officer who bumps into Holly Johnson as she is being snatched by a well-organised three-man kidnap squad. Trent ‘had some pretty unusual skills’.
A Special Forces officer is required. The Army says John Trent is the man. But Trent is already in Montana. Nobody knows why. Nobody knows whose side he is on.
Alone, isolated, distrusted by both sides, Trent takes his own decision. Penney must be stopped. While Army units mass on the perimeter, Trent does what Washington would want him to do. He goes to work as a ‘magic bullet’, taking out the militia’s command structure, one by one. Secession fails. The militia is defeated.
But as a fictional hero, the-same-but-different Trent was doomed.
On the back of the final page of the extended synopsis, in red ink, the still fledgling author has written five, life-changing words:
They want a Reacher sequel!
It was a rare use of the exclamation mark: a marvellous, awestruck moment of realisation, the second best thing to the birth of his daughter sixteen years before, but also like he could hear the door clanging shut behind him, just as he had then. There would be no escaping Reacher. He was going down for a long stretch – he might as well enjoy it.
These were the ‘Neophyte Years’ (1997 to 2000), when Lee came closest to escaping through Reacher the way his readers did. A time of respite, of renewed innocence almost, when looking out over the pond and the woods all he had to do was write. He was working closely with Highfill, finding out what he could and couldn’t do, what was and was not acceptable. They were learning together. No one knew the name Lee Child. No one was calling him up asking for interviews or endorsements, or wanting to write books about him, or swooning in signing queues. No one was denouncing him for selling out to Hollywood or hogging more than his share of the market.
Being nobody was liberating. But he still had that nagging sense of responsibility. He was still a husband and father: still breadwinner, provider, worker. It had been a wonderful moment at the Bookstore, signing his first books for the book-buying public. The signature and delivery payments for the first deal had started to repair his ‘unemployed-broke-guy status’ and he was feeling good about himself and the future. But in that very same moment he had the sense he was about to step on a treadmill that once started would never stop, and if ever he paused he was liable to be bawled out like the guys on the shaft lift at Hamstead Colliery.
For a while he was jogging along at a comfortable pace. If those things weren’t mutually exclusive. Then the machine began to crank up, at first slowly and steadily, then madly, as though some mischievous puppeteer was itching to see him sweat.
The ‘Early Middle Period’ (2000–10) started with the move to Bantam-Dell and Applebaum selling the hell out of him. Suddenly, and literally, he had a following.
In 2004 he went on a four-day cross-genre cruise out of Galveston, Texas – ‘Get Caught Reading at Sea’. Not a holiday. Part of a deal with Merchandiser, a wholesale distributor to non-traditional venues such as truck stops and gas stations, pharmacies and supermarkets. In exchange for participation in a daily round of panels and talks, and eating at a different table every night, he would get the major boost of a nine-month mass-market promotion campaign.
By 2005 the fan forum is in full swing. His first blogs are a shoutout to ‘long-time forumites’ and ‘stalkers from way back’: ‘Reacher Creatures galore’ in Glasgow, ‘hardcore down-under Reacher Creatures’ Helen and Linda and Ashleigh, and ‘lurker Libby’ (‘these Aussies take some beating’), Tina and Teri and their mom, ‘the crazy trio from Michigan’, and Marcia, who bakes him a box of cookies. The tours get bigger and so too the venues. By 2010 the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble is breaking fire codes for 61 Hours, with the overflow watching on monitors outside.
The books creep up the bestsellers list. It’s still a big deal. On 24 May 2006 he blogs:
The second Wednesday after a book’s release is a tense one: The New York Times day, when the bestseller list for the book’s first sale week is released, to be published in the paper 10 days hence. Way back I would make it on to what’s called the ‘extended’ list, i.e. places 16 and worse, where a book has measurable sales but isn’t burning the place down. Without Fail made it to #17, then Persuader made it to the dreaded #15 equal, which actually hits what’s called the printed list, i.e. it appears in the Sunday paper, with the curiously stilted little synopsis that someone comes up with. The Enemy crept up to #11… One Shot peaked at #10.
So, where was The Hard Way going to hit?
On 3 June he finds out: ‘Either #2 or #3 nationwide, with the Denver Post bringing it in at #1. Did I mention I love Denver?’
The blogs read like a man courting his fans. But none of it was strategic, Lee said. He was just riding the wave, having the best time of his life, making good on his promise to pack more into his sixty years than the rest of us would in a lifetime. Everything was on the up, but he was still fresh-faced, still had the time and energy and freedom to hang out at the bar or turn up for champagne and chocolate surprise parties ‘plotted by Rae and Janine, held in Cornelia’s room’.
In 2007 it was Rae and Janine (groupies who became friends) who came up with the title Nothing to Lose (when it turned out ‘Play Dirty’ was taken) by trawling through Hendrix lyrics in search of a one-liner (‘very Reacher-ish’, comments Lee). So they must have experienced a proprietorial thrill when a year later, theirs was the first Reacher to hit the all-important no. 1 spot in the New York Times.
When Cruise bought the rights to the Reacher franchise it wasn’t only the star’s height that caused fans to freak out. It was his stardom. A man mixing with TC wasn’t quite so likely to be found propping up the bar with Tina and Teri’s mom. They were lovely people, Lee told me, and he had been their special secret.
But once you became big and everyone knew about you they began to drift away. It probably started around 2006, or 2008 when I became a bestseller, and Reacher wasn’t a niche thing any more. It doesn’t apply to me. If I like Camel cigarettes and then suddenly the whole world likes Camel cigarettes, I still like Camel cigarettes – but for other people, it changes everything. The movie became both a symbol and a driver of that divorce.
It was time to let his fictional alter ego take over. Lee wrote his last blog in 2011, the year before Paramount released Jack Reacher. The movie turned both Reacher and Lee into public property. Both got bigger, but the power dynamic changed.
In 2013 Lee was awarded the Diamond Dagger by the UK Crime Writers’ Association: the first in what would become a procession of lifetime achievement awards. Indifferent to such industry accolades, a nameless faceless fandom began to assume a twisted authority over the author. They still demanded their book a year, but no longer accepted what Lee wrote as the last word. Online reviews read like an unending stream of school reports. Another excellent year, well done sir, full marks, top of the class, keep it up. Or (of the same book): just not good enough sir, not up to your usual standard, can do better, we’ve read them all so we should know. And: We strongly suspect you are using a ghostwriter! Shame on you, sir. One person put pen to paper for the sole purpose of correcting Lee’s use of ‘juddering’ to ‘shuddering’.
It was the onset of the ‘Late Period’. People began talking about Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, like a new celebrity manager had taken over the team. Tom’s face appeared on book covers. Old-fashioned book readers were affronted. There were people who didn’t know Reacher was a book character at all. New markets opened up, in Latin America and Japan, Indonesia and Korea.
Financially, it was all good. Lee calculated that in 2016, the year of the second movie, he earned 90 cents per second. But personally, he was baffled by the backlash. It was unsettling. He began to wonder if some of his readers weren’t really book people at all. Didn’t they understand that the movie would always be worse? That the book was the thing? Last time he’d taken his copy of One Shot down from the shelf and opened it, all the words were still exactly where they always had been. Nothing had changed. Except everything had. The hate mail was worse than for controversial chart-topper Nothing to Lose, when he’d given a voice to real American soldiers (quoting emails and letters he’d received from servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan) and the ‘patriots’ who purportedly supported them had turned on him as a traitor, tearing out the offending pages and using them as toilet paper before putting them in the post with his name on. He was convinced that if his team wrote on his Facebook page: Lee Child has fallen down the stairs and broken his leg, the first response would be: Ask him why he sold out.
He’d always loved the movies, but sometimes he hated them too. The movies were a cross the book writer had to bear. If someone asked what you did for a living and you answered ‘writer’, the next question was always: Have any of your books been made into movies? At least now he could answer in the affirmative. But it wasn’t the unadulterated unalloyed pleasure he once naively thought it would be.
Was it possible, I asked, that with Tom Cruise – paradoxically, and on the face of it ridiculous – he hadn’t, for the first time, been quite so lucky? The very definition of a first-world problem, Lee answered, but he didn’t deny it. It had not been a ‘joyful experience’. ‘I regarded it as a chore.’ It had all taken too long, which was partly why he felt compelled to plump for Tom in the first place. But from the start he’d sensed it was not going to be ‘fun’ or ‘delightful’, as he’d imagined it might be. ‘It was taking us off on a tangent. I knew it was not going to produce what I wanted it to.’ It also felt strangely unreal, like he’d been shunted into a parallel universe. But not one of infinite possibility. More a dead end.
It was in 2017 at Sheffield City Hall that I first heard him say: ‘I made a mistake.’ Not in rubber-stamping the casting – the original reasoning still stood. But in ‘underestimating reader reaction, how offended readers would be’. His view, the writer’s view, was ‘not shared by all readers’. I know, I know, he would say to later audiences, getting his retaliation in first – he belongs to you.
He lost a small percentage of readers who couldn’t get Tom out of their heads. But he gained far more. Everyone was talking about it. You would be reading Reacher in a café and instead of how may I help you? the waitress would open with: ‘Tom Cruise isn’t big enough to be Reacher!’ The truant hero had become a cultural reference point. He got into crosswords and quiz shows. He was used as a benchmark for video games – ‘solidly constructed, expertly polished, easy to consume, and immensely satisfying’ (Eurogamer). He was used to sell mattresses in Pakistan and Alexa on Amazon (Alexa, when did Lee Child’s new book come out?). He was cited in Vogue (ahead of Jack Vettriano and Liam Neeson) as an analogy for the phenomenal success of Australian fashion designers Ralph & Russo. He rode to the rescue of a beleaguered education system in the UK’s Times Educational Supplement – ‘in desperate need of a Jack Reacher’. A lecturer ran a course at Massey University in New Zealand: ‘Jack Reacher and thinking inside the box’, ‘Jack Reacher’s thoughts about leadership’, ‘Jack Reacher and leading within your comfort zone’, ‘Jack Reacher and leading by taking action’, ‘Jack Reacher and the call to leadership’. A guy on Twitter aspired to be the Lee Child of drumming.
At the same time there was a growing category of admirers more interested in the writer than his character. They were in thrall to the perfection of the bookwright’s craft. They were going into the bookstore asking for the new Lee Child. Other writers were wishing they had half his skill. When asked what book she wished she’d written, esteemed novelist and critic Margaret Drabble was rapturous in her response:
Anything by Lee Child. What page turners, what prose, what landscapes, what motorways and motels, what mythic dimensions! He does all the things I could never do, and I read, awestruck, waiting impatiently for the next. (Guardian, January 2019).
For Steve Cavanagh (winner, 2018 CWA Gold Dagger) Lee was ‘one of the best authors in the world, if not THE best’.
Stav Sherez (winner, 2018 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year) extolled the subtle brilliance of his voice (Spectator, October 2016):
Child is a deliberate stylist and his prose is taut, dynamic and highly-sprung. The sentences have a rhythmic sophistication lacking in most other bestsellers and a minimalism that is highly conceptual. The opening of ‘Without Fail’ is a perfect example of this: ‘They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren’t ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because no one noticed.’ The way each sentence suggests the next mirrors the inexorable unfolding of fate and plot and plays a large part in making the books so compelling.
Similarly Steven Poole, reviewing Personal in the Guardian:
[Child] is so good. He makes ‘literary’ writing seem orotund. Flabby. His sawn-off sentences pile up. He generates relentless momentum. At the same time, breathing space. Educational interludes. A whole paragraph on how to kick down a door. Sardonic riffs on consumerism. Always rhythmically placed in the ebb and flow of information. Contributing to the suspense. Child’s dedication to suspense. It approaches the Hitchcockian.
Andy Martin wrote pages on Child’s use of the double-tap double-negative four-word sentence. The first ever such sentence, in chapter two of Killing Floor is: ‘No address, no history.’ In the original draft this is two sentences, and the first, equally defining example doesn’t arise until chapter four, on page thirty-six of the handwritten manuscript: ‘No milk, no sugar.’ (Which on publication becomes the more American ‘No cream, no sugar.’)
Lee began to feel like Cuthbert Jackson, the black piano player in his story ‘New Blank Document’ (written for Jonathan Santlofer’s anthology It Occurs to Me that I Am America, in support of the American Civil Liberties Union), exiled in Paris after the war. Jackson merely spoke plain common sense and people had started treating him like Socrates. ‘One guy wrote a whole book about Jackson’s five-word answer to a question about the likely future of mankind.’
‘I may have written 10,000 things [at Granada],’ Lee told Maclean’s magazine in 2017, ‘but most of them were four words long.’ But the roots went further back. In 1960s Birmingham it was common to see four-word signs displayed in the windows of houses with rooms to let: ‘no dogs, no blacks’; ‘no niggers, no Irish’. Such messages would certainly have registered on a boy with James Grant’s susceptibility to language, story and injustice.
In 2014 Forbes magazine declared Lee Child to be ‘the strongest brand in publishing’, commanding the greatest loyalty among returning readers. He had mastered the art of crafting books that people wanted to read and were willing to pay for. In this he was literally second to none. But now he was also a writer’s writer.
The coup was to do it all without being labelled a ‘literary’ author. ‘I didn’t want to be James Joyce,’ he told Barbara Peters (of Arizona’s Poisoned Pen bookstore) back in 2002.
I would be horrified if I became literary. If I won the respect of literary magazines and was selling three thousand copies, that’s no good to me. What I want is to be ignored by the literary magazines and to sell three hundred thousand copies. This is a business, a living.
Not much had changed. Except that Lee had caught the attention of the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and the New Yorker (even the Paris Review had come nibbling) while selling three million, then thirty million copies and more. What could be more literary than referencing Joyce? He was having his cake and eating it too. But he was diligent and saw positive reviews as his due, like a restaurant serving quality food at affordable prices with good service in decent surroundings.
‘It was the study of Latin poetry that taught me all I needed to know about genre writing,’ Lee said provocatively at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2018 to a bunch of assembled academics. ‘That’s how I learned my trade.’
He was eleven, reading on the bus going home from King Edward’s, when it struck him that ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ and Dr No were ‘exactly the same story in every beat and every plot point’. Everything had already been done. Which taught him two things: ‘First, there are certain enduring themes that people love, so the fact that something’s been done before isn’t a bad thing, and second, you can’t worry about it – just do it again, only better.’ The same two lessons he would learn from Led Zeppelin.
In 2010 he wrote an essay on Theseus for Thrillers: 100 Must Reads (Morrell and Wagner, with a chapter on Killing Floor by Marcus Sakey). His lucid analysis lays bare the prototype:
I first read this tale, in Latin, as a schoolboy. There was something about the story elements that nagged at me. I tried to reduce the specifics to generalities and arrived at a basic shape: Two superpowers in an uneasy standoff; a young man of rank acting alone and shouldering personal responsibility for a crucial outcome; a strategic alliance with a young woman from the other side; a major role for a gadget; an underground facility; an all-powerful opponent with a grotesque sidekick; a fight to the death; an escape; the cynical abandonment of the temporary female ally; the return home to a welcome that was partly grateful and partly scandalised.
Which taught me two things: first, Lee was a loss to the teaching profession; and second, he was happy to use the semi-colon when the conventions of the genre permitted it.
All the while the treadmill was turning. By 2008 he had scaled the heights of Mount Olympus and was comparing notes with Homer: who would win in a fight, Odysseus or Reacher?
But he had to keep running to stay there. Which saddened him, a little. Tom Cruise might like running, but honestly, he really really didn’t. It was great to make no. 1. Publishers took you more seriously. They said we need this guy for another four books. Foreign deals were easier to come by. You got better placement in stores. You got into stores in the first place. ‘If you’re in anything where there’s a league table you want to be at the top.’ But where do you go from there? How long will you stay there: two weeks, four, six? For a few years in Bulgaria he had occupied the no. 1 spot from one October to the next thanks to a peak-time talk-show host who talked Reacher five nights a week. ‘Unless you’re no. 1 for fifty-two weeks a year in every country on earth, there’s always something else to aim for.’
‘One regret is not being able to enjoy it,’ Lee told me. ‘You were always asking: how do we make this bigger and better?’
The alternative to bigger and better was smaller and worse. Lee didn’t like the sound of that. Escalation was the name of the game. Once when he and Darley were negotiating a new deal Lee was asked: ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ The answer was simple, he told me: ‘Because I can. But also because I have to. Because it’s set up as an adversarial system.’
It was always win or lose, with him. Was there a third option?
By 2018 the third option was looming larger on Lee’s mental horizon. Retirement. Whisper it softly, the fallout wasn’t worth thinking about. It would be worse than Cruise playing Reacher. His old sparring partner Irwyn Applebaum had already gone, downsized ten years before in 2008: ‘As I straddle the line between Bad Luck and Trouble and Gone Tomorrow,’ he wrote in response to a note from Lee, ‘I take it as a mark of a job well done here that I am leaving and you and your books stay on. I am grateful for having your trust that allowed the Bantam-Dell team to get you to the top.’
‘I always thought,’ Lee told me over brunch on Columbus, ‘that it was going to be an easy choice between a better thing and a worse thing.’ Turned out it was a choice between two good things. He liked what he was doing, and the attention that came with it. But he liked doing nothing as well. Hadn’t retirement been his first thought when he was laid off by Granada, and writing just the fallback?
The only real difference was he’d done the writing for twenty-five years, and he’d hardly done nothing at all. He’d always worked, like his father before him. He’d never had the luxury of a stretch of time ahead where there was no obligation to go into work the next day, or the next week. Maybe it was time to hop off the treadmill, before he fell off. Like he told the ‘Money’ pages of the Sunday Times back in 2002: ‘There’s a lot of fun to be had in life outside work.’
That’s why he agreed to a return trip Down Under, where Reacher Creatures had not yet followed the giant moa into extinction. A victory lap. The Past Tense tour started with the big names – Bill Clinton and George R. R. Martin in New York and Santa Fe, Ian Rankin at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank – and ended with the big crowds and full rock-star extravaganza, with fans in Australia and New Zealand (‘the world capital of Reacher madness’) reaching out to touch the hem of his leather biker jacket (a gift from Idris Elba after they’d met at a party) as he glided past. I was following it on social media from New York:
‘I just got to meet one of my fave writers. Side note: his fashion sense is bangin’.’
‘OMG, I think he’s the sexiest author alive.’
‘I can’t believe we’re going to meet Lee Child. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.’
‘Lee Child: Jack Reacher is the modern version of the knight errant. Me, already taking my clothes off: Mr Child, you’re a fucking genius.’
It had been pretty great, he admitted on his return. The US ambassador to New Zealand had even crashed one of his television interviews. But he was tired of touring. The world had become too hostile to smoking. Especially Australia and New Zealand. ‘All part of the collapse of society. No goodwill, no convenience. No joy.’ (‘My First Drug Trial’, The Marijuana Chronicles)
‘Just because you like one thing,’ Lee said, ‘it doesn’t follow that you might not like another thing equally.’
I recalled his answer the last time I’d asked if it would be hard to stop. Hard would be to keep going.
There was another thing. Once again the world had changed around him, and responses to his books were shifting in light of a new, ugly politics. The discourse of toxic masculinity ‘makes Reacher look worse’ and the rise of right-wing nationalism ‘casts a shadow over my type of fiction’. There was no tolerance for argument or nuance, no appreciation of the ‘various bipolar tightropes’ his hero was so delicately walking. The fundamental reality of his character – that he’s a decent man who shows respect and sensitivity towards others and treats women as equals – was ‘not accurately reported’, with certain lazy readers preferring to draw ‘cheap and easy comparisons’ between Reacher and America’s scourge of trigger-happy lone-wolf shooters armed with automatic weapons. In the past Reacher had been perceived and accepted as a rough, tough aberration, a metaphor, but now more combative interviewers would jump gleefully in and say: Isn’t this all a bit Trumpian?
So when in 2019 Andrew Grant told Read It Forward he had created the main character of Invisible (the first in his new series about an elite former military intelligence officer who’ll go to any lengths to see justice done) because ‘we were collectively in need of a new kind of hero’ who ‘resonated with the time that we live in’, it was hard not to feel he might be twenty years too late.
The change had come in like the tide and left Lee exposed. Emotionally, there were shades of Granada, and Reacher’s alienation in The Enemy.
I had always been a loner, but at that point I started to feel lonely. And I had always been a cynic, but at that point I began to feel hopelessly naive. […] I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realised everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn’t want it to.
Lee wasn’t fazed by hard talk. But it had stolen the innocence and joy from his knight-errant hero, who was defined by his two-fisted justice and his ability to distinguish unequivocally between right and wrong (what writer and critic Paraic O’Donnell would call his ‘artisanal fascism’). He was fairly certain crime had been around before books and television were invented. He was scrupulously careful about showing the full physical effects of violence – none of that being knocked down and bouncing back up again like Tom and Jerry. But despite all this reviewers now chastised him for setting a bad example. ‘Really?’ he said to me, incredulous, but actually addressing an otherwise warm review of Past Tense in the Times Literary Supplement: ‘You don’t want me to kill the bad guys before they do more evil? Not even in fiction?’
Why write fiction merely to reproduce a deplorable reality?
‘It’s moronic,’ Lee said. ‘I’m all in favour of an open mind, but don’t keep your mind so open your brain falls out.’
‘It’s like this,’ he concluded, wistfully. ‘When the sun is shining on Reacher from the left, then people emphasise his moral compass and his heart of gold. When it’s shining from the right, then he’s a violent vigilante.’
Truth was getting too close to fiction, and the sensitivity around it was ‘frankly depressing’.
Reacher wouldn’t stand in the way of Lee laying down his pen. He had no trouble letting go. He never looked back over past cases. He wasn’t nostalgic or proud. He had the skills; he didn’t mind exercising them; increasingly, he was curious to see if he was still up to the mark, but he didn’t need to be involved, he didn’t depend on it, he’s quite happy when it all comes to an end.
Much like James Grant.
Retirement was no big deal. He would have to get used to ‘not having infinite money’. But he couldn’t complain. And he had no compulsion to be heard. ‘They’re pulling it out of me.’ Let publishers find new authors, let someone else have a go. We needed new voices to refresh the culture.
He wouldn’t hang on grimly like a spectre at the feast, either. Once he was done he was done. You wouldn’t see him again. No more festivals, no more interviews, no more early mornings on the road. I’d rather hang myself than get up at five in the morning.
He was standing at the crossroads. As I listened to him contemplate which way to turn, his words for the New York Times echoed again in my mind:
That’s the real rite of passage: knowing that you’ve written and spoken your lines […] and now it’s someone else’s play.
Lee could be peaceful with his efforts. Not only had he been at the beating heart of the golden age of British television, he’d done a good job as a storyteller too. It had been an amazing second act. ‘I’ve told twenty-four decent stories in the course of my life,’ he said, then added: ‘Not written twenty-four novels. The novel as a physical artefact was very far from my mind.’
It was time for the family that had steamed into New York twenty-one years before to fan out across the country like people had a hundred years ago. Ruth was selling up in New York and heading for Colorado. Jim and Jane had their hideaway in Wyoming. They could get cigarettes there for $4 a pack.
And Reacher?
Maybe Reacher would go to the Pyrenees, or rent out a beach shack and get a dog.