‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m always happy to help.’
A Wanted Man, 2012
Lee didn’t much like lawyers. Especially divorce lawyers. Divorce lawyers made their money out of other people’s misery. He supposed there was happiness in it for some people, mainly the lawyers, but there was a whole lot of misery along the way. Misery and penury. While the lawyers were getting richer, their clients were generally getting poorer.
He didn’t want to peddle in all those synonyms for misery so mercilessly listed in the Oxford English Dictionary:
Unhappiness, distress, wretchedness, hardship, suffering, affliction, anguish, anxiety, angst, torment, torture, hell, agony, pain, discomfort, deprivation, poverty, grief, heartache, heartbreak, heartbrokenness, despair, despondency, dejection, depression, desolation, gloom, gloominess, moroseness, melancholy, melancholia, woe, sadness, sorrow.
Lee wanted ‘to do something that makes people happy’.
A passing UFO, he wrote in the New Yorker (2016), would once have written us off as sickly, shabby toolmakers.
Then we developed language, and everything changed. We had grammar and syntax, which turned out to be the best tools of all. Now we could plan, and discuss, and theorize, and speculate. We could coordinate ahead of time, with a plan B and a plan C already in place. A cooperative pack of early humans was suddenly the most powerful animal on Earth.
At first we prospered through truth-telling. But at some point we started talking about things that hadn’t happened to people who didn’t exist.
Not for entertainment during our leisure time. […] We had no leisure time. Everything was a desperate struggle for survival. We did nothing unless it had a chance of keeping us alive until morning. Fiction evolved for a purpose. Warnings and cautionary tales could be sourced from the grim nonfiction world. A sabre-toothed tiger will kill you. OK, got it. Fiction pushed the pendulum the other way. It inspired, and empowered, and emboldened. It said, No, actually, there was a guy, a friend of a friend, who came face to face with a sabre-toothed tiger, a huge one, and he turned and outran it, all the way back to the cave, safe as can be.
The action-hero story was escapism in the face of a brutal realism. At the St Hilda’s Mystery & Crime Conference in Oxford, 2016, Lee was succinct:
We’re still using stories to get us through life, because real life is shit. Real life is miserable. Real life is frustrating. Telling stories which provide closure is immensely satisfying.
Stories weren’t just for bedtime, or around the campfire. We didn’t grow out of them. Maybe we didn’t have to fight the Minotaur, but we each had demons of our own and dragons within. We still needed an arm around our shoulder. A book of verse to transform the wilderness and help us transcend the terminal ‘grey’ of desolation. Either that or we needed football.
Critics questioned Reacher’s vigilante violence. But the books were not ‘textbooks for how we ought to live’, rather ‘consolation and compensation for how we have to live’. Lee loved to surmise that we all had ten, twenty, fifty guys we would ‘happily walk up to and shoot in the head’. Most interlocutors chose to demur. Not so Bill Clinton: ‘That wouldn’t get me started,’ he commented at the launch of Past Tense, where he was interviewing Lee on stage. Clinton had just published The President is Missing and had been known to call on Lee for late-night writing advice.
‘Reacher’s a bad guy,’ Lee admitted. But not as bad as the bad guys.
Credit readers with sophistication. We love that he shoots the bad guy in the head while simultaneously understanding that can’t happen in real life. We all respect and value the rule of law, due process, etc. – but it is frustrating. Justice is so often not done, but it’s the price of a civilised society.
Lee thought his most important work as a writer was to have told the story of Kirk Bloodsworth – the first person in the US to be exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence – for the anthology Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted.
Even when justice was done it was slow and ponderous and costly. Reacher’s ferocious violence was ‘a metaphor for the ongoing criminal process’, short-circuiting the tedium of the trial and, much to Lee’s satisfaction, bypassing the lawyers. He felt no calling to write the legal thriller.
Reacher was an idealised agent of desire. You’re walking down the street and there’s some guy abusing his girlfriend. Mostly, we do nothing. Doing nothing produces ‘a corrosive unsatisfied feeling’, because mostly we want to do the right thing. Not just men: ‘It’s a gender-neutral fantasy, being free, and acting on your best impulses.’ Reacher stands for our better (as opposed to most law-abiding) self. The satisfaction readers get from this is ‘very organic’, because it corresponds to ‘a deep-down inchoate feeling that you should be doing something yourself’. It’s not an abstract, theoretical appreciation, but primal: ‘you love that novel in your gut’.
We didn’t like being afraid for real. But we could enjoy the simulation of fear if we knew deep down we were safe. It was a way of discharging anxiety without actually getting hurt. Lee had learned this from his daughter. It went back to when Ruth was little and he used to lift her out of the bath and while she was still all wet and slippery toss her up in the air and catch her again, and she would squeal with delight. ‘You want to feel scared when you know it’s going to be OK.’
Broadcaster and former BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Phil Williams, who bonded with Lee over Aston Villa, put it very simply: ‘I always enjoy Lee’s books. Pacey, easy to read and leave you feeling better about life.’
For that to happen and for us to experience that satisfying sense of closure Reacher had to get his hands dirty first. He dealt with all those synonyms for misery so that we wouldn’t have to. Not being able to change his clothes as often as the rest of us merely served to emphasise that. As did the showers he took whenever he could, sometimes two in a row, using a whole bar of (motel-sized) soap each time. Lee is not shy of spelling it out:
First they took long hot showers, obviously and overtly symbolic, but also warming and comforting and necessary and practical. They got out smelling clean and fresh and fragrant. Innocent. Like flowers. (Blue Moon)
Lee was happy to be making his money out of increasing the sum total of happiness in the world. Or at least, given pause for thought, out of not causing harm to others or the planet. What he did for a living wasn’t going to hurt anyone, not like dealing in weapons or drugs or divorces. And there was freedom of choice: take it or leave it, he wasn’t forcing anyone to read his books.
There was no harm in gentle persuasion though. The Reacher machine was a ‘juggernaut’. In 2018 his Transworld publicist tweeted of a ‘publicity blitzkrieg’ and their reliance on a driver ‘henchman’. They had invested such astronomical sums of money they would stop at little to claw some back. ‘It takes the publisher three or four years to earn back my advance,’ Lee said. ‘After that it’s all gravy. The backlist is long, and fully amortized. Pure profit.’
But there was another, more serious problem. Which was Lee’s fault. They were his books, after all. And he had made them dangerously addictive. You might even say it was borderline coercive. More than once his novels had been described as ‘the crack cocaine’ of mystery fiction, like this was a good thing. Fans waited anxiously for their annual fix, tore off the wrapper and devoured it in a single sitting, then almost without drawing breath set about sweating on the sequel: When’s the next one coming, Lee? The comparisons – and pairings – with chocolate were legion.
It was something Lee could relate to. Even back when he could only afford 10p books from the secondhand bookshop he would still buy drugs ‘when necessary’ (‘mostly I tried to blag them’): such was ‘the reality of an addict’s life – they always come first’. He didn’t dare experiment with pure opium. He feared ‘the joy plant’ and the wave of warm contentment that was liable to wash unstoppably over him until it carried him irresistibly out to sea. And no sooner had he told himself a story than he was bored and looking around for the next one. It was why he never mapped out his books in advance, and one reason he cited for not wanting to write the story of his own life: he knew it all already.
Lee was regularly asked what makes a bestseller. His first response was always to delay his response. ‘All I know about creating a bestseller is you write a thriller and it sells a lot.’ ‘Everyone agrees there are two things you need – unfortunately nobody knows what they are.’ He might hat-tip Grisham for his command of the narrative engine before concluding that it’s all about engaging human curiosity, because human beings are hardwired to want the answers to questions.
Then he got down to basics (ThrillerFest 2017):
A lot of people have baked a cake. I never have. But I know in theory. First you need ingredients, and the better the quality, the better the outcome. Then you need to mix them together, and the better you mix it the better the cake. Then you need something I’ve seen but never used, which is an oven. Then getting the timing and the temperature exactly right. Great cake.
But creating suspense is not like baking a cake. Wrong question. The right question is: ‘How do you make your family hungry?’ Easy, you don’t give them dinner for five hours. Set up a situation and don’t resolve it, make it last for as many pages as you can.
The principle applied not just to the overriding arc but likewise to ‘smaller bites’ – to each phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter. He served up a simple illustrative example. The train was late and therefore John was angry was ‘a perfectly serviceable sentence’. Far stronger was John was angry because the train was late. Which made it ‘a curiosity issue’ and ‘a better way forwards’. Then all you had to do was ‘keep that going at every level’ or ‘bake it in’.
When he spelled it out the message was Machiavellian, verging on Sadeian. ‘You have to train the reader to expect and desire and crave constant gratification.’ Or in more abstract terms, in The Hero: ‘The story proceeds based on the teller’s aims and the reader’s needs.’
Lee had trained his readers all too well, rendering many helpless. The worst afflicted signed up for online pre-orders before the book existed, when it was little more than a notional title, a shadowy, unformed embryo in the author’s plan-free mind. It didn’t make any difference to how soon they could lay their hands on the physical object, but they felt comforted – happier – all the same.
When they did get their hands on it they cancelled dates and called in sick and stayed up all night. They were powerless against the compulsion. There was nothing they could do to fight it. Like Sanderson in The Midnight Line, they were hooked up. The fix was ‘more important than family and friends and any kind of a regular, trustworthy life’.
Reacher was the equivalent of an over-the-counter painkiller. Once, Lee’s argument ran, a degree of pain was accepted. We were stoic. Then pharmaceutical companies isolated morphine from heroin (named for the German ‘heroic’) and introduced it into everyday medicines. They made money. They educated us into regarding no level of pain as acceptable. They educated the medical profession into accepting that pain can’t be measured from the outside. They created a demand, a dependency, an addiction. Then they fed that addiction. They created oxycodone, whose ‘only purpose was to make you high’. They made a lot more money.
Fortunately, the outcomes from feeding a Lee Child addiction were (mostly) positive.
Once he was signing books at the Mysterious Bookshop when a man approached him and said: ‘You saved my marriage.’ Something to do with how reading Reacher books on the plane had pacified his anger. ‘I’ll add that to my resumé,’ Lee replied. ‘Marriage therapist.’ But the chances were that as many had been driven apart. Couples who stopped listening to each other or forgot anniversaries, or who preferred – men and women – to take Reacher, rather than their partner, to bed.
One woman tweeted in annoyance: ‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t THE Lee Child, destroyer of dates.’ She included a screenshot of two terse texts from her boyfriend: ‘Can’t make it.’ ‘Completely addicted to a Lee Child I picked up recently.’
As Reacher took pains to remind us: ‘No one should ever underestimate the appeal of an opiate high.’
Here is the deeply flawed, deeply human first-person narrator of ‘My First Drug Trial’:
I felt the tiny thrills, in my chest first, near my lungs. I felt each cell in my body flutter and swell. I felt the light brighten and my head clear. […]
I could feel the roots of my hair growing. The follicles were thrashing with microscopic activity. […] My spine felt like steel, warm and straight and unbending, with brain commands rushing up and down its mysterious tubular interior, fast, precise, logical, targeted.
I was functioning.
The orthodoxy among fans was that Lee’s novels were a fast read, a score you could go on social media and boast about. Self-restraint didn’t enter into it, rather there was an unofficial competition to see who could finish first. ‘You don’t write the kind of book that you want to sit by the bed for six months,’ Naughtie said in Harrogate, ‘with people picking it up and putting it down and reading a paragraph at a time.’ He believed a thriller should ‘thrill from beginning to completion in a relatively short space of time’.
But not everyone saw it that way. Serious addicts were often abstemious readers, spacing out the highs and rationing themselves and setting targets before the next hit like Sanderson on the road: ‘a hundred miles, maybe […], or five red trucks, or a rest area, or a hybrid car’.
Crime writer Holly Seddon allowed herself three sentences of Lee Child every night before bed, maybe a paragraph if she was bingeing.
[Sanderson] took scissors from her cabinet, and she cut a quarter-inch strip off her [fentanyl] patch, and she stuck it behind her bottom lip. A maintenance dose. It would keep her asleep all night. It would keep her warm, and gentle, and relaxed, and at peace, and cradled, and happy.
Sanderson/Seddon was ‘doing OK’ because she got high every day. She would probably continue to do OK as long as her supplier kept showing up on time.
Lee had found a way of writing that was fast and slow all at once. Both focused and discursive, like guitarist Jimmy Page. You could opt for the precision-tooled plot-driven page-turner or alternatively, the more reflective character-driven analysis of the Jungian subconscious. It was twin-track writing that appealed to the few as well as the many, like a super audio CD, and quite likely more instructive than any university course in prose style. ‘Maybe if there’s something unique about my books it’s this.’
Smart readers were ‘relaxing’ to write for, because they ‘already liked reading’. The rest, if you weren’t canny about it, might stop.
He once itemised the three crucial elements of a successful book (that people would buy regardless of genre), addressed to the would-be writer in question form.
It was ‘all about the reader – 1, 2 and 3’. He dismissed the idea that the character had to want something on every page. The character wasn’t real. ‘There are only two real people in this transaction. The writer and the reader.’ It was the reader who had to want something on every page, and the writer had first to create and then cater to that need.
That was the fundamental answer to the question: How has Lee Child sold more than one hundred million books? (Nearer two hundred, perhaps; they were losing count.) He had established a seamless synchronicity between writer and reader. He spoke with the reader’s voice.
It was around the publication of The Midnight Line that Lee started talking more and more about an emotional contract with the reader. It was directly connected with the conundrum of retirement. He was ‘an old showbiz person’ who believed you should always leave people wanting more. But he was also ‘the servant of the reader’, and who was he to say no? You want more? OK, I’ll give you more. You need more? OK, I’m always happy to help.
There was no denying pandemic dependency was good for business. In the first week of UK sales Past Tense sold 58,710 copies and topped the Sunday Times bestsellers list; no. 2 on the list scraped just over 10,000; Blue Moon broke further records (after what was claimed to be Transworld’s biggest ever outdoor advertising campaign). Like Stackley with the Wyoming cowboys ogling the boxes in the back of his truck, Lee could feel ‘the hum of desire’ over his shoulder when he was sitting typing at his desk. ‘Which was good. He needed his new pals to feel what he had to offer.’ But great power brings great responsibility, and Lee found himself having to manage his readers’ addiction through an artful balance of supply and demand.
He would always deliver on time. But stood firm in the face of escalation (in 2010 Random House US had tried to nudge him towards two books a year when they shifted the release date from March to September, and brought out Worth Dying For just six months after 61 Hours). Ultimately, only 365 Reachers a year would ever be sufficient. To cushion readers from the worst withdrawal symptoms his publishers would drip-feed short stories or teaser trailers into the ether like Stackley peeling back the blanket to let the client take a glimpse at the heady riches beneath.
Lee famously disliked neediness. But he had created a hydra-headed monster of need that he would spend the rest of his life taming and holding in check. By 2016, like Frankenstein, he was squaring up to the beast and exploring his own growing sense of unease. Fiction had helped us survive. But it had also led us astray. We had wandered too far from the straight and narrow path of truth.
Every bad thing depends on the same two components as every good thing: people prepared to lie, and other people prepared to believe them. The habit of credulity, bred into us, albeit inspiring and empowering and emboldening, has led to some very bad outcomes throughout what we know of our history. From small things, like a father believing a son, to much larger things, like a billion miserable and terrified dead. All balanced against the good things. Is it fifty–fifty? Or worse than that? And what about babies and bathwater? Could we give up the stunning joy that the good side of storytelling brings in order to erase the appalling horrors of the bad side? Where does the balance lie?
It’s ironic, given my profession, but the more I learn the more I would uninvent fiction.
The title of his New Yorker essay was ‘The Frightening Power of Fiction’.
As time went on, and one Reacher book followed another regular as clockwork and reliable as a doctor’s prescription, readers began to worry about Lee killing off his character or worse, dying himself. ‘How long before the supply cuts off, do you think?’ they would ask nervously, like Sanderson grilling Reacher on his power to provide. Lee stopped telling the hypothetical story about a final episode entitled ‘Die Lonely’, in which Reacher bleeds out on a bathroom floor somewhere in the back of beyond. It was just too distressing all round. Getting him a dog was a better idea.
There was a fantasy in The Midnight Line about unlimited supply. What would Sanderson do if she didn’t have to worry about the stream running dry? ‘I would party at first. Big time. No more rationing. No more cutting patches. I would bathe in the stuff.’ Then she breathed a deep sigh of release and contentment, like she was having the best day of her life just thinking about it, like she’d discovered the new gold standard for affluence.
High-dose time-release oxycodone, and transdermal fentanyl patches […] The boxes were made of high-gloss card, antiseptic white, pharmaceutical grade. They had brand names. They were the real thing. Made in America, straight from the factory.
Solid gold.
Add some eye-popping colour and foil and an embossed font and it wasn’t far off a description of the glossy, highly branded Reacher books themselves.
The great virtue stories had over drugs was they never ran out. They were cut-and-come-again miracles, like Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, which had been my own favourite book as a child. You could bathe in them any time you liked. Even if Lee never published another word, there were around three million in print that weren’t going anywhere. The books would never dry up. Next time you needed a fix, all you had to do was take one down from the shelf. Even after the author was gone. It was as García Márquez said: When writers die they become books.
Lots of people characterised the Reacher books as being about revenge. Lee was one of them. ‘But you could just as easily say they’re about altruism,’ he countered: ‘love on a public scale.’
It reminded me of a song by Nat King Cole.
There was a boy
A very strange, enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he
And then one day
One magic day he passed my way
While we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me:
‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.’
Lee Child had never forgotten the public adulation that once made him dream of becoming the fifth Beatle. Nor had he forgotten James Grant, sitting in the audience at Cherry Orchard Primary School when he was five years old. All those happy children. All those beaming parents. It was why the two of them had gone into the entertainment business in the first place.
To love, and be loved in return.