(Not too many people worried about my welfare. And yet, looking back, I now wonder if all the doubters, fearing for their hero’s welfare, did have a point. As if I could be some kind of poison! This was a guy who smoked a packet of Camels a day and an occasional pipe of hashish: he must be immune to having a fly on the wall watching him.
He and I both scoffed at the word “toxic”. Lee referred to our relationship as a kind of Stockholm syndrome, but whether I was holding him hostage or the other way round was unclear. What could possibly go wrong? I was an anthropologist studying a primitive tribe, which happened to consist of just one man. In their eyes, I had committed a mortal sin.Īs far as I was concerned, I was basically a guy in a white coat. I had trespassed into the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, the very room in which the great man was working. From the point of view of the publishers, they were the lucky owners of a golden goose, laying regular golden eggs – did anybody really need an egg inspector? Wasn’t there a risk he might upset the goose? Or cause him to stop laying? Over 100m The Reacher publishers were even more explicit: they called me “toxic” and wanted Lee to stop talking to me. One guy I met in a New York bar told me flat out: “You are killing Jack Reacher!” (He also said I was a pervert and a voyeur.)Ĭoleridge blamed “the Person from Porlock” for messing up his great poem “Kubla Khan”. A lot of people assumed that I would put Lee off his stroke. But the irony of the situation I found myself in was that, according to some (OK, many), I was the bad guy. It came as a bit of a shock to him: that he was the bad guy, not just the good guy. “You evil mastermind bastard!” I blurted, when he finally worked out, several months after Make Me’s first page, exactly what horror was going on in the tranquil small town of Mother’s Rest. The horrible Hook Hobie, the seductive and sadistic Lila Hoth, the monstrous Little Joey, they were all alter egos. Oddly enough, I think I may have been the first to explain to Lee the blindingly obvious, namely that he was all the bad guys he had ever dreamed up as much as he was Jack Reacher. Despite all of which, I still tended to think of Lee in terms of Reacher, the vigilante, nomadic outsider, drop-out and avenging angel. And a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Child: private jets and houses in several countries. As he once said, in shorts he looks like Olive Oyl.Īgain, Reacher: takes the bus, of no fixed abode. Fold him up neatly and you can fit him into one of Reacher’s arms. But Lee is barely more than half Reacher’s weight. Do they not share the same birthday (29 October)? Both drink absurd amounts of black coffee.
As Lee himself said, recalling his days brawling in the school playground, “Reacher is me aged nine”. Perhaps, to be fair, there is a bit of Odysseus in Homer, a bit of Madame Bovary in Flaubert and, likewise, a bit of Jack Reacher in Lee Child. The line of his that still echoes in my brain, even now, is: “This is not the first draft – it’s the only draft.” That sounded as if Jack Reacher were writing a novel: nobody was going to mess with his prose.Īnd that, of course, was my fundamental error: to confuse the writer and his hero. I couldn’t sneakily go about rectifying and polishing he didn’t, so I couldn’t. The rule was that I started when he started and finished when he finished. I sat perched on a couch a couple of yards behind him, taking notes for the book that would become Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of “Make Me”. So for months on end, I watched Lee write his 20th novel in the Jack Reacher series, Make Me.
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