TalkingLocationWith… Heather Martin, authorised biographer of Lee Child

2nd October 2020

Georgia On His Mind by Heather Martin, authorised biographer of Lee Child.

‘I looked out of the window. Georgia.’ That’s Reacher speaking, of course, in the first chapter of Killing Floor. But at the point the author wrote those seven words, Jack Reacher barely existed. The same was true of Lee Child himself.

It was one reason he chose to write his first novel in the first person. Not only was it more natural – he saw himself as a storyteller, rather than a novelist – but he didn’t yet have a name for his hero. He was toying with ‘Franklin’, but he wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t until 2272 words into chapter two that he wrote what now reads like a character blueprint: ‘My name is Jack Reacher,’ I said. ‘No middle name. No address.’ Little knowing how resonant those words would become.

On that day in September 1994, the shadowy, elusive figure of Lee Child, as yet barely distinguishable from his Granada Television creator Jim Grant, was looking out at the new-build houses across the street in Kirkby Lonsdale, a historic market town in the South Lakeland district of Cumbria. He was only a short walk from Church Brow and the view over the Lune Valley that in 1875 art critic John Ruskin described as ‘one of the loveliest in England’, detailed on the tourist information plaque as ‘a gentle panorama of river, meadow, woods and hills in almost perfect balance’, as though the natural landscape were already a work of art. Ruskin had in fact first encountered it in an 1822 watercolour painting by J. M. W. Turner that later became known as ‘Ruskin’s Vie

Lee Child wrote Killing Floor sitting at the dining room table. Had he wandered through to the back of the house and written what he actually saw, those lines might have read: ‘I looked out of the window. Casterton.’

Casterton is a tiny village across the valley from Kirkby Lonsdale, bordered by the River Lune and the medieval Devil’s Bridge. Most likely the bridge was the work of monks from St Mary’s Abbey in York, but local legend favoured the notion that the devil had appeared to an old woman and promised to build a bridge in exchange for the first soul to cross over it. When the bridge was finished the woman threw bread over it and her dog set off in pursuit, thereby outwitting the devil while still gaining a crossing (at the cost of a dog).

Also famed as the place where the first four Brontë sisters went to school, Casterton is an important landmark in the Lee Child story. It was at the Pheasant Inn, during one of the weekly quiz nights Jim and his American wife Jane attended with friends, that on Thursday 7 December 1995 a call came through from London. It had finally happened. Lee’s literary agent, Darley Anderson, had received an offer from G. P. Putnam’s in New York for Killing Floor and an unspecified follow-up book.

Looking out over this idyllic landscape, sheep safely grazing beneath the spreading oak, Lee Child wrote his debut novel, set in fictional Margrave in real Georgia, roughly four thousand miles away and a place he’d never been.

      I looked out of the window. Georgia. I saw rich land. Heavy, damp red earth. Very long and straight rows of low bushes in the fields. Peanuts, maybe. Belly crops, but valuable to the grower. Or to the owner. Did people own their land here? Or did giant corporations? I didn’t know. [. . .]

     After maybe a half mile I saw two neat buildings, both new, both with tidy landscaping. The police station and the fire house. They stood alone together, behind a wide lawn with a statue, north edge of town. Attractive county architecture on a generous budget. Roads were smooth tarmac, sidewalks were red blocks. Three hundred yards south, I could see a blinding white church steeple behind a small huddle of buildings. I could see flagpoles, awnings, crisp paint, green lawns. Everything refreshed by the heavy rain. Now steaming and somehow intense in the heat. A prosperous community. Built, I guessed, on prosperous farm incomes and high taxes on the commuters who worked up in Atlanta.

It was a feat of imagination that amazed his original New York editor. But there was ‘a lot of Kirkby’ in Margrave, one of Lee’s old neighbours told me, ‘the small town life with dark secrets and machinations’.

Passing through San Francisco ten years later, Lee would have lunch with Martin Cruz Smith. ‘He was a huge inspiration for me,’ he wrote in his One Shot tour blog. ‘When I was in England starting to write about America and wondering if I could get away with it I would think back to Gorky Park and say, hey, for sure I’ve been to the States more times than he’s been to Russia, and it worked for him.’

Lee calculated that between his first trip in 1974 and the day he got his US residency in 1998, he had visited America precisely one hundred times. One of those times was in early 1996, when he started thinking seriously about book two.

The book’s overall shape and approach were based on an instinctive decision to make it as different as possible from Killing Floor while keeping it part of a coherent series. He didn’t want to get locked into too narrow a channel. Where Killing Floor was a single-track first-person narrative set in a backwater town, Die Trying was a third-person exercise in multiple points of view drawing on the glossy apparatus of central government. And whereas Killing Floor was pure imagination, Die Trying would be the fruit of serious research.

Lee read widely on separatist and militia movements in Northwest America, both specialist reports and mainstream press. Then he decided to go see for himself. He packed his toothbrush and stuffed a roll of cash in his back pocket and caught a plane from London to Seattle via a visit to his sister-in-law in Chicago. He rented a grey Ford Explorer and drove back east through the Washington State badlands across the Idaho panhandle into Montana, as far as Kalispell and Whitefish.

‘I had been paid for Killing Floor but was still some way from repairing my unemployed-broke-guy financial profile, and I had no credit cards, so it was cash all the way, including the planes and the car rental,’ he wrote in his introduction to the Mysterious Press collectors’ edition of Die Trying. ‘I stayed in twenty-dollar motels and ate cheap. I used truck stops and played pool in bars. I talked to all kinds of people – truckers, strippers, cops, farmers, FBI agents – and found my way into two separate militia encampments. I saw bears and coyotes and two-mile-long freight-trains, and never quite got used to the vast emptiness, which at times was scary. At one point I drove four hours without seeing another vehicle.’

It was a great holiday. But ‘the reality turned out to be more or less exactly what I had imagined.’ He didn’t really learn anything. Except how many dry cleaners there seemed to be in Chicago. Which gave him the idea for the opening scene, where old-school Reacher steps in to help the expensively dressed Holly Johnson with her bad leg and her nine dry-cleaning bags.

He went back to Kirkby Lonsdale and carried on writing. No more research trips. From then on, like Reacher, Lee Child would only ever be passing through – mainly, in his case, on increasingly sold-out book tours.

But it didn’t really matter whether or not he’d been to the places he was writing about. The way he wrote about them made you believe that he had, and made you feel like you had too. If you’ve read Echo Burning, you too have sweltered in the steelyard-furnace heat of Texas, dirt baked dry and hard like concrete, mesquite brush like tangled barbed wire, the track through the desert a scar on burned and pockmarked skin, the blinding white-hot sky.

      It was worse than dumb. It was suicidal. The sun was fearsome and the temperature was easily a hundred and twelve degrees. The slipstream from the cars was like a hot gale, and the suction from the giant trucks wasn’t far from pulling him off his feet. He had no water. He could barely breathe. There was a constant stream of people five yards away, but he was as alone as if he was stumbling blind through the desert. If a State Trooper didn’t come by and arrest him for jaywalking, he could die out there.

And when Lee bought a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies and wrote about it The Midnight Line, you felt like he’d taken you home with him. How he loved that unpopulated landscape!

      He walked to the lip of the ravine, and looked at the view. He could see fifty miles. A slice of Colorado, but mostly Wyoming. Thin clear air, immense tawny plains, spiky trees, rocky outcrops, hazy mountains.  Nothing moving. He felt all alone on an empty planet. He could imagine hiding out there. Seeing no one.  No one seeing him. Nowhere better.

I’ve never been to Wyoming. But I have in my head.

     The magic hour was the last part of the sun’s daily travel, like a sixty-minute farewell performance, when it was low in the sky, shining sideways through the atmosphere, which reddened its colors and lengthened its shadows. Reacher sat on the porch step and watched the tawny plain go gold, then ochre, then chili-pepper red.

After Die Trying, Lee never really planned his books in advance, but he always had a premonitory sense of whether they would be hot or cold, red or blue. He was good at snow (had to be, hiding out in Wyoming, where he could be snowed in for eight months of the year), but in my view, writing about the sun was his forte. If I had to choose one example it would be from his twentieth novel, Make Me, in which the extended metaphor of the sun to build suspense as the story approaches its climax is sustained throughout the whole of chapter fifty-two.

For the first 307 of those 1707 words, uninterrupted. The writing is as incandescent as the sun itself:

     From the metal walkway on top of the old concrete giant the dawn was vast, and remote, and infinitely slow. The eastern horizon was black as night, and it stayed that way, until at last a person with straining wide-open eyes might call it faintly gray, like the darkest charcoal, which lightened over long slow minutes, and spread, side to side and wafer-thin, and upward, like tentative fingers on some outer layer of the atmosphere, impossibly distant, the stratosphere perhaps, as if light traveled faster there, or got there sooner.

     The edge of the world crept into view, at least to the straining wide-open eyes, limned and outlined in gray on gray, infinitely dim, infinitely subtle, hardly there at all, part imagination, and part hope. Then pale gold fingers probed the gray, moving, ethereal, as if deciding. And then spreading, igniting some thin and distant layer one molecule at a time, one lumen, lighting it up slowly, turning it luminous and transparent, the glass of the bowl, not white and cold, but tinted warmer.

     The light stayed wan, but reached further, every new minute, until the whole sky was gold, but pale, not enough to see by, too weak to cast the faintest shadow. Then warmer streaks bloomed, and lit the horizon, and finally the sun rose, unstoppable, for a second as red and angry as a sunset, then settling to a hot yellow blaze, half-clearing the horizon, and throwing immediate shadows, at first perfectly horizontal, then merely miles long. The sky washed from pale gold to pale blue, down through all the layers, so the world above looked newly deep as well as infinitely high and infinitely wide. The night dew had settled the dust, and until it dried the air was crystal. The view was pure and clear in every direction.

Then, threaded delicately through what remains: the eastern horizon bright, the new sun weak on the back of his neck, still low enough to roil the air, winking in the windshield, weak new thermals off the blacktop, a low billow of dust, the train big enough to see, sunlit on one side and shadowed on the other, the air boiling all around it like a luminescent slipstream.

     After twenty minutes the sun had pulled clear of the horizon, and was already curving south of east, setting out on its morning journey. Dawn had become day. The sky had gotten brighter, and bluer, and perfectly uniform. There was no cloud. New warmth stirred the air, and the wheat moved and eddied, with a whispered rustle, as if waking up. From the top of Elevator Three to the horizon was fifteen miles. A question of elevation, and geometry, and the flatness of the land. Which meant the guys on the walkway were at the exact center of a thirty-mile circle, floating high above it, the whole visible world laid out at their feet. A golden disk, below a high blue sky, cut in equal halves top to bottom by the railroad line, and side to side by the road. From the walkway both looked narrow and crowded by the wheat. Like thin pencil lines, to the naked eye, scored completely straight with a ruler. The lines met at the railroad crossing, directly below them. The center of the disk. The center of the world.

The reader is right there: like Reacher, the laser-like eye at the heart of the forthcoming storm.

Make Me has a painterly quality to it. Take this melancholy, almost elegiac scene from chapter one:

    Twenty miles north the train slowed, and slowed, and then eased to a hissing stop, and the doors sucked open, and Jack Reacher stepped down to a concrete ramp in front of a grain elevator as big as an apartment house. To his left were four more elevators, all of them bigger than the first, and to his right was an enormous metal shed the size of an airplane hangar. There were vapor lights on poles, set at regular intervals, and they cut cones of yellow in the darkness. There was mist in the nighttime air, like a note on a calendar. The end of summer was coming. Fall was on its way.

For Child as for Ruskin, art preceded life. But his vision of the flyover states, shaped first by film back when he was still unambiguously Jim Grant, was more Edward Hopper than William Turner. He cited Kevin Costner in 1990’s Dances with Wolves and the seventeen-year-old Linda Manz in 1978’s Days of Heaven as defining influences on Reacher’s voice, and his writing often evokes Terrence Malick’s cinematography, too.

In 2017, at the New York launch for The Midnight Line, novelist and critic Megan Abbott told Lee how much she liked ‘the care and leisure’ he took in getting Reacher from one place to the next. ‘It’s both a pleasure and a problem,’ Lee replied. ‘I like the long, meandering journeys, his observations along the way, but you don’t want it to read like a travel timetable.’ Did Homer worry about that when he was writing The Odyssey, too?

Less than four years after first sitting down at his dining room table, pencil in hand and Georgia on his mind, the Jack Reacher author and his family set sail on the Queen Elizabeth II from Southampton, bound for the new world and a new life, putting Kirkby Lonsdale and the green and pleasant lands of England behind them for good. Lee Child was taking over from Jim Grant. He would never look back.

Constable at Little, Brown publish The Reacher Guy – by Heather Martin, authorised biographer of Lee Child, on 29 September

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