With Child. Andy Martin

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13 THE DERANGED, OBSESSIVE FAN

      I couldn’t help but notice, at the very end of Finders Keepers, Stephen King had written a message to the reader. The last lines in the book. ‘And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you’re still there after all these years. If you’re having fun, I am, too.’ Heartfelt, of course, sincere, but at the same time it sounded a little bit desperate. Perhaps apologetic. Because the rest of the book was all about Fear of the Fan.

      Which was not surprising. He’d already written Misery, a couple of decades back. Annie Wilkes holds the author hostage. Nurse. Fan. But she has an axe to grind. Literally. Chop chop. That is what I call editing.

      In Finders Keepers (no spoilers here, this happens near the beginning), Morris Bellamy shoots and kills John Rothstein, the great Rothstein (a hybrid of Philip Roth and J. D. Salinger), ‘reclusive genius’. Partly to get his hands on all those unpublished notebooks. Partly because he feels betrayed: the author allowed his favourite character, Jimmy Gold, to go into … advertising! The writer had, in effect, sold out.

      Another dissatisfied reader.

      Young Pete, who also loves Rothstein, realizes (at the point where Bellamy is threatening to kill his little sister and has already offed any number of other people) that the ‘marker of true, deep insanity’ in Bellamy is that fictional characters are more real for him than actual human beings. Type on the page engaged his feelings and sympathy more than any being of flesh and blood ever could.

Bellamy was a bad, bad man. But, really, was that so insane? The love of unreal people, I mean. Odysseus, Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, the Lone Ranger, Jack Reacher: don’t I care for them more than the anonymous hordes passing me by on the street? (And yes, I do feel obscurely betrayed by Flaubert and Tolstoy – I imagine Morris Bellamy or Annie Wilkes would have hunted them down too, given the chance.)

      And the equally mad idea that ‘the writing was more important than the writer’? Roland Barthes set it out coolly, with structuralist rigour, in his essay on ‘The Death of the Author’. The author is dead (especially if you shoot him yourself), long live the text!

      Something like this was in Lee’s mind. He’d written twenty Reachers, not to mention numerous short stories. Didn’t he want to try his hand at something else? He had ‘ten or twenty’ different ideas, but … He had a responsibility to the Reacher fans. He was ‘locked in’. They would only be disappointed if he wrote something else. It was bound to end badly. He didn’t want vengeful readers coming after him en masse. He had had enough trouble with the Tom Cruise objectors. And then there were the Tea Party guys who complained and mailed him white feathers and suchlike when Reacher started sounding too anti-war … (‘I was only quoting word for word messages from serving soldiers!’)

      That locked in put me in mind of Misery. It was as if he really was being held hostage. By his millions of readers. They wouldn’t let him out of his room until he had written another Reacher. Fans could be demanding.

      I was one of them.

      There was another at Barnes & Noble, Union Square. Except he had to be restrained. (I mostly succeed in restraining myself, apart from the occasional, ‘Come on, Lee, stop goofing off!’) Security guys were all over him, they had him cordoned off, like some kind of dangerous animal, concerned that he might want to take home a piece of Lee Child. Or something like that. So I didn’t get a chance to speak to him.

      He was probably harmless. Just over-enthusiastic. Big and unshaven and unkempt. Lennie in Of Mice and Men. Maybe John Coffey in The Green Mile.

On the other hand, I can’t help thinking of my friend Michael Scott Moore. Doing research on Somali pirates. They liked what he had written. In The New York Times and elsewhere. Kidnapped him and held him hostage for a couple of years. They thought his writing was worth a lot of money. The better his work, the higher his ransom. Lee Child was probably not going to Somalia on this tour. But he knew that all readers were, potentially, pirates, that they wanted to kidnap him and take him home with them. Most of them would make do with one of his books.

      For now.