With Child. Andy Martin

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2 THE DEARTH OF THE AUTHOR

      I was barely on to my second cup of coffee that morning when I picked up the Leemail. By his standards it was almost long-winded.

      Urgent – forget tomorrow – plane broke down, stuck in Ireland for the night. Don’t know when I’ll get home.

      Which explains how it comes about that I am in New York, on 1 September, writing about Lee Child’s newly published Make Me in the absence of Child himself. The author is not dead, he is only delayed, somewhere in Ireland. But he is AWOL. He has stood up the muse. Risky.

      He should have known he was leaving it too late – the day before. Pure hubris and thoroughly deserving of a comeuppance. I had a kind of smug told-you-so feeling. Verging on Schadenfreude. I whipped off the following reply:

      Looks like I’m going to have to start without you. Maybe you should try writing in the airport lounge?

I knew he hated writing in airport lounges. He had to be back in his cool, comfortable office space on the Upper West Side, or nothing. No loud rock music (unlike Stephen King, for one). No perching on stools in cafés. He needed that silver metal desk, the size of a steam engine or the wing of a Spitfire. The 27-inch monitor. The reference books and the bestseller listings on the wall. And – above all – the cigarettes. Maybe if you could smoke in airport lounges and Starbucks it would be a different story.

      I wasn’t too worried about him, to be honest. He would probably get over the bad start. Then again, maybe all his worst fears would come true and he would completely mess up the next book. Maybe it would never happen.

      But it wasn’t my concern. I had to prioritize. And my priority was the fate of Make Me.

      I had watched over the slow, sometimes gruelling genesis and evolution of a book. I had borne witness, almost like a midwife, to its birth. In fact I was more involved than a midwife – I had been there, at the primal scene, overseeing the inception, the embryonic struggle for life, division and multiplication, the gradual formation of a text. And now it was out there, in the world, on its own, and somebody had to keep an eye on it. I had gone from midwife to nanny, or possibly minder.

      Obviously, the author himself was useless, knocking back Guinness in a pub in the Emerald Isle, carousing with the spiritual descendants of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. But even if he weren’t, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do, in any kind of practical way. He couldn’t exactly write the reviews himself.

      Months had passed since he had hit the send button. He had finessed, here and there, in response to his editor. She had one telling point: the bad guys in the home invasion scene would definitely refer to Chang’s Chinese look (now that she was no longer ‘Stashower’). He had proofread and eradicated error. Okayed the cover (had to change the colour scheme: silver came out grey online – that neon yellow ought to do it). And he would be present for the launch party at Union Square Barnes & Noble, he would go and converse with Stephen King in Cambridge (Mass.), he would give away enticing and intriguing snippets on talk shows, shrewdly summarize on breakfast TV, and try to sound like a serious and reputable writer on radio. He would sign a thousand copies (more!) as he trooped around the bookstores of North America and Europe. Not to mention a couple of high-security military bases. Maybe even a campus or two.

But the reality was that the book was on its own now. It was vulnerable. It was an orphan. The author was not dead, but he might as well be. It had been thrown in at the deep end of the world and now it had to sink or swim.

      This is going to sound more ruthless than I intend, but the truth is, strictly from the point of view of the book itself, his premature demise would be no kind of disaster. Au contraire. ‘FAMOUS AUTHOR DEAD’ headlines would do it no harm at all. As far as Make Me was concerned, he could just go ahead and chuck himself off that mountain, fill up the tank with horse tranquillizer, or drink himself into oblivion in Ireland. It would not only be obscurely poetic, it would sell shedloads. A posthumous thriller – now that was thrilling. Look at Larsson, for example: finishes the ‘Millennium trilogy’, bids farewell to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then promptly drops dead. Good timing, Stieg. ‘The End’, then aaaagh.

      Better still, to come back to the case of Child, if some delusional obsessive should choose this moment to gun him down, à la Lennon, preferably on the doorstep of his apartment building, after all only a few blocks north of the Dakota, that would (personal regrets aside, and speaking purely on behalf of Make Me) be a great way to go. As I say, I am not advocating any such occurrence, only contemplating the kind of impact an author can have on his own work after it is finished. So far as I can work out, the worse for him, the better for it.

      I happened to mention this scenario to Lee, some time later. He agreed. Didn’t mind the harshness at all. Liked it, in fact. ‘Seems to me I have three possibilities. The book comes out with zero participation from me. It does OK. It comes out with participation from me. Better. But, better still, a tragic feature – that would be best of all.’ He was already using the word ‘feature’, as if it would make a good article, or a movie perhaps, seeing the creative, writerly possibilities inherent in a good death, even if it was his own. ‘The best thing I could do would be to fall out of this window right now.’ He had the window open, looking out over Central Park, СКАЧАТЬ