Reacher Said Nothing. Andy Martin

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      ‘I’m really reacting to the reader’s question here. “Hold on, they’re hogs, aren’t they going to dig him up again and have him for dinner?” So we have to go down deep.’

      ‘With a backhoe.’

      ‘I love the backhoe. It’s the American word for a JCB in England. A digging machine. A giant shovel. Saves you a lot of time and energy. I’m being a little bit omniscient observer. But they are thinking and talking in their vernacular. So we’ve got to try and stick with that.’

      ‘You’ve got “steaming” and “steaming”. And another “steaming” in the previous. I like that. No elegant variation. It’s all steaming.’

      ‘I really like the steaming. “Shit” and “piss” could change – if I can find some agricultural terms. Reacher wouldn’t generally have shit and piss.’

      ‘You know, I have this feeling you don’t much like rural places. They come up a lot in your fiction as the natural habitat of the bad guys. Is this your take on the American pastoral? Are you being just a bit satirical here about a whole mythology of nature?’

‘It’s common in western cultures,’ he snapped back. ‘The rural is revered. Farmers are revered.’ He stood up. Wandered over to the window. Twitched the blind. Looked out on an urban landscape of roofs and windows and water towers. Some sky. A lot of concrete. ‘But Reacher is all about logic and fact. He would say it’s an unexamined assumption. Lots of different kinds of farmers. No doubt some of them are fantastic. But among them are some of the stupidest people doing the stupidest things.’

      Lee – he loves a good rant. Sometimes it’s hard to stop him.

      ‘And if they come up with an innovation it’s only to make it even more stupid. Look at chopping up cows in order to feed them to other cows – thus causing BSE. Everybody knows they eat grass. We’re turning them into cannibals. Mad cannibals.’ He turned away from the window, sick of the sight of some distant, seemingly innocent farming community, actually full of unscrupulous maniacs. Nothing like Charlotte’s Web at all (the one with Wilbur the ‘radiant’ pig). Lee’s pigs had to be hogs, not pigs.

      ‘They are not necessarily the repository of wisdom,’ Lee went on. ‘They are just as much the repository of ignorance and superstition. And look at the dustbowl years. That was all the fault of the farmers. The government was trying to tell them all the time, don’t keep planting and harvesting, planting and harvesting every year, year on year, you’re going to kill it. And then it dies and blows away. And they’re, “Hey, we didn’t know!” They don’t know anything.’

      I had a feeling that Make Me wasn’t going to be a hymn of praise to that little farmhouse on the prairie. Not one with a backhoe, anyhow.

      Lee went and sat down again, finally running out of steam. He settled himself back in the chair and put his feet back up on the desk, crossed them, and gazed fondly at the screen.

      ‘I’m feeling good about it. I think it works in and of itself. It’s not overlong. And it gets you going. I wish I knew more. But it raises some great questions.’ It was something he had written for the ‘Draft’ column of the New York Times in 2012, under the heading A Simple Way to Create Suspense. ‘Ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story’ – and then ‘delay the answer’. It was easy for Lee to delay, because he really didn’t know the answer. ‘Who is Keever? Why is he dead? What happened? This is what we want to know. The questions are there. Yes, I’m feeling good at the moment.’

He nodded to himself, by way of assent to his own statement. And then he added a qualification. ‘But also I’m feeling a bit challenged by the next scene. What is Reacher even doing there? How come he’s getting off the train anyway? Why here?’

      Clearly Reacher has been doing nothing of great import before the book starts up. Just roaming about, no dramas. When he steps down off that train he is re-entering the world of action, that realm in which things happen and must be reported on. Lee didn’t feel the need to keep tabs on the quiescent Reacher, Jack’s well-behaved, decent-citizen, peace-loving twin. ‘Look at Robert de Niro being Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Classic method acting. He had to be Jake. Just as there are method actors, so too there are method writers. They will write out whole bios and calendars for their characters and pin them up on the wall.’

      I glanced at the walls of his office. They were blissfully devoid of little bits of paper stuck to the plaster.

      ‘A lot of readers come up to me and say – or send me emails and say – “How come Reacher gets into all this mayhem all the time? Can there be that much drama in these little towns?” You could do Waiting for Reacher, but I’m not into that.’

      He had seen Waiting for Godot about forty times, he reckoned. (‘Forty!?’ ‘Thirty-nine maybe.’) He denounced a recent production involving Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. It was too local, too northern, and they weren’t really trying. Self-indulgent. I said something about Hamlet, about how not much happened for long periods, it was all anticipation and retrospection on things that really had happened off. Lee didn’t fully approve of Hamlet either. Self-indulgent. Too long. Were they paid by the minute? ‘Only Macbeth would you leave alone. All the others you would want to speed up. I hate these Richard IIIs which are supposed to be authentic and they’re just too long and slow.’

      He wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the comedy in Shakespeare either. ‘It’s just not funny enough.’

      I asked, ‘Do you ever want a comic touch in your books?’

      ‘Of course Reacher has more in the way of sardonic humour than he is given credit for. But I’m allergic to comic thrillers. We’re talking about killing here. That doesn’t seem like the right place for a lot of humour. There are moments – when Reacher leaves a body in the trunk of a car for the rest of the gang to find.’

‘Classic Reacher sense of humour.’

      ‘But I’m not going out of my way to try and be funny. Look …’ He scanned the screen. Only one thing went wrong – that is almost funny. It’s wry.’

      He kept on contemplating what he had written. ‘It indirectly involves Reacher. The train is Reacher. Another big guy – as you say, an alternative to Keever.’

      ‘As big as a silo.’

      All this talk of size brought us round to the subject of how much he hadn’t written exactly. On that particular day. We understood – it was implicit – that it was all about the quality not the quantity. On the other hand Lee likes to crank it out, if possible. Steadily. Day by day.

      ‘So is that the first page, then?’

      ‘It’s two pages – of a book. Five hundred words. Half a per cent of a book. On day one. That’s not bad. On a good day, fairly relaxed, I can do fifteen hundred words.’ Lee likes to use the word efficient or efficiency in relation to his work. ‘The efficiency is severely hampered by not knowing what’s coming next. So it’s inefficient. But it’s efficient because I don’t do revisions.’

      ‘Not at all?’

      ‘Not much. And I certainly don’t let other people do revisions for me.’ Which started him off on another of his rants. ‘Look СКАЧАТЬ