Reacher Said Nothing. Andy Martin

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FOREWORD

      Some authors don’t read their reviews, but I do. I like to get a sense of how my books are being received, and I like to map out the reviewer landscape, in terms of who responds to what, or doesn’t, and who is generous and who is mean … above all, I suppose, I like to see who gets it, and who doesn’t.

      Years ago I was reviewed in the UK newspaper the Independent, by a guy named Andy Martin. It seemed to me he got it. He called Reacher ‘a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s’, which delighted me. He reviewed another book, and then the Independent sent him to New York to do a feature interview with me. He turned out to be a fun guy, into Sartre, Camus, Bardot, surfing, and a dozen other things. The interview came out well, and we remained friends.

      That’s the good news. Then I got a message from him – it’s right here in the prologue – proposing a harebrained scheme, whereby he would write a book about me writing a book. Which would involve him physically watching me write it, for months and months, and discussing it as I went along. Normally (although this had never been done before, so really there was no ‘normally’) such a venture would be considered ahead of time and possibly agreed, in which case it might be booked in a year or so in advance.

      But I got the message only days before I was due to start writing that year’s instalment. So I didn’t get time to mull it over. If I had, I might have said no. Instead I said, OK, but you better get here before Monday. And he did, and what you’re about to read is what came of it.

At first I found it irksome – writers are usually solitary, and the act of creation is intensely insecure and personal, and I didn’t like the idea of him seeing imperfect or half-finished sentences. But I got used to it, and eventually – Stockholm Syndrome, probably – I came to enjoy it. I felt that together we were placing something in the record. Not just about me, I hoped, but my peers and colleagues collectively. My genre is packed with talent and invention, and people in it work really hard, with passion and ferocious intelligence – as opposed to the lazy trope that we ‘churn it out’, as if mechanically or formulaically. I hope this account makes that point. I’m one of many working writers, and we all do it differently, but really we all do it the same – we start with a blank page, we fill it with words, then hundreds of pages more, and they have to be the right words in the right order. This is the story of some of those words. I don’t remember exactly how many there were, but I bet Andy does.

      Lee Child

      New York

      2019