Andy Martin - Reacher Said Nothing

‘I’m opening a file here. Microsoft Word doc … Now I move it to the middle of the screen.’

He was talking me through it, like some kind of surgical operation. ‘I always use Arial. To begin with anyway. And ten-point. So I get more on the page. But I crank it up to 150 per cent to save my eyes.’

It’s 2.26 in the afternoon. September 1, 2014. Lee is on the verge of something momentous. At the moment it’s a blank page. The file doesn’t have a name.

‘Then I have to turn off all these red lines … Do not check spelling. Or grammar. I am going to let Microsoft tell me what grammar is?’

It’s a huge screen (27-inch). Virgin. Tabula rasa. ‘Single line space. I like to see a lot of text on the page. I don’t want to spend all my time scrolling up and down.’

He has put his tortoiseshell glasses on. Lit another cigarette. Put it down again. Finally he starts typing. He types:

CHAPTER ONE.

It started with a burial. It would have to start with a burial.

Lee types with two fingers only, the index fingers.

The smoke was corkscrewing up from the cigarette in his hand. He stopped to take a drag on it. Looked back at what he had written. Crushed out the cigarette. He was looking intently at the screen.

The first paragraph was five lines long. I could almost make out the first word. An -ing word – a present participle. Something-ing . Ten-point and I’m two yards back. I could see the words, but not read them. Could have been Sanskrit. The suspense was killing me. Next time, I vowed silently, I’m going to bring a telescope. I would have got closer, maybe could have got closer, but I didn’t want to crowd him. I was already nervous about making paper noises as I jotted down largely meaningless notes with a lot of question marks. I was already right on top of a guy in a small room in front of a computer trying to create a novel out of nothing, to conjure it up like a 100,000-word rabbit out of a hat.

Or maybe snake charmer would be a better metaphor – teasing that snake right up out of the basket.

Either way, Lee Child was thinking hard about his second paragraph.

Behind the page, on the desktop – I should have mentioned this sooner – a blue background, plain, no images.

The cigarette went back in the ashtray. The two fingers went back to work. End of second par. He lit another cigarette and then saved the file. For the first time, he was going to give it a name. Stick a label on it. He considered using the title, but then opted for something more neutral. ‘Reacher 19’, he typed.

I leaned forward. I could just make it out. ‘Nineteen?’ I said. ‘Reacher nineteen?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Losing it.’ Deleted 19. Changed it to ‘Reacher 20’. Personal was nineteenth. Make Me is the twentieth. The file was no longer nameless.

‘I’m working up to Make Me . Not quite there yet.’ Make Me was fresh out of the oven – he didn’t want to drop it.

The second par was longer. The onscreen page was slowly bulking up. He went back and slipped another sentence into the first par. Just a short one. So far he hadn’t deleted a thing.

I deciphered another word. ‘Nothing’. No. ‘Nothing ness ’.

The second par was twice the length of the first. Now he was into the third. The third was only two words long. I could only make out the second: ‘enough’. Good enough? Bad enough? Looked more like a four-letter word than three, though. A tetragrammaton. Was that an S at the beginning?

Lee, stuck in mid-sentence. The cursor flashing impatiently, urging him on, begging for more.

Another cigarette.

That desk: sheet metal all riveted together, made back in England – is that some kind of homage to all those old artisan metal workers of his youth? Back in Birmingham and Sheffield. Under the railway arches. The craftsmen who knew how to make stuff and make it well. No painted jam. No guano peas. Solid. Dependable.

The fifth par. We’re on again! I could make out the beginning: ‘Only one thing went wrong …’ A one-line par.

Other books on the shelf. Encyclopedia of American Police Cars. Websters. Small Arms. Tourist guides to Maine, Oregon, California.

Lee folded his hands together under his chin. His face was about two feet from the screen. He shoved it a little closer, peering into the screen like a crystal-ball gazer. Now leaning back again, hands behind his head. Rubbing thumb and index finger of his right hand together, as if trying to elicit a flame.

Backs off for a maximum of ten seconds at a time, then into it again.

An asterisk – or maybe a hash sign? Centre. Return. We’re into a new section. A couple more lines. Then he stops.

3.07: file saved. Reacher 20.

Lee hit a button and the printer stirred. A page slid out. Lee stood up, went over to the printer, took out the page. Then he came over and handed it to me. ‘There.’

I think my hand was trembling. Just a little.

I leaned back on the couch and looked it over, slowly. The first page – or first couple of pages – of the new Reacher. Fresh off the printer. Straight out of the mind of Lee Child. (Maybe with a detour through the collective unconscious.)

Less than an hour. Five hundred words. Two fingers. ‘I find it’s about the right typing speed for me,’ Lee said. ‘It’s as fast as my brain can keep up with.’

It took a while for the text to come into focus. I think I was too awestruck or moved or something to make any sense of it at first. A labyrinth. Utterly mysterious. Then words. Then sentences.

That -ing word right at the beginning. I was right about that. Turned out to be Moving . This is how the first sentence went: Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy .

Keever . Good name. I was already hooked.

Lee turned his chair round so he was half facing me, half looking back at his text on the screen. He swung his feet up on the desk.

‘I wanted to start with a verb of action,’ he said. ‘The participle came naturally.’ He went over it in his head. ‘See, I didn’t want to write, Keever was a big guy and moving him wasn’t easy. That’s too expository. This way we waste no time. It’s compact. I thought about was not easy for a moment. But the rhythm was better, wasn’t easy .’

Here it is, the whole of it, as it emerged, that afternoon, September 1, 2014. That page I had in my hand – now you have it in yours.

Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air for a guy like Keever. They would use spotter planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.

They started at midnight, which they figured was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of the horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. So, safe enough. No prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, like kids had on their pick-up trucks, and together they made an aimed pool of halogen brightness. So visibility was not a problem. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always freshly chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with thermal imaging. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, plus their steaming piles of shit and their steaming pools of piss.