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Also by Andy Martin

The Knowledge of Ignorance

Walking on Water

Waiting for Bardot

Napoleon the Novelist

Stealing the Wave

The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus

With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher

Andy Martin

polity

Copyright © Andy Martin 2020

The right of Andy Martin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition first published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4086-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Andy Martin ( left ) with Child Photograph by Jessica Lehrman

To all those loyal readers of Lee Child who may have bought this book by mistake

I love his knowledge, his diffusion, his affluence of conversation.

Samuel Johnson

quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page – as when I read Rider Haggard, the Odyssey , Conan Doyle and the German author of Wild West stories, Karl May. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

All the conversations in this book are real. Some of them got compressed. The names are real too (unless they are actually fictional). In the interests of authenticity, any modifications are minimal. The timeline is as faithful as I can make it. The quotations from Make Me are as I originally heard them or read them – they don’t always correspond exactly to the text as it finally appeared. But they have an archaeological value.

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.