‘Them!’ he exploded. ‘In their self-published world, they just make me feel that whatever it is I do is the Real Thing by comparison!’ He wasn’t scornful, just conscious of a differendum. I think it was why he liked academics so much. It reminded me of something he had said when I told him I was off to go to work in Starbucks. The kind of thing he refused to do. It wasn’t just the cigarettes, he argued. ‘They’re all writing novels in Starbucks! Who isn’t writing a novel with a latte in one hand?’ He spat out the word latte with a particular disgust. Coffee was coffee and milk was milk and never the twain shall meet. ‘Starbucks should have a competition—the Best Novels Written in Starbucks.’ He made the kind of derisive noise that suggested he wouldn’t feel worried by that kind of competition. He was going to be head judge—and executioner. They were bound to be frothy, latte-lite books. But he was worried about Franzen and Lagercrantz. Big guns. Not just black but double espressos.

I’d always liked that self-confident line of Reacher’s: ‘There are only five or six guys in the world who are maybe as good as I am.’ By good he meant good at killing. ‘What are the chances that your guy is going to be one of them?’ (When I checked back with Lee about which novel that line came from he said, ‘The Visitor? [Running Blind in the UK]. Hmm, could be any one of them really.’) What were the chances that Franzen and Lagercrantz could be bigger and better?

Lee was up against it. In fact, he was (as Sartre would say) doomed to fail. I had only just realized. All the time I had been watching him write Make Me, the whole of the previous twelve months, I had been convinced that I was watching the Numero Uno. Something like Socrates and Schwarzenegger all rolled into one. The Napoleon of literature. Beyond compare (we had agreed to leave J. K. Rowling out of it). And, it was true, he was writing beautiful sentences and an epic book. But, coming out again into the real world beyond the precincts of that hushed, orderly library that was Lee’s fortress on Central Park West, Child Tower, it was obvious: he was just one guy, up against hordes. The mob. The book would do OK for a while. But, as the economist John Maynard Keynes shrewdly pointed out, ‘In the long run, we’re all dead.’ Lee would live or die by the numbers. And the fact was, even if you got to be a bestseller, you couldn’t be a bestseller for ever. Not unless you were the Bible or Shakespeare. The other guys were Lilliputians, but there were a lot of them. Even if you got to No. 1, all it meant was that there was a long line of contenders waiting to knock you off your pedestal.

Even Napoleon had Waterloo and St Helena on his CV. Dead aged fifty-one. Lee was nearly a decade older.

Article continues after advertisement

* * *

Excerpted from With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher. Courtesy of the publisher, Polity Books. Copyright © 2019 by Andy Martin.