I have seen Lee Child, Britain’s most successful writer of thrillers, interviewed on stage a few times, and there is usually a barrage of questions from the audience about the nuts and bolts of his writing routine, from what time does he start to what brand of haemorrhoid cushion does he use. All are disguised variants of the question “How on earth do you do it?”, which as often as not really means “How on earth can I do it?”

I suspect no book featuring the word “parataxis” will sell more copies this year.

Child-emulators and scholars of popular fiction can now find an extensive, if perhaps not definitive, answer in Andy Martin’s Reacher Said Nothing, an account of how Child wrote Make Me, his 20th Jack Reacher thriller, published a few months ago. Dr Martin is a Child addict and a Cambridge academic whose previous books include a study of Sartre and Camus. He emailed Child in August 2014 to suggest he write a “making of” about the next Reacher novel; Child allowed him to be present in his New York apartment while he wrote large chunks of it. On the strength of this privileged access, Martin’s book has been published with a fanfare not normally accorded to works of literary criticism. I suspect no book featuring the word “parataxis” will sell more copies this year.

With close textual analysis, Martin observes Child’s redraftings and scrutinises the novel for “adjacent ideas, obscure but harmonious images, resonances, affinities, recurrent phrases/words/refrains, syntactical echoes… all singing out to one another across the deeps, like blue whales miles apart in the ocean,” as he puts it in his rather excitable style. This is leavened by a spot of psychoanalysis: Martin argues that Child writes to win the approval he never received from his parents back when he was little Jim Grant in Birmingham. There is also some effort to account for his enormous success. Child himself thinks he has an intuitive feeling for what ordinary people want: he has correctly predicted the outcome of every general election since 1970.

Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher, 2012 Credit: Alamy

I have to apologise, by the way, for a factual error I made in a review some time ago, when I described one of the Reacher novels as “cleverly plotted”. Child is actually a proud non-plotter. Every year on the first day of September, fingernails freshly cut to avoid clacking against the keyboard, he sits down to write the new Reacher with no idea of what will happen. According to Martin, he was five and a half months and 44,695 words into Make Me before he began “to work out what the hell was going on”.

Child’s obiter dicta on every subject from Dorothy L Sayers to Shakespeare, as recorded by Martin, are unfailingly interesting. Some of Martin’s own speculations are less so. Because Reacher’s role in the novels is to foil the bad guys’ plots, Martin has decided Child is “a classic anti-narrativist, an anti-Hegelian… By the end of every book Reacher has negated the narrative and returned the world to its incoherent meaningless default mode… Lee Child is not telling a story, he’s fighting story.” But if this is true, which it isn’t, surely it would apply equally to all thriller writers?

We are also told that marijuana plays a part in Child’s creative process, but Martin is hazy about how much and when.

I appreciate that Martin is only bouncing ideas around, and he does so with a winsome sense of fun, but if he had junked some of his silly-clever interludes (an imagined Lee Child exam paper), there might have been room for even more pertinent information. I’ve heard Child say his writing process is so linear that, if he reaches a point in a novel where he needs some technical information, he has to stop writing until he gets his facts, even if that means waiting two or three days. There is no mention of that here. We are also told that marijuana plays a part in Child’s creative process, but Martin is hazy about how much and when.

I cannot guess what the average Child fan will make of this book, because it is impossible to say what such a person is like: we learn here that Child’s terse style has made him a favourite among dyslexics and academics alike. For the most part, I found it very entertaining. Until Child can be persuaded to publish his own version of Stephen King’s On Writing, I think it will be a wise investment for anybody who wants to write popular fiction.

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