Twenty miles north the train slowed, and slowed, and then eased to a hissing stop, and the doors sucked open, and Jack Reacher 13 stepped down to a concrete ramp 14 in front of a grain elevator 15 as big as an apartment house. To his left were four more elevators, all of them bigger than the first, and to his right was an enormous metal shed the size of an airplane hangar. There were vapor lights on poles, set at regular intervals, and they cut cones of yellow in the darkness. There was mist in the nighttime air, like a note on a calendar. The end of summer was coming. Fall was on its way. 16

Only one thing went wrong, and it happened right then. The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn’t know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, like a vision in a dream, 11 seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and then the tail light was swallowed by the midnight darkness, 12 and they turned back to their task.

Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was not a problem either. Their backhoe’s arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent, articulated 10 seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the electric light, the engine straining and roaring and pausing, the cab falling and rising, as each bucket-load was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the front bucket to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body in dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows.

They started at midnight, which they thought was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, 8 and the only man-made structure their side of any horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. Therefore, no prying eyes. Their backhoe 9 had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, the same way kids pimped their pick-up trucks, and together the four beams made a wide pool of halogen brightness. Therefore, visibility was not a problem either. 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 chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste. Safe enough.

Moving 1 a guy as big as Keever 2 wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. 3 So they buried 4 him close to the house. Which 5 made sense anyway. The harvest 6 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. 7 They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.

You start with a participle. I like that. Verb of action. Transitive. We have an action taking place, and an object (corpse, one, large). But we don’t know who is doing the moving. So, covertly, you’re posing a question, right at the beginning, that won’t really be answered till somewhere near the end. Who are these guys? Who is the subject of the verb? The “hermeneutic code” (as Roland Barthes neatly called it) is like a long, serpentine fuse leading to a big barrel of gunpowder somewhere down the road. You just lit it. Expect fireworks.

The first sentence arrived fully formed. And it had to put us right alongside the bad guys, struggling with their midnight task. I didn’t want, for instance: “Keever was a big guy and it was hard to move him.” That’s too flat, too start-from-cold, too declarative. I felt “Moving a guy as big as Keever” was somehow real-time descriptive, a little breathless, as if grunted by a guy occupied with the problem. The sentence had to do two things — launch the action “in medias res,” as they say, and hint at a kind of inarticulate, rural vernacular.

First proper name. Like an inscription on a tombstone. “Keever,” phonologically a close approximation to “Reacher.” A para-rhyme. What you’re saying is: This could happen to Reacher, if he’s not careful. Keever is a big guy, too. And look where that got him! (In with the hogs.) Maybe there is a faint echo of (John) Cheever, the writer, in there too? But more likely it’s Kiefer (Sutherland). You have to bump off the star of “24” in the very first sentence. Before the first sentence. You don’t want any competition.

That’s an academic thinking. The writer says he doesn’t know where it came from. Cheever? Possible, but so far removed from a hog pen at midnight that it’s unlikely. Kiefer? I’m more of a fan of his dad’s. (Who once wrote to me saying he wished he was younger so he could play Reacher in the movies.) “Keever” probably just bubbled up from somewhere in my subconscious. Maybe I just liked the sound…

The leitmotif of sheer size gets bigged up all over again. But you want to know the thing that kills me about this sentence? Try getting “Deep Blue” to write that line! There will come a time when machines will write novels. Maybe it’s already here and cyber-authors are simply masquerading as human beings (I could name names.) But I guarantee IBM or Google are not going to come up with this crazy waterbed image in a million years. Where did that even come from?

I try to respect the physical reality of death and corpses, to some extent. And they’re floppy and hard to move, especially the big ones. I was once in a hotel in California, trying to nudge a waterbed mattress straight, and it felt like the right image. But I agree, machines will never have that kind of crazy free association.

Begin with a burial. How can that miss? It also picks up where the last one, “Personal,” ended: with another burial. So there is a sense of a continuum. But I know you were rereading Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” at the same time you were writing this book. All those zombies on the rampage. And isn’t there a sense in which Keever just won’t stay buried? Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, crying out for revenge, he keeps on popping up, despite the best efforts of the bad guys.

Keever was dead before the book began, but in a parallel way he wasn’t. … His fate drove the whole story, we learned some poignant details about him. For a dead guy he ended up a rounded, well-developed character. So in that sense, yes, he refused to stay buried.

It’s like you’ve got two voices going here at the same time. Like a harmony. On the one hand, you’ve adopted the point of view of the farmers, the hog owners, the guys who are doing the killing and the burying. It all “made sense” to them to do exactly what they were doing. Coldly logical (the word “therefore” comes up twice here). Ruthless, of course. It’s the Flaubertian style indirect libre, what James Wood calls the “semi-close” third-person voice. But the way you’re starting a sentence with the beginning of a subordinate clause: that is pure you. That is your voice. One of your syntactic quirks (egalitarian perhaps? No subordinates!). So it’s like you’re letting the reader know that you’re still there. Buried, but irrepressible.

And “Which” at the head of a sentence is an accelerative word — it launches the new thought with pace and momentum. Very valuable. But I have to be careful not to overdo it. It becomes a habit. Two or three in sequence is fine, but those sequences need to be separated.

They are farmers, after all. If only they would stick to the farming. They shouldn’t be using people as fertilizer or hog snacks. Harvest would typically have fairly positive connotations. Not in the works of Lee Child! Admit it — you hate the pastoral. The nomadic warrior is the opposite of the farmer. It’s an opposition that goes back to the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural homemakers. And “harvest”: It has a weird sort of Stephen King echo to it — what the hell is going to leap up out of the earth? That old Greek myth of the “autochthonous” guys … these are people connected to the earth in some way. Chthonian, subterranean. Which hooks into the very end of the book … The descent into the labyrinth.

I guess one writes what one knows, or at least has sympathy with. And the opposite. It’s not that I particularly dislike farmers (O.K., a bit) but more that I scorn the unexamined assumptions that litter our discourse. Farmers are good and wise? Well, not really. Not always. Farmers have screwed up repeatedly (Dust Bowl, etc.) — they’re as dumb as anyone else. I think that should be pointed out occasionally. The myth of agricultural wisdom.

I almost forgot. You went back and put in the comma in this sentence, didn’t you? The humble comma. You’d think a big, bone-cruncher like Reacher wouldn’t have time for a mere comma, but he notices the little things, doesn’t he?

There was no comma on the first pass, but I wanted it to sound slower, more considered, more ruminative, slightly inarticulate, slightly low-I.Q. Even though no one talks in the first section, I wanted to mirror a halting, slow-witted style of speech. Flaubert!

There is plenty of “nothing” in your work. “Reacher said nothing,” for example — one of your most recurrent phrases. But nothingness: It’s a rarity. This is only the third time in 20 novels that this word has been used (I checked). The first page of “Make Me” and you pull out the nothingness card. And only once in the course of this novel, likewise. What is this word even doing here? A faint allusion to Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” perhaps? The pastoral is all about nothingness; the nomadic warrior, on the other hand, is the incarnation of pure being. A higher level of existence. And, without giving it all away, the whole plot is right there, at the very beginning. Like a hologram. The temptation or the dread of nothingness.

It was somewhat declarative — here we have a tiny cast on a gigantic empty stage. I wanted a strong sense of absolutely nothing, with a bright pool of light in the center of it. In the context of the first page (especially considering the way I write, which is not to know the second page yet) it would be bogus to claim much meaning in it, beyond an obligation to tell the reader, O.K., the setting is miles from anywhere in farming country. Information, rather than metaphor. I find it more organic to come back and decide what was metaphor later (and then develop it) rather than decide ahead of time.

You really like this word, don’t you? And the size of it. Maybe Reacher is modeled on a backhoe. But I like the way you really give the machine character and dignity and power. Look at it go! All those beautiful lights. And all the different kinds of work it can do, “straining,” “roaring,” “scraping” and all that. It’s lyrical. Your hymn to tekhne, the love affair between man and machine. The cab “falling and rising” — inanimate and yet so alive. We instinctively feel that we are not done with this backhoe, just yet.

I like machinery, sure. I grew up in a city that made that stuff. [Birmingham, England.] But again, at this point all I wanted was to create a picture of vast, dark emptiness, with a tiny hot spot of light, noise and nefarious activity at its center. You’re the analyst, I’m just a working hack. This is housekeeping — setting the scene for the reader, but through action, so it’s not boring. But yes, it’s a good American word, they don’t have it in England.

Verbal words applied to the machine. The machine speaks more than the anonymous farmers. And look at the description of the train, too. With its “mournful whistle” and the rails that “sang.” It’s like they have real feeling and poetry, which the humans lack. The machine sings the blues. But we are reminded too of the thing that is missing on this first page, something you might reasonably expect: dialogue. There is none. Surprising?

I wanted the sound of the railroad to emphasize the silence and loneliness. No dialogue? Absolutely, and that’s a choice. Lots of writers use dialogue from the top, to make the page look accessible to a bookstore browser. White space is less intimidating than a dense wedge of text. But Reacher is not a talker. I don’t want to give a false impression. But if I do the opening right, I think I’m saying to the reader, don’t worry, you’re in for a fun ride, and there will be plenty of talking later. On the other hand, in the third person, it often feels like dialogue even when there isn’t any. It’s all down to the voice — or voices.

“Like a vision in a dream.” It wasn’t like that — it really was a “vision in a dream,” wasn’t it? Isn’t that how it came to you?

It’s a funny old job, mine. I actually get paid to sit around and daydream. Everything else is just typing.

I notice that not only do these mysterious Keever-killers live in the state of nothing and nowhere, but they have no time in which to do a proper job either. There is a manifest contradiction to do with trains that Agatha Christie, for one, would never have tolerated. Look at your impossible timetable. Your bad guys only get started at midnight. And you have them being disturbed by the train in the middle of their fairly rigorous grave-digging. Yet the train is supposed to leave Somewhere at 7. It’s 5 hours late, so it arrives in Nowhere (i.e., Mother’s Rest) at midnight. Therefore (to use your word) the time it takes them to do the job is exactly… zero. The train takes ages to go by (forever) and yet: It is still “midnight” when it’s gone. It’s like the whole oneiric plot exists in non-time and non-space. Is this Lee Child subtly deconstructing the whole genre and saying to the shrewd reader, it really is all airy nothing?

Sometimes you just have to get it wrong to get it right. I liked the emphasis on “midnight darkness,” for one thing. It just felt right that way. For a clandestine burial. I didn’t want to be a slave to train timetables. And then once it was done, I was reluctant to go back — like Agatha Christie — and finesse it. I like it a little rough and ready. And rely on the readers to get it right for me.

I know it’s not in the text (not until several chapters in). But the folding toothbrush has to be in Reacher’s pocket, right? It’s his most defining possession. Or is it the kind you screw together? Either way, you have actually owned one. Jules Verne said of H. G. Wells: “But, he invents!” Stephen King said something similar about you at Harvard the other day: “You make stuff up!” It seems obvious. But I sometimes wonder, seeing the way you work. Perhaps nothing is invented and everything is true and your wildest imaginings are only (as the empiricists would say) some random permutation of sense data.

It clips together. I have hundreds. People send them to me all the time.

I remember you originally had something to do with dirt here and you changed it to concrete. Is concrete more Reacher? You didn’t want him getting his shoes dirty, right off the bat. He’s a warrior, not a farmer, after all. What’s that phrase in “Shane”? “Sod-buster”? Reacher is more of a head-buster. Here he is in Mother’s Rest getting down off his steel horse: like a knight in disposable chinos and T-shirt.

I wanted to separate Reacher’s initial environment from what we had seen around the bad guys. I needed it to be a clear two-world situation — here are the bad guys, and here is Reacher, different in every way. Yes, he’s a descendant of the ancient knight errant tradition.

Very Don Quixote, with silos in place of windmills. Or rather this used to be “silo” — you’ve changed it to elevator. Don’t you like silos anymore? But more important, I recall that you originally had “bigger than an apartment house.” Now you have “as big as.” Is that downsizing? So everything comes down to sheer size: the lifeless bulk of Keever, the massive presence of Reacher. Even the shed has to be “enormous.” It’s like you’re saying, O.K., now it’s Reacher vs. silos (or elevators) — who will win?

Cervantes was too satirical of the heroic tradition. I never liked sidekicks like Sancho Panza, either. But you’re right, I wanted to echo the opening. Make it more like a refrain. And elevator — it was the sense that there could be machinery at work rather than just a storage facility. Or maybe it was all those syllables. Size, yes, I always want Goliath to win, not David.

I’m hooked all over again. Another reader, desperate to know what happens next. How do you do that? What’s your secret?

It’s all about asking questions and not answering them for ages. Who is Keever? Who are the folks who killed him? And why? Why was he important? Did Reacher see the lights? Is that why he gets off the train? For a first page I thought it did its job. I was happy with it.