9780857508744

REACHER THE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES

REACHER LEE CHILD

THE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES

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9780857508744 (cased)

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INTRODUCTION

I was first published in 1997, nearly thirty years ago as of this writing, in an era that now feels as remote as the Jurassic in the book business. The world was still almost entirely pre- internet. I had heard of email, vaguely, but I didn’t have it. Nor did anyone else I knew. My first editor’s comments arrived by fax, to an obliging local store, because I didn’t have a fax machine either. I communicated with my agent by letter or landline telephone. I delivered my manuscripts as bulky packages in the mail.

The upside of that era was that brick- and- mortar bookstores had not yet been laid to waste. In fact they were thriving. New York had four excellent crime-fiction stores, and most cities had at least one or two. Their proprietors loved the genre and knew it intimately. They would call each other or get together at genre conventions to talk about hot new books and authors.

That’s how I got my start. Those so-called ‘big mouths’ talked up Killing Floor and turned it into a major release

within the genre. It became a cult hit within the community. It won several Best First Novel prizes. I had arrived at the starting line.

Naturally (and of course quite rightly) by the time my second book came out, those folks had moved on to even newer books and writers. All except one. The only ‘big mouth’ who talked up Die Trying was a guy named Otto Penzler. He owned The Mysterious Bookshop in midtown Manhattan, and was a voice worth having on your side. He was a world- renowned collector and a world-renowned Sherlock Holmes expert. He pushed Die Trying just as hard as anyone had pushed Killing Floor. I was grateful for that.

Otto also ran his own indie publishing company, The Mysterious Press, and was the editor of countless shortstory anthologies and other ventures. He had more pies than fingers. He was always doing something, including beautifully bound special editions of titles likely to appeal to his customer base. Slowly, over the years, we became good friends, despite his irascible nature and appalling politics. On the plus side, he was a Yankees fan who had seen Mickey Mantle in his prime, he often had appealing wives or girlfriends, he had immaculate taste in food and champagne, he was funny in the kind of sardonic way that appealed to the Brit in me, and he was a gentleman. We got along very well.

Eventually he asked if he could do specially bound editions of the Reacher series. I had been asked once or twice before by other people, and I had always resisted

the notion. Many of my readers were so into Reacher they felt they had to have every edition of everything. I didn’t want them to feel obliged to shell out maybe a hundred bucks for a reprint of something they already had, but in a fancier jacket. So I had said no to such requests.

But Otto’s special editions were also limited editions, only a hundred or so copies per title. His customer base was so big – and so rich – he could easily find a hundred people who really wanted the product and wouldn’t even notice the price. So I felt there was no real risk of exploitation of the regular consumer. So I said yes.

Then he asked if I would write a foreword for each title, to add value and make each edition even more special. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Certainly I was flattered that anyone would want to make or buy such handsome editions of my work, but felt quite unequal to providing literary insight into it, beyond what could be gleaned from, you know, actually reading it. I work with no plan, no theory, no structured approach, and no overarching intentions. I supposed I could pretend I had those things, and by using a little reverse engineering I could have come up with plausible explanations for why the books turned out the way they did. But the truth is I was always just hoping for the best, trusting my instincts, and flying by the seat of my pants.

So, self-indulgently, I decided to use the opportunity to do what I wish more authors would do: to set down a plain and quotidian record of the who, why,

what, where and when, like a career diary. I am not vain enough to think it important, or even very interesting; but –  as a reader, pedant and geek –  I would like to know this kind of stuff about other authors’ work, and therefore, humans being not so very different from one another, I assumed some readers, at least, might like to know this kind of stuff about mine. At worst, far in the future, if my daughter ever wanted to know where her dad was, and when, and what he was doing, and what he was thinking, she would have a shelf of handsome volumes to tell her exactly that.

On Thursday August 18th, 1994, in Manchester, England, I was told by senior management at Granada Television that my studio director’s job was scheduled for elimination in an ongoing restructuring initiative, and that after a little more than seventeen years’ service, I would be unemployed by Christmas. I didn’t believe them. Given their competence level, I guessed early summer 1995 was a more likely exit date. (And I was proved right. I was eventually let go on June 21st, 1995.)

I felt that British TV was in a death spiral –  partly because people like them were in charge –  and in any case employment elsewhere in the industry was unlikely. But I wanted to stay broadly in the world of entertainment, so I decided to act on a contingency plan I had thought of some years previously: I would write a novel. So, to pre-empt the coming crisis, on Friday September 2nd, 1994, I went to a stationery chain in the Arndale Centre, Manchester, and bought three pads of paper, a pencil, a pencil sharpener and an eraser. I

took them home, which was then in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, England, more than seventy miles away.

On Monday September 5th, 1994, at home, at the dining room table, I sat down to write. An hour later, I gave the first chapter to my wife. I asked, ‘Should I continue?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I like it.’

So I wrote through the rest of the fall and winter, at home and at work, and by March 1995 I had finished the book. But it wasn’t this book. Not exactly. The working title was Bad Luck and Trouble (a title I re-used much later in the series) and the story was about drug money. A year or so earlier I had bought a book about money laundering –  purely for its cover: it had a real dollar bill laminated into it. It said the illegal narcotics trade in the US was all cash (obviously), and in a dry, statistical way said its annual value was twice the amount of all the cash in circulation within the fifty states. Which, I saw, meant the cartels had a serious, industrial problem. I worked out that four thousand tons of paper money had to be transported to the Caribbean banks – twice a year.

The original manuscript was based around that theme.

I typed it up on my daughter’s new laptop, and printed it out on her slow inkjet printer, and bought a copy of The Writer’s Handbook , which lists agents, and I sent a query letter and the first three chapters to Darley Anderson, in London, England. He replied

immediately, by letter (this was 1995, remember), and offered representation – and eventually, after seeing the whole draft, some editorial suggestions.

The suggestions were mostly to do with the story, but one was to change the title. Darley felt that the two negative words ‘Bad’ and ‘Trouble’ would trap readers’ perceptions in the narrow niche of noir, which wouldn’t help when seeking a wider, more generalist audience. So I came up with ‘Killing Floor’ as an alternative, and it stuck. (The image of a meatpacking plant’s killing floor was present in the text, and so were lines from the song ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ –  including the line ‘Bad luck and trouble’s been my only friend,’ which are still there, of course, as trace evidence of the working title.)

I worked on the suggestions and had the second draft completed by May 1995. Darley and I went through it again and perfected a third draft by July. Nothing much happens in the world of publishing in August, so it was September 1995 before the book went out on submission. By that point I had been out of work for more than two months, and my savings were dwindling.

It was a targeted submission. Darley’s movie co-agent knew an editor at Putnam in New York who was looking for that kind of thing: David Highfill. David liked the book and wanted to buy it.

But: he wanted me to change the story. He felt that drug gangs and drug money were overdone and overfamiliar. He wanted a major launch and major attention

Child and felt that any element of same-old-same-old would blunt the impact.

I wanted –  needed, I felt –  to preserve the ‘river of money’ theme. And I got lucky, because out in the real world, 1995 was the year the US had its first change in printed money for many decades. The $100 bill had been redesigned, and the new bill was being fed into circulation. There was tremendous journalistic coverage of the change, which was a move in the battle against counterfeiting. Some coverage was superficial, and some was very comprehensive. By reading it all, I saw how I could preserve the skeleton of the book by changing the flesh from narcotics proceeds to raw material for a counterfeiting operation.

I rewrote the book through the fall –  over a year after starting it – and David liked what he saw, and on Thursday December 7th, 1995, he made a formal twobook offer. At that point I was seven weeks away from going broke. I had enough in the bank for one more mortgage payment, but not two.

Putnam saw it as an early spring book –  March, ideally – but March 1996 was too soon for them. Line editing, copy-editing, jacket design and preliminary marketing plans had to be done. So the book was scheduled for March 1997.

And eventually it was published in that month, on Tuesday 17th, Saint Patrick’s Day. It had a truly great jacket image by Thomas Tafuri, a bloody handprint on a white background, and an author photograph taken by

my then-sixteen-year-old daughter, of me sitting at the same table at which I had written the first pencil draft.

The book became an absolute exemplar of how things used to work: the specialist mystery bookstores and the crime-fiction community adopted it as a favourite; it won every genre award it was eligible for; and without selling more than a respectable number it gave me a very solid start. Since then it has sold untold millions in, as of this writing, fifty languages and ninety-six countries.

I sold the dining table when we sold the house before our move to the States, but I still have the pencil. It sits on two pegs on a bulletin board in my office, and it reminds me every day of how this whole thing started.