The horrible Hook Hobie, the seductive and sadistic Lila Hoth, the monstrous Little Joey, they were all alter egos. Oddly enough, I think I may have been the first to explain to Lee the blindingly obvious, namely that he was all the bad guys he had ever dreamed up as much as he was Jack Reacher. Despite all of which, I still tended to think of Lee in terms of Reacher, the vigilante, nomadic outsider, drop-out and avenging angel. And a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Child: private jets and houses in several countries. As he once said, in shorts he looks like Olive Oyl.Īgain, Reacher: takes the bus, of no fixed abode. Fold him up neatly and you can fit him into one of Reacher’s arms. But Lee is barely more than half Reacher’s weight.

Do they not share the same birthday (29 October)? Both drink absurd amounts of black coffee. As Lee himself said, recalling his days brawling in the school playground, “Reacher is me aged nine”. Perhaps, to be fair, there is a bit of Odysseus in Homer, a bit of Madame Bovary in Flaubert and, likewise, a bit of Jack Reacher in Lee Child. The line of his that still echoes in my brain, even now, is: “This is not the first draft – it’s the only draft.” That sounded as if Jack Reacher were writing a novel: nobody was going to mess with his prose.Īnd that, of course, was my fundamental error: to confuse the writer and his hero. I couldn’t sneakily go about rectifying and polishing he didn’t, so I couldn’t. The rule was that I started when he started and finished when he finished. I sat perched on a couch a couple of yards behind him, taking notes for the book that would become Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of “Make Me”. So for months on end, I watched Lee write his 20th novel in the Jack Reacher series, Make Me.

Die Trying by Lee Child