With Child. Andy Martin

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Название With Child
Автор произведения Andy Martin
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Серия
Издательство Кинематограф, театр
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509538232



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a question directly. Everyone takes that for a yes.’

      ‘Come on!’ I was attached to Chang, the ex-FBI agent formerly known as Stashower. ‘Let Reacher have some fun for a change. Apparently some advance readers have already been bitching about how it’s too dark and they had to avert the gaze.’

      ‘That’s the world. It’s not all pleasant.’

      I was thinking, as I walked away from Lee’s place, that maybe there was something in this sense of even Reacher, wise old bird that he was, discovering something new and utterly beyond his power to master that inspired the ‘Night School’ idea. There was at least a certain continuum there, even though the new novel was a prequel, the young Reacher back in the army again (as he was in The Enemy, The Affair, and the short story, ‘Small Wars’, the one Lee had dashed off back in July).

      In the morning they gave Reacher a medal, and in the afternoon they sent him back to school.

      I knew it was serious when he offered to pour me a mug of black coffee. We wandered into the kitchen and he refilled the coffee machine.

      ‘For the first time, I’m actually worried.’

      ‘About?’

      ‘Sales, obviously. We’ve got the new Stieg and the new Franzen coming out at the same time. It’s going to be tough.’

      Lee had written a very fair and balanced review of The Girl in the Spider’s Web (by David Lagercrantz) – the Stieg Larsson sequel – for The New York Times (and kindly sent me a preview). Thoughtful. Shrewd. Pros and cons. ‘I thought your review was very fair and balanced,’ I said.

      ‘What I really wanted to do was to kill it. Stomp on it. Like a cockroach. It’s competition. I had to grit my teeth not to trash it totally.’

      I sort of wondered what he thought of Jonathan Franzen. His name came up from time to time but I realized I didn’t know what he thought of his writing as opposed to the myth and the hype. And I wasn’t about to find out either, because he raised another question entirely.

      ‘And then Harper Lee is still selling.’ Go Set a Watchman, the new old one.

      ‘Oh come on!’ I spluttered, having read that phony non-novel over the summer. ‘That is crap!’ And then added, ‘Sorry,’ feeling that my one-word review was perhaps a little unfair, but also that the other Lee was not even in the running. Unless it was fixed. (Need I add, I know nothing. When I finally get around to opening the ‘Bestsellers’ page ofThe New York Times, dated Sunday, 30 August, guess what I find? Yep. Fiction. 1. GO SET A WATCHMAN.)

      I scratched my head, like the aircon engineers, trying to think of someone. ‘Like the James Bond franchise. Of course, unlike Larsson, unlike Fleming, you’re not dead yet. You’re not planning to retire young like that Jamaican guy you met on the plane are you?’

      ‘I can’t! There’s no one to take over the store.’

      ‘You must have had offers.’

      ‘There’s a number of people hinting at it. Ghost-writers.’

      ‘Almost like writing your will and there are all these relatives poised to swoop. Vultures. “Hey, Lee, you know, when you’re dead and all, I wonder what happens to good old Reacher … Got any plans?”’

      ‘Yeah, that kind of thing.’

      ‘Anyone?’

      ‘Nah, not really.’

      ‘Carl Cederström – he’d do a good job. He’s Swedish.’

      ‘Yeah, he’s got the umlauts.’ Lee liked Scandi names, thought they would have an edge. ‘And he’s tall.’

      ‘What about Big Blue?’

      Lee had recently visited the IBM artificial intelligence research lab (invited there by our friend Quiller). I assumed they had stolen some part of his brain to incorporate into their electronic neocortex.

      He was generous. ‘There is a madness to Reacher. Big Blue could hit maybe 90% of it. But it’s the off-the-wall stuff it can’t do.’

      ‘Make Me, for example.’

      ‘Come on, who else is going to come up with Reacher reciting the Gettysburg Address in the bath? Would anyone else do that? Who is going to go there?’

      ‘Or the name “Mother’s Rest”? That is so idiosyncratic. Almost absurd.’

      ‘I guess I’d better keep going then.’

      ‘I know, what about …?’ I mentioned a couple of names, one man and one woman. Maybe they could do it?

      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 US]. Hmm, could be any one of them really.’) What were the chances that Franzen and Lagercrantz could be bigger and better?

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