Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me, by Andy Martin
(minor spoilers)
A fascinating premise with the promise to uncover insights into the making of an epic is marked by inchoateness.
To be a fly on the wall as Lee Child, bestselling author whose books have sold over 200 million copies, wrote his next Jack Reacher bestseller, "Make Me". To watch, literally, over the shoulder over the world's bestselling author as we wrote, plotted, edited, rewrote; as he thought, ruminated, fretted, breezed through a novel.
The process would take several months—222 days, as it turned out—and the final draft was edited down by 2000 words, and where the first paragraph itself took several days to hammer and iron out. In 2014, starting on September 1, as he always did, Lee Child set out to on his computer, with spellcheck and autocorrect off, because he was not going to let some darn computer tell him what was correct and what wasn't.
Child starts off with the first words of the first chapter. ""The first day is always the best," Lee said. "Because you haven't screwed anything up yet. It's a gorgeous feeling.""
Why didn't Child write, "Keever was a big guy and moving him wasn't easy"? Why did he instead write, "Moving a guy as big as Keaver wasn't easy." Because that would be "too expository. This way we waste no time. It's compact."
Yes, adverbs are frowned upon, as in, "The dirt was always freshly chewed up" becomes "The dirt was always chewed up." Because ""we don't need freshly. Adverb. One word too many. Better styling. Economy.""
Notwithstanding that Child would go on to record a well-received series on writing for BBC Maestro, his views on writing theory are decidedly blasé. "So much of writing theory is just airy-fairy to me. They say a character is supposed to want something on every page. ... No! It's the reader who wants something on every page. Not the character. The character does not exist. It's just a way of mediating the wants of the reader."
Make Me was started in 2014 and finished in 2015. The paper that would introduce the concept of the 'transformer' and lay the foundations for LLMs—Large Language Models—would not appear till 2017. But the what-if was asked during the writing of Make Me. Martin asks Child a semi-rhetorical question—
“Do you think it’s possible some smart cookie at Google is going to come along and read all this and turn it into a piece of software that can write virtual Lee Child novels from now till kingdom come? Are you giving too much away?”
Child's response was revealing:
“Whenever anyone asks me where does one of my ideas come from, I always think: from reading. Read enough books, you can write anything.…You’d get the flats but none of the peaks. No flair or spark.” None of the madness, or the sublime confidence, or divine furor, or the chip-on-the-shoulder aggro. How can a machine have a chip on its shoulder?"
As it turns out, people in 2025 are churning out books, both fiction and non-fiction, using LLMs for plotting, editing, dialogs, and more. The results will be evaluated dispassionately only after enough distance of time, when both emotions and excitement have cooled down.
But these peaks of insight in the book are buried in the pits of didactions galore, there are philosophical digressions, there is a frustrating lack of structure and coherence, and a certain inexplicable nonchalance to the topic and the book itself, which lets the reader down.
Yes, Child does not plot, and the route from the opening of Make Me and Keaver's death to the Dark Web takes him some time to figure out. But... how that happens is not told. Perhaps the publisher wouldn't hear of it. There is considerable information about the Dark Web that is presented in the book, but we are not told how Lee Child did that research or who he spoke to or what he decided to leave out or even something as basic as how he navigated, or stumbled, on to this plot pathway. Perhaps the peek into the sausage factory was deemed extraneous. We are told that Child did not know the plot would lead to the Dark Web. Or did he? As a little pitcher with big ears who gets to read the unedited, raw drafts that Child provides him as printouts, this is detail that the reader expects but does not get.
Heather Martin's biography, The Reacher Guy, is also long, but better structured, and as far as informing the reader about Reacher the author, his journey, tribulations, and successes go, more successful.
Martin had an opportunity to captivate millions of Reacher readers with what goes on in the journey from individual letters to words to sentences to paragraphs to pages to chapters, with punctuation and frequent rewrites, to a full-length novel with plot, dialog, twists, turns, fights—Oh! the gorgeous and exquisitely choreographed fights, on which there is some mention—and a series that have sold more than 200 million copies.
Perhaps the magnitude of the opportunity overwhelmed him; or he got distracted, or he stopped caring after some point; we don't know. Perhaps the publisher stepped in and decided that giving out too much information was not good business strategy. We don't know. And after a point, I, the reader, stopped caring, too.
Had this book been a hundred pages long, and better edited, it would have been an order of magnitude more readable and valuable to the reader. As it stands, it contains nuggets of insight and information strewn between pages and pages of rambling prose. More's the pity.
© 2025, Abhinav Agarwal (अà¤िनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.
