FaceOff

LEE CHILD VS JOSEPH FINDER

When Joseph Finder decided to try a series character, he took many cues from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Joe named his hero Nick Heller and made him not a private eye, but a private spy. Nick works for politicians and governments and corporations, sometimes digging up secrets they’d rather keep buried. Like Jack Reacher, though, Nick’s sense of justice drives him. He’s a mix of blue collar and white collar, the son of a notorious Wall Street criminal, raised in immense wealth that evaporated when his father went to prison. He spent his formative years in a split-level ranch house in a working-class suburb of Boston.

By nature, Nick’s a chameleon. He can blend in among the corporate elite as easily as he does among the jarheads.

And, of course, he roots for the Boston Red Sox.

Jack Reacher, on the other hand, is a Yankees fan. His background is vastly different from Nick’s, but equally scattered. Reacher is an army brat, raised on military bases around the world: a man without a country, but still an American. He’s a loner who avoids attachments, yet he’s absolutely loyal. He suffers no fools.

Nick Heller and Jack Reacher. Chalk and cheese, as the Brits say. Couldn’t be more different, yet so much the same.

Which can also be said for the two writers.

Lee and Joe are good friends. They share a love of writing, baseball, and the quest for America’s best hamburger. Not a gourmet burger. Just the best plain, honest, normal burger. Lee tells the story of some years ago when they were trying a contender in a Spanish restaurant (yeah, go figure) on Twenty-second Street in New York. The talk turned to upcoming projects and Joe started riffing, thinking out loud about maybe starting a series character. He gave Lee a lengthy and penetrating analysis that covered every cost and benefit, every desirable and undesirable characteristic, every strength and weakness.

“I wish I’d had a voice recorder running. I could have sold the transcript to Writer’s Digest. It would have become the Rosetta Stone for all such decisions,” Lee recalls.

Eventually, Joe followed through on his analysis with the first Nick Heller story, Vanished (2009), written with his trademark blend of freewheeling imagination mixed with iron self-discipline.

Lee is not a planner. He does not outline stories. They just emerge naturally. For Joe, that’s like walking on a wire without a net. So Lee came up with the premise of two guys in a bar in Boston. Reacher would be the out-of-towner, like always. Heller would be home, in the city he loves. Lee was taken by the notion of a mirror at the back of a bar — the way you can look at the reflection of the person next to you and talk with both intimacy and distance. Heller and Reacher would both end up talking to and about and around someone who’s in trouble. Eventually, they’d help the guy out, because that’s what they do. But that help would come in vastly different ways.

The story was written long distance. Lee sent the first chunk by e-mail and Joe immediately asked, “What do you see happening next?”

In typical Lee Child fashion he answered, “No idea. Until you’ve written it.”

Joe coped with such improvisation just fine.

Actually, their biggest problem was who would win the Yankees-Sox game that kicks the whole thing off.