Soundcheck Magazine: What would you like to discuss today?

Keith Murray: Literature! But maybe a branch of literature you may not have delved into…too deeply.

As a band, we’ve all become deeply obsessed with, like, airport-grade thrillers. So, your Michael Connellys, your Lee Child..ses, uh, who else. Robert Crace. [Ed. Note: Jim Crace]. Et cetera. Et cetera.

The biggest hit, although I don’t think anybody would argue it’s the best-written series, are Lee Child’s novels, which feature the hero Jack Reacher, who has been described as looking like a “condom full of walnuts.” That’s his physiology.

SM: The author described him that way?

KM: Well, a character in the novel mentions that he looks like—a condom full of walnuts. She sort of mentions, marveling over his physique, that he looks like a condom full of walnuts.

SM: [Laughing] How is Child not a household name?

KM: He actually is a huge, huge deal. I had never heard of him. I think—there’s a market for what these authors do, and I’m not sure it’s discussed very often in the indie household. Who’s the author…now I’m not going to be able to remember his name. There’s one author who’s in that genre who very clearly has his books ghostwritten by other people…oh! Patterson. Michael Patterson? [Ed. Note: James Patterson]. He legitimately has about 60 books. And some say, you know, “Michael Patterson with Mike Pace**.” And clearly, Mike Pace has written the entirety of the book. Patterson just puts his name on it. So I think very few of these authors are household names—I had never really heard of any of them before. I feel like Thomas Harris might be the most famous, simply because of Silence of the Lambs.

SM: Is there a particular plot line that has gripped you?

KM: For the band as the whole, and for myself personally, the zenith of—at least the Lee Child novels, and perhaps the whole genre—is Persuader, in which—part of the deal with the Jack Reacher novels is that Reacher is essentially a vagabond. He used to be a military policeman and left the military out of disgust out of the politics and sort of hierarchical injustice—

SM: So he’s a man of principle.

KM: He’s a man of deepest principle, and that has essentially led him to be a tramp. He has no job, he wanders around, and somehow consistently gets thrust into situations in which his heroism comes out—he injects himself into the situation. In this one, he gets—

The timeline of the narrative is scrambled, so when we first meet him, he’s rescuing the son of a…I guess I don’t want to say what his father does. His father is a very wealthy man, in carpet trading, although it turns out that’s a cover for what his father really does.

Um, [there’s a kid] who has been kidnapped. Jack Reacher intervenes, saves the kid; it turns out Jack Reacher was part of an FBI sting; they set up the kidnapping, knowing that the kid would invite his hero to his father’s home. Suddenly Jack Reacher is in the thick of it!

It’s wonderful.

SM: I love the name “Jack Reacher”. It’s very... descriptive.

KM: I do think the fact that he has—there’s a verb involved. He’s a very—he’s an active man. “Reacher”. “Jack” is just a good, All-American, butch name. Certainly, the name is as clumsy as they come. I’m trying to think of other characters in other novels. The Jack Reacher-esque character in [Jim] Crace’s novels is named Joe Pike. So that seems to be it—there’s a trend in the lexicon of character names.

SM: …It seems a little mix-and-match—

KM: …Elvis Cole is the detective in the [Jim] Crace books, and his partner is old Joe Pike—

SM: It’s like they sit down and come up with a list of first names, a list of last names, and just draw lines—

KM: "Generic first name, evocative last name". That’s the rule.

SM: Elvis Cole doesn’t quite--
KM: But Elvis Cole doesn’t really work.

Elvis Cole doesn’t really—he could certainly thrash me, but he’s not exactly…

Elvis Cole’s more of a thinker. He’s sensitive. He’s just very thoughtful and introspective. He’s like a yoga buff. Every morning he goes on his porch, does some yoga with this cat he rescued. He’s that kind of guy! And sure, he’ll bed a lady per book, but they all respect themselves in the morning! Unlike with Reacher. And I’m sure—and although they clearly enjoy it—something tells me a month later, [the ladies] regret their time with Jack Reacher.

SM: (laughs). I feel like if a character has to tell her friends, “I hooked up with a guy named Jack Reacher—“

KM: “Who looks like a condom full of walnuts.”

SM: (laughs) Exactly! Not much more needs to be said.


SM: How’d you stumble upon this genre of book?

KM: Chris, our bass player, introduced us all. He—I think he was reading the New York Times book review. Very recently, for some reason, Lee Child has gained some level of credibility with critics that continues to confound us, especially because his most recent work—it’s unanimous that it’s his worst, among us. Fact is, the critics are only liking it more and more. But I think Chris stumbled upon it in the NY Times book review for [Child’s] second-to-most recent—his penultimate novel. But hopefully this last one won’t be the final one of the series.

SM: Do you think it’s a critical in-joke? Like the NY Times decided to champion a terrible book?

KM: To say that they’re “terrible” is deeply unfair. (Sighs). You know, they’re written with a narrative facility, and they certainly are incredibly gripping. The fact of the matter is that everybody in my band has read at least 8 Jack Reacher novels. They feel disposable, but they’re ridiculously compelling. …To say they’re “addictive” is to do discredit to everybody involved. (Chuckles.) They’re compelling in the extreme.

...To be fair, we do skirt the worst of airport fare... But it's not--we're not without discretion, here. Lee Child is certainly--I mean, he's writing within certain parameters that require him to kind of get to the point, and not be, uh, you know, too verbose. He certainly is flowery at times. But in a way that's sort of, almost pathetic. It's endearing, in the pathos that's involved in his attempts at being literate. No! Okay. Literary. He's deeply literate, I would say.

SM: I imagine I’m not giving Lee Child enough credit—I might be assuming his books are worse than they are--

KM: …He certainly cranks them out with a level of alacrity that you imagine he doesn’t spend a lot of time digesting what he’s working on. (Laughs).

The book nearest to our hearts is—I can’t think of the author’s name. Oh! Robert—it’s either Robert McCavin or McCaren. [Ed. Note: Robert McCammon.] It’s a book called The Wolf’s Hour. And get this: it takes place during World War II. Michael Gallatin is a British spy. He grew up in Russia where his name as a child was Mikhail Galtanov, or something. But these days, he is the go-to independent spy for the British government. They call upon him only when they need him—I actually believe that at the beginning of this mission, he’s retired, and they send someone out to sort of convince him.

(Dramatic pause.) Michael Gallatin has one thing that other spies might not have.

SM: Knife in the shoe?

KM: He’s a werewolf. He’s a werewolf! So it’s werewolf vs. Nazi.

…It’s probably the finest book I’ve ever read.

SM: Is it serious or ironic?

KM: No, it’s serious. It’s deadly serious. I mean, it’s serious in the way that a book about a werewolf fighting Nazis is serious. …It may be one of the most compelling reads ever. I highly recommend it. I’ve never given it to someone who’s rejected it.

**Mike Pace is Oxford Collapse’s guitarist; Oxford Collapse and We Are Scientists were touring together at the time.