The Hero

About the TLS

The Times Literary Supplement was born in January 1902. Its first ever front page bashfully stated that ‘during the Parliamentary session Literary Supplements to “The Times” will appear as often as may be necessary in order to keep abreast with the more important publications of the day’. Fortunately, the question of necessity was not left in the hands of literary journalists (who, we can imagine, might occasionally push for a holiday or two), and the title became a weekly one. A few years later, the TLS split entirely from The Times.

Since then, we have prided ourselves on being the world’s leading magazine for culture and ideas. Our guiding principle for the selection of pieces remains the same as it ever has been: is it interesting; and is it beautifully written? Over the years, our contributors have included the very best writers and thinkers in the world: from Virginia Woolf to Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath to Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera to Christopher Hitchens, Patricia Highsmith to Martin Scorsese.

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In an ever-quickening culture of flipness and facility, fake news and Facebook, the TLS is determined to be part of the counter-culture of quality. We believe in expertise, breadth and depth. We believe in the importance of ideas, and the transformative power of art. And we believe that, in reading the TLS – in whatever form, be it in a magazine, online or in a book – you are supporting a set of values that we have been proud to uphold for more than a hundred years. So thank you for that.

Stig Abell, 11th Editor of the TLS

London, 2019

Also by Lee Child

THE JACK REACHER NOVELS

Killing Floor (1997)

Die Trying (1998)

Tripwire (1999)

Running Blind (US)/The Visitor (UK) (2000)

Echo Burning (2001)

Without Fail (2002)

Persuader (2003)

The Enemy (2004)

One Shot (2005)

The Hard Way (2006)

Bad Luck and Trouble (2007)

Nothing to Lose (2008)

Gone Tomorrow (2009)

61 Hours (Spring 2010)

Worth Dying For (Autumn 2010)

The Affair (2011)

A Wanted Man (2012)

Never Go Back (2013)

Personal (2014)

Make Me (2015)

Night School (2016)

The Midnight Line (2017)

Past Tense (2018)

Blue Moon (2019)

NON-FICTION

Jack Reacher’s Rules (2012)

Copyright

TLS Books

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The-TLS.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by TLS Books in 2019

Copyright © Lee Child 2019

Cover illustration by Shutterstock

Lee Child asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Illustrations © Ella Baron 2019

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008355784

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008355791

Version: 2019-11-01

Contents

1  Cover

2  About the TLS

3  Also by Lee Child

4  Title Page

5  Copyright

6  Contents

7  The Hero

8  About the Author

9  Enjoyed the book?

10  Also from TLS Books

11  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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The Hero

Let’s start with opium. That venerable poppy grew wild and natural after the retreat of the last Ice Age, across a broad band of territory stretching from Asia Minor to the Mediterranean to North Africa. We know from the archaeological record that New Stone Age farmers were interested in it. A carefully curated stash of seeds, about seven thousand years old, was discovered near the Mediterranean Sea; seventeen other New Stone Age sites throughout what we now call Europe show evidence of opium use five or six thousand years ago; and the first deliberate cultivation of the poppy, as opposed to its casual collection, seems to have happened in Mesopotamia over five thousand years ago, organized by the local Sumerians, who called their crop hul gil, which translates as ‘the joy plant’.

I would love to know who tried it first. I would love to know who tried anything first. Who first dug up a strange root or random tuber and thought, hey, you know what – maybe I should cook this and eat it? In particular, I would love to know how many died trying. Our species seems to be restless and curious to a degree that seems almost unhinged. Recent research concerning the Neanderthal people shows them to have been pretty much the opposite of what we have long assumed – they were intelligent, bigger-brained, better animals than us, stronger, faster, healthier, more durable, better toolmakers, caring, compassionate, gentle, artistic and organized. But they seem to have been constitutionally timid. Their settlements migrated slowly, cautiously and sensibly. Often a new settlement would be within sight of a previous settlement. In particular travel over water seems never to have been attempted, unless the far shore was clearly visible. By contrast, our own ancestors, Homo sapiens, went anywhere and everywhere, many of them, we assume, to their doom. Not cautious or sensible at all. The consensus – in what I suppose we could call psychological archaeology – seems to be that Homo neanderthalensis was painfully rational, and Homo sapiens was batshit crazy.

Crazy enough, certainly, for one of them to notice the pretty red flower, to scratch its immature seed pod, to watch the sticky latex ooze out, and then to think, hey, you know what – maybe I should collect this stuff and dry it, and then suck it or chew it or smoke it. I would like to meet that person. Certainly his or her inspiration was way more complicated than, for instance, finding a carrot and deciding to try a bite. Restless and curious indeed. (Although smoking is a misnomer – the latex was not itself set on fire, but indirectly heated, and the active ingredients were inhaled as they gassed off. Vaping, five thousand years ago. Nothing new under the sun.) The effect, then as now, was of a deeply warm, hugely satisfying contentment, washing unstoppably over the user, leaving him or her laid out and passive for hours at a time, inert and endlessly contemplative. As a result, the opium poppy’s scientific name is Papaver somniferum, which is Latin for ‘the poppy that carries you to sleep’.

Of course the problem with an extract from a plant growing wild and natural – or even farmed, given good years and bad – was that dosage was fundamentally unpredictable. The sixteenth-century physician Gabriel Fallopius complained bitterly that opium tended to be either too weak or too strong, and if weak it didn’t help, and if strong it was exceedingly dangerous. An overdose caused the victim’s breathing to slow down, and down, and down, until it stopped altogether. Not good. So began a quest to isolate the active ingredients, in order to deliver them in known and reliable doses.

Like most things to do with practical chemistry, not much happened until the nineteenth century, when, between 1804 and 1817, a German pharmacist named Friedrich Sertürner zeroed-in on a particular compound that made up about twelve per cent of the latex by weight. It seemed to be where the action was. The other eighty-eight per cent was window dressing. Sertürner got better at getting the good stuff out, but showed less finesse in his experimental methodology; his indiscriminate test doses nearly killed him and the three young boys he recruited to help. Restless and curious and almost unhinged. But in the end he lived to announce he had successfully isolated the compound, which would henceforth reliably deliver the wave of hugely satisfying contentment, and had the happy side effect of also being the most effective painkiller so far known in human history. Sertürner named his newly naked chemical after the Greek god of dreams. He called it morphine.

Morphine did well in the subsequent decades, especially after the invention of the hypodermic syringe as a delivery system. The American Civil War became a gigantic testing ground for its painkilling abilities. It was great. Wounded soldiers called it ‘God’s Own Medicine’. But it was extremely addictive. Opium itself had long been known to be addictive – a sixteenth-century Venetian visitor observing far-gone Turkish users reported that without their fix they ‘quickly die’. And that was with the eighty-eight per cent window dressing included. Morphine was the real thing, all the time. In America the 1860s ended with millions of addicts. The same was true elsewhere, albeit less spectacular in terms of numbers. So began a new quest, to deliver the wave of contentment, and the painkilling, but without the addiction.

In true British style, the (then presumed) solution was hit upon in 1874 – perhaps by accident – by an English chemist named C. R. Alder Wright, who then quickly abandoned the project, perhaps as uninteresting. The same discovery was then made again, more than twenty years later, and independently, and perhaps also accidentally, by a German chemist named Felix Hoffmann. Hoffmann was trying to synthesize codeine, which is morphine’s baby brother, a chemically similar, but less potent and less addictive substance. Instead his new discovery turned out to be twice as strong as morphine, twice as good at delivering the wave of contentment, and above all not in the least little bit addictive. Or so Hoffmann claimed at the time.

His product swept the world, delivering every bit of the longed-for feeling, deeply warm, hugely satisfying, unstoppable. Twice as fit for purpose as morphine, and way better than opium. It was put in cough syrup for children, and tinctures for anxious women. But the non-addictive part of the deal was a lie. Hoffmann’s product was in fact horrifically addictive. Lives were ruined, people died, crime was rampant. (But corporate fortunes were made.)

What did Hoffmann name his product, that at best left its users laid out and passive for hours at a time, inert and endlessly contemplative, and at worst ruined their lives and killed them? He called it heroin, from the German for heroic.

Why that word?

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