Tanner On Ice

Afterword

Evan Michael Tanner was conceived in the summer of 1956, in New York’s Washington Square Park. But his gestation period ran to a decade.

That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.

What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)

But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.

Where’s Tanner in all this?

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen Anne, the last reigning monarch of the House of Stuart, there was still (in the unlikely person of a German princeling) a Stuart pretender to the English throne.

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time Magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Britannica. They seemed to go together, and I found myself thinking of a character whose sleep center had been destroyed, and who consequently had an extra eight hours in the day to contend with. What would he do with the extra time? Well, he could learn languages. And what passion would drive him? Why, he’d be plotting and scheming to oust Betty Battenberg, the Hanoverian usurper, and restore the Stuarts to their rightful place on the throne of England.

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Tanner was ready to be born. By then a Stuart restoration was just one of his disparate passions. He was to be a champion of lost causes and irredentist movements, and I was to write eight books about him.

The first seven Tanner novels were written and published within a four-or five-year span. The eighth one took twenty-eight years.

Back in the day, I never made a firm conscious decision to discontinue the series. It felt to me as though I was done with it, and as time passed the likelihood of my ever returning to Tanner grew increasingly remote. There had been reason to stop – the lack of great enthusiasm on the part of readers and publishers, for one thing, and the fact that the stories and characters had seemed to me to be repeating themselves. And it struck me that there was further reason to stay stopped, in that all of the lost causes and irredentist movements to which my sleepless knight belonged had somehow transformed themselves; when I started writing about them they seemed richly comedic, and since then they had turned homicidal.

After Black Sunday, what was even vaguely funny about the IRA and the Irish Troubles? After a few ETA bombings and assassinations, what was amusing about Basque nationalism?

And so on.

It’s not unheard of for a writer to stop writing about a series character. Sometimes it’s time to move on.

And, by the same token, sometimes it’s time to return.

In 1977, I published Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, the first of a series about one Bernie Rhodenbarr. Four more books followed in about as many years, and then after a few failed attempts at a sixth volume I stopped trying. I turned to other things, and the years passed, as they always seem to do.

Bernie was a hugely popular character, and whenever I made a personal appearance at a signing or conference, the first question I’d get (and often the fourth and twelfth as well) was when I would write another book about him. “Soon, I hope,” I would say at first, but the years kept passing without another Burglar book, and I began saying that it was unlikely there’d be any more of them. “I’d like to write another,” I would say, “but I don’t think it will happen. Though I certainly don’t rule it out.”

And what abut Tanner, someone would occasionally ask. Any chance of a new Tanner book?

“No,” was always my reply. “No, there’s a slim chance of a new Burglar book, but Tanner’s done.”

And, after eleven Rhodenbarrless years, I did in fact produce The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, and there have been four more since then. Bernie’s reappearance led to still more readers wondering if Tanner as well might be in for a revival.

“No,” I said. “Never happen.”

Shows what I know.

Here’s how it happened. A paperback publisher had arranged to reprint the Tanner books, and sent me galleys of the first two titles, to see if there was anything that needed to be changed. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to change anything – you pull one thread and the whole sweater unravels – but I figured it wouldn’t hurt me to read the books.

So I did, and what happened was I remembered just how much fun it had been to write them. Now memory’s a curious thing. It’s never as accurate as one thinks, for one thing, and for another one tends to remember the more pleasant aspects of an event and forget the bad part. (And a good thing, let me tell you, or nobody would ever have a second child or run a second marathon.) So the books probably weren’t quite that much fun to write, but that’s how I recalled them. And in fact there had been an insouciance about my writing all those years ago; if it was often lamentably careless, it was as well delightfully carefree. These were fun, I told myself all those years later. And I guess they were.

So why not sign up for some more fun? Why not write some more about Tanner?

Alas, I didn’t see how I possibly could. For one thing, the fellow was a Korean War veteran. By now he was twenty-eight years older than he’d been in Me Tanner, You Jane, which would make him well up in his sixties, and a tad long in the tooth for all of that hopping in and out of various beds and across various borders. Some series characters stay the same age forever, and Bernie Rhodenbarr isn’t a day older than he was in his first appearance, and no one has ever been bothered by this heroic defiance of Time’s winged chariot. But Tanner, rooted in historical and geopolitical realities (or unrealities, as you prefer) struck me as the sort of character who had to exist in real time.

And, even if one was prepared for an action-adventure hero old enough to collect Social Security, how to explain his quarter-century absence? What the hell had he been doing since we saw him last? Sleeping? Not likely, since sleeping was the one thing he didn’t do at all.

Nope, I decided. There was no way to write more Tanner books. The folks at Dutton would be delighted if I did, as it would certainly kick-start the reprint series, but that wasn’t reason enough to do it. There were real impediments here, and no way around them. So I shrugged, as I often do, and said the hell with it, as I often do.

But I forgot to inform my subconscious mind.

What happened was I went to a concert. It was at Lincoln Center, and the New York Philharmonic was playing something or other, but all I recall of the evening is the idea that came to me. There are three things that happen to me at concerts, and I can’t cause them to happen, nor can I stop them from happening. One is sleep, and another is being absorbed in the music, and the third is a state where I’m very much awake but done concentrating on the music, so that my mind wanders.

Sometimes, while wandering, it produces (or allows the reception of) ideas.

Which is what happened that particular evening. All at once I thought of a way to account for the twenty-eight-year gap since we’d last heard from Tanner, and to keep him the age he’d been when we saw him last. The world had moved on, while he’d remained unchanged, fixed – yea, verily, frozen in time.

Once I had the idea, a world of possibilities opened, all of them deliciously Tanneresque. I couldn’t wait to write the book.

I decided to set it in Burma, a country Lynne and I had visited a couple of months earlier, at a time when I had not the slightest idea I’d even want to set a book there, let alone one starring Evan Tanner. And I decided to write it in Ireland, in the town of Listowel, in north Kerry.

If I did so today, I’d take along a laptop. But this was just long enough ago to make me nervous about trying to use a computer that far from home. So instead I took a pen and some legal pads and sat down at a table in my room at the Listowel Arms and wrote the book in longhand.

(The computer, incidentally, is blamed for the fact that books are longer than they used to be. Writing’s become so much easier that writers are self-indulgent, and natter on at greater length than they ought to. Well, I might be self-indulgent, and I very likely natter on longer than I ought to, but that trip to Ireland proved that the computer has precious little to do with it. I wrote every word with a ballpoint pen, and my hand ached at the end of each day’s session, and still the bloody book ran 90,000 words, which made it almost half again as long as Tanner’s earlier adventures, each of which had been pounded out far less effortfully on a Smith-Corona portable. So don’t blame the computer, my friend. Blame the windy old fart who’s tapping away at it.)

And will there be any additional Tanner novels? Is there a chance we’ll hear from him again?

Well, I’d tell you, I’ve learned, as they say, never to say never. Tanner surprised the daylights out of me by reappearing after twenty-eight years. The fellow would appear to have the life-cycle of a cicada. So look for him sometime in 2026.

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village