The Canceled Czech

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 and 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.

Tanner was my first series character, but I didn’t know that when I started writing about him. As pleased as I was with The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, he wasn’t yet a series character because you can’t have a one-book series. (Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Some years later I wrote a book called The Specialists, and it did in fact turn out to be a one-book series. But I digress…)

By the time I finished Thief, I knew I wanted to write more about this guy. I’d written several novels under my own name by then, plus several dozen under pen names, but it seemed to me that this was the first book with a voice that was uniquely mine. That felt good, and I wanted more of it.

Thief ends with Tanner the putative employee of a government agency so secret that he doesn’t know its name, and his boss doesn’t know that Tanner doesn’t really work for him. So his boss sends him off to rescue a particularly odious Nazi war criminal, and Tanner accepts the assignment, and carries it out in his own idiosyncratic way.

What a different place the world was when I wrote this book! There was barely a patch of rust on the Iron Curtain; not only were Perestroika and Glasnost decades in the future, but the world still had some turning to do before the Prague Spring of 1968. The Iron Curtain’s gone, the Soviet Union’s gone, and Czechoslovakia has bifurcated itself amoeba-style into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the last a development no one anticipated but which Tanner (like an abiding majority of Czechs and Slovaks) would have wholeheartedly approved.

Kotacek, the unpleasant chap Tanner rescues, is of course a Slovak, not a Czech, but somehow the notion of calling the book The Canceled Slovak never entered my mind. Go figure.

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village