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 six Tanner novels, from The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep through Tanner’s Virgin (nee Here Comes a Hero) were published as mass-market paperback originals by Fawcett Gold Medal. While they were being written and published, I was also publishing hardcover fiction with Macmillan, starting with Deadly Honeymoon in 1967. And, when I was ready to write a seventh book about Tanner, I offered it to Macmillan.
Nowadays, almost anyone would assume that the move from paperback original to hardcover was a Big Step Up. And nowadays it generally is. But things were different then, and the most significant reason for Macmillan’s publication of Deadly Honeymoon was that Gold Medal had already turned it down.
Consider the numbers. Gold Medal paid an advance representing a royalty on the total number of copies printed, and generally amounting to somewhere between $2500 and $3000. (If they went back for a second printing, they paid a similar advance for all copies printed. This, sad to say, never happened with any of the Tanner books.)
Macmillan’s advance was $1000, against royalties on copies sold, and in return they took 50% of any paperback earnings the book might generate.
Now there were compensations. Macmillan always took me out to lunch. And hardcover books were much more likely to get reviewed, for whatever that’s worth. (Not much, I suspect.) And, finally, there was something far more prestigious about hardcover publication. A hardcover book with one’s name on it – and perhaps one’s photograph on the flap, or even the back cover – looked good on the shelf, and made one’s mother proud. It was evidence that one had arrived, even though it might in fact owe its existence to one’s having been first rejected by a paperback house.
Me Tanner, You Jane hadn’t been rejected by Gold Medal. They seemed perfectly willing to go on publishing Tanner’s adventures. The books weren’t selling terribly well – as I said, none of the six ever managed to get into a second printing – nor did sales seem to be increasing from one book to the next.
For my own part, I was getting tired of the books – although I’m not sure I was aware of it at the time. For all that the settings changed from book to book, the characters and situations seemed to me to be repetitive. And, annoyingly enough, Tanner wasn’t making me rich or famous, and for all that Fawcett was selling upwards of a hundred thousand copies of each title, I never had the sense that anyone out there was actually reading the books, or paying any attention to them.
So my agent and I put our heads together, and one of us – I forget which one – thought perhaps it was time to move Tanner to hard covers, and the other figured it was worth a try. By this time I had an idea and a title, and my agent arranged for me to meet with my editor at Macmillan and pitch it.
My first editor at Macmillan was a woman named Mary Heathcote. She bought and edited Deadly Honeymoon and After the First Death, and moved on before the latter book was published. Her replacement was Alan Rinzler – “I am the new Mary Heathcote,” his note to me began – and it was to him that I would propose Me Tanner, You Jane.
We’d met before, of course, and had had lunch once or twice. He didn’t drink, didn’t drink at all, which I found quite remarkable. I thought everyone in publishing drank. I thought it was part of the job description.
Still, he was a bright and personable fellow, and his status as a nondrinker meant there was no great danger in meeting with him in the middle of the afternoon. (CBL read the notation on a good many cards in the Rolodex of one agent I knew; Call Before Lunch was what it stood for.)
So I went in and sat across the desk from him, and started talking about this book I planned to write, furnishing him while I was at it with some background on the series, and it didn’t seem to be going too well. He looked, dare I say it, hungover.
And his eyes did look to be glazing over, which I’ve never found to be a good sign. So I talked a little faster, and fabricated some plot elements, and just kept talking, talking, talking, until the poor man held up a hand.
“Stop for a minute,” he said. “See, I had some really dynamite hash last night, and I’m not tracking all that well today. But I can see you’ve got a well-thought-out story here, and it sounds good to me, so I’ll put through a contract.”
So then all I had to do was write the thing.
I don’t remember a great deal about the writing of Me Tanner, You Jane, and I can’t blame it on hash, neither dynamite nor corned beef. I picked the African setting in an effort to make the book different from others in the series, and looked for a dramatic way to get things going. In The Scoreless Thai, I’d kicked things off with Tanner locked in a bamboo cage suspended in the air, and awaiting execution; Me Tanner, You Jane begins with him already buried.
The opening sequence gave me a chance to use something that had been stuck in my head for a couple of years. While I was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I made the acquaintance of a Latvian painter named Valdi Mais. (I had recently published Tanner’s Twelve Swingers, which involves the Latvian Army in Exile, and a local review of the book had led him to invite me to a party.) His English was good, if accented, but he made an interesting mistake on one word, adding the wrong suffix to a verb form; comparison came out comparisment.
I really loved that, and I wanted to have a character make errors of that sort, but I never was able to conjure up another example. So one of the chaps involved in Tanner’s premature interment says comparisment for comparison. Good, I thought to myself. I’ve used it, and now I can forget about it.
But evidently I haven’t.
Looking back all these years later, it strikes me that having Jane call herself Sheena after the comic book character may be more than happenstance. Because I’ve long felt that there’s a comic-book aspect to this particular novel. (You could perhaps say as much for the whole series, but I think it’s truest for MTYJ.) I have a feeling the same thing happened to me when I was writing the book as when I was pitching it to poor Alan Rinzler. I imagined the reader’s eyes glazing over, and tried to bring him/her back by making every plot turn a little more outrageous.
I don’t dislike the book all these years later, not by any means, but by the time I finished it I knew I was done – not just with the book itself, but with the series. I’m sure I’d have changed my mind if it had been a huge success, or even a rather small success, but all it did was come out and sell a handful of copies and vanish. It didn’t even manage to get reprinted in paperback.
What it did do, oddly enough, was remain in print. Nowadays books get remaindered almost before the ink is dry; unless a book continues to sell at a pretty good pace, a publisher drops it from his list and ships the leftover copies to a cut-price wholesaler, and the next thing you know your novel is on the Bargain Books table at Barnes amp; Noble, pegged at about half the price it commands in paperback.
It was not ever thus. Until the government changed the rules, a publisher could keep a book in print as a service to readers and booksellers while still writing off the greater portion of costs for tax purposes. Some swine took the trouble to close this useful loophole, and that was the end of that.
But Me Tanner, You Jane, published in 1970, was still available from Macmillan seven or eight years later. I knew this because a copy actually sold, mirabile dictu, and I got a royalty check for forty-nine cents. If I’d had any sense – and a few hundred dollars worth of risk capital – I’d have stocked up. I had neither, and all I did was tell Otto Penzler, who promptly stocked up. Shortly thereafter the book disappeared.
And here it is, all these years later, in a handsome paperback edition not that much more expensive than the original Macmillan hardcover.
I do hope you enjoyed it.
Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village