TANNER COMES IN FROM THE COLD: Lawrence Block

The following article by the amazingly talented and prolific author Lawrence Block appeared in Spies & Secret Agents, the theme of the latest issue of Mystery Readers Journal (Volume 34:2). Thanks, Larry!

Lawrence Block:
Tanner Comes in from the Cold

I made the acquaintance of Evan Tanner a year or two before I started writing about him. Two odd facts called themselves to my attention at about the same time: There were a few documented instances of people who never slept at all, and some German chap was the lineal Stuart Pretender to the English throne. So I found myself imagining what life might be like with an extra eight hours of consciousness each day, and along with other traits, I decided the insomniac fellow would champion the Pretender’s cause.

And that’s as far as that went.

Until 1965, when I actually held a job, my first and last since college. I was in Racine, Wisconsin, editing the Whitman Numismatic Journal (and if you don’t own a set of those issues, how can you call yourself a Lawrence Block completist?)

One day at the office I met a fellow named Lincoln W. Higgie, home on a visit after a stretch in Istanbul, where he made a very precarious living smuggling rare coins and antiquities out of the country. (Why precarious? Because if the authorities caught you, they were apt to kill you. That precarious enough for you?)

We hit it off well enough for me to invite him home for dinner, and after dinner he and I pretty much flattened a fifth of Bushmill’s. We sat and drank and talked, and he did more talking than I did because he had way more interesting exploits to recount. Like the time he boarded a plane to Zurich with some relic that he intended to put in an auction at the Bank Leu, and something gave him a funny feeling, and he took out the wrapped relic and asked the pleasant middle-aged woman seated next to him if she’d mind putting it in her carry-on luggage for the time being.

She agreed, and moments later some uniformed chaps stood him up and searched him, and went through his own hand luggage, and sighed when they found nothing. And when the plane landed in Switzerland, the woman handed over the parcel. “I don’t know what this is,” she said, “and I don’t ever want to know, but that was quite exciting, wasn’t it?”

Damn right I let him do the talking.

And a couple of drinks later, he told me an intricate story of the Armenian community of Smyrna (aka Izmir) at the time of the genocide at the hands of the Turks. The Armenians all gathered their gold, he said, and stowed it beneath the porch of a house in Balikesir, and that was the end of it. Until half a century later a couple of Americans working for Aramco heard the story and decided to hunt for the gold. They managed through considerable research to locate the very house, and broke into the concrete vault beneath the porch, and learned that (a) the story was true, and (b) somebody beat them to it, because the gold was gone.

I may have some details wrong. This was 53 years ago, and, not to put too fine a point on it, Bill Higgie was not the only one hitting the Bushmill’s. I may not have held up my end of the conversation, but I had the drinking part down pat.

Now here’s what’s remarkable, and what makes it abundantly clear Evan Tanner wanted to make an entrance. When I awoke the next morning, I actually remembered the conversation!

And I thought about that golden hoard, as it were, and realized I now had something for my sleepless knight to do. He’d be committed not to a single lost cause but to a whole portfolio thereof, and one of them would be the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, and he’d learn about that house in Balikesir, and he’d go there.

This time, however, the gold would still be there, waiting for him.

A couple of months later, after I’d decided it was time to bid adieu to honest work, I sat down and wrote what became The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. I had by this point in life written a few dozen books, including two or three under my own name, but this was the first book in which I’d managed to find a voice that was uniquely mine. I loved writing about Tanner, and in the course of the next several years I turned out six more books about him.

Looking back, I’m amazed at my cavalier attitude toward research. Tanner went all over the world, and it wasn’t until his fifth adventure, Tanner’s Tiger, that he visited a country where I’d set foot myself. (That was Canada. He was turned back at the border, but found someone to smuggle him across.)

So I didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the places he visited, nor did I have much in the way of second- or third-hand knowledge. It’s not as though I spent a lot of time in libraries on Tanner’s behalf. I owned a 1948 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and any fact unknown to it remained unknown to me.

I stopped writing about Tanner in 1970; Me Tanner, You Jane was the last volume, and I’m not entirely sure why I aborted the series at that point. It seemed to me that the books were too much the same, that he kept meeting the same types of people, that I’d taken the premise as far as it could go.

Then, 28 years later, I wrote Tanner on Ice.

No one could have been more surprised than I. Here’s what happened: my publisher at Dutton, Elaine Koster, had decided to reissue the seven Tanner books as NAL paperbacks. I had occasion to read the first volume in galleys, and I liked it, and remembered how much fun it had been to write them. And wouldn’t it be nice if I could come up with an eighth book to join the others?

But how could I? Tanner had been wounded in the Korean War, that’s when a shred of shrapnel took out his sleep center, and this made him way too old to be leaping international borders in a single bound. By now he’d have problem enough climbing the three or four flights of stairs to his Upper West Side apartment. (Three flights? Four flights? 105th Street? 107th Street? Hey, don’t ask me. It’s not in the Britannica, so how the hell would I know?)

No, he had to be the same age as he was in Me Tanner, You Jane. And the missing time had to be accounted for.

And all of this was plainly impossible.

Until the evening when I was at a concert at Avery Fisher Hall, and my mind wandered, and I realized what had happened to Evan Tanner. He’d been drugged by agents of the Swedish government, and, because they were way too Scandinavian to kill him outright, he’d spent a quarter of a century in a frozen-food locker in Union City, New Jersey. And when they thawed him out—very carefully!—he hadn’t aged a day.

Once I got the idea I had to write the book. And this time he had reason to go to Burma, a country I’d recently visited. (You can call it Myanmar if you wish. I, like most of the Burmese, will stick to the old name.)

I wrote the book in Listowel, a town in County Kerry of which I’m inordinately fond. And, because this was in 1998, and I was concerned about having computer problems in a foreign land, I left my Mac at home and wrote it by hand. But here’s the thing: sitting at a desk in my room at the Listowel Arms, I picked up a pen and bent over a yellow legal pad. And when I started writing, Tanner was simply there. I didn’t have to work to get his voice right, or to know his views on whatever matters came up. I’ll tell you, it was as though he’d spent the past 28 years in some otherwise unoccupied brain cells of mine, just waiting for a chance to resume talking.

And he’s still talking, I should point out, he sounds a lot like Theo Holland. That’s the skilled voice artist with whom I’ve teamed up to issue Tanner in audio. His most recent effort, readily available via Amazon or Audible, is Tanner’s Virgin. (That’s book six, which you may know as Here Comes a Hero, an unfortunate title someone at Fawcett came up with. I like Tanner’s Virgin a lot better, don’t you?)

So of course people have asked when there’ll be a ninth Evan Tanner novel. “It was 28 years between books seven and eight,” I point out. “The fellow seems to have the life cycle of a cicada. You can look for book nine sometime in 2026.”

You know, that line worked better twenty years ago. All of a sudden 2026 is only eight years away.

Hey, do me a favor. Forget I ever said anything…

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Learn more about this prolific, award-winning, sociable mystery author and world traveler at lawrenceblock.com.

B is for Block: Lawrence Block

As part of the Mystery Fanfare Alphabet Meme-- Guest Posts by "Alphabet"Authors--today's post is brought to you by the letter "B". Lawrence Block, this great man of letters, has been "Block" for many years, but he's also written under an alphabet of other names. Maybe Larry will do a guest post for more letters!  So you see, it's only fitting that this meme begin with Lawrence Block.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: 

A PEN NAME? REALLY? AFTER ALL THESE YEARS???

The first book I wrote was about a young woman who’d come straight from her college graduation to Greenwich Village, in search of her sexual identity. My agent sent it to Crest, where it was bought and published. I had called it Shadows; they called it Strange Are the Ways of Love, and they called me Lesley Evans.

The second book I wrote, though the first published, was written for Harry Shorten at Midwood. I called it Carla and I called myself Sheldon Lord, and Harry didn’t feel a need to change either of those names.

I wrote those books in 1958, and it’s no secret (and was never much of one) that I wrote a great many over the next two decades, many of them under one pen name or another. I was never Lesley Evans again, but I went on being Sheldon Lord. And Andrew Shaw and Ben Christopher and John Warren Wells. I wrote one book (Such Men Are Dangerous) with a first-person protagonist named Paul Kavanagh, and put his name on the cover; then I wrote two more books, told in the third person and peopled with other characters, and used Paul Kavanagh’s name on them, too. I wrote another book (No Score) with a first-person protagonist named Chip Harrison, and put his name down as author. (There were three more books by Chip, but they were also about Chip.)

And then there was Jill Emerson.

Jill was a little different. After I’d parted company with an agent, I sat down and wrote a sensitive novel of the lesbian experience. I put the name Jill Emerson on it, and I put Jill’s name on the letter I wrote to the editor at Midwood. This was really dumb, as I’d published maybe a dozen books with Midwood and the door would have been open for me. Instead I elected to fling my manuscript over the transom, and I got a contract by return mail. (Call me insane, but you can’t say I’m without talent.)
The mail came addressed to Jill Emerson, whose name I’d already added to my office mailbox so that I could receive The Ladder, the publication of the Daughters of Bilitis. Which was a national lesbian organization, to which Jill belonged. (Call me insane, but you can’t say I’m not resourceful.)
I called the book Shadows and Twilight. Midwood called it Warm and Willing. That seemed reasonable to me. I mean, they only changed two of my three words.

Jill’s second and last novel for Midwood was Enough of Sorrow. Throughout, no one there had a clue that Jill was anyone other than the young gay woman she purported to be.
 #
By the end of the 60s I was done writing pseudonymous erotica. I’d long since stopped writing for Midwood and Nightstand and Beacon. Then Berkley started up a line designed to elevate the genre, and my agent peddled me to them. He told them the author’s real name was Lawrence Josephson, but that he’d be using a pen name. When he asked me what name I wanted to use, I figured it sounded like a job for Jill Emerson.

Jill wrote three books for Berkley, Thirty, Threesome, and A Madwoman’s Diary. (They came out with other titles, but forget it; they’re eBooks now, with my original titles restored.) They were stylistically experimental; A Madwoman’s Diary, as you might expect, was in diary form, as was Thirty. Threesome was even more of a tour-de-force, with the three characters writing alternate chapters of a Naked Came the Stranger–type novel.

Next I wrote an epistolary novel that would have been Jill’s sixth book, and her fourth for Berkley. But everybody who read it thought it deserved better, and my agent sent it to Bernard Geis, where it was published as Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, by Lawrence Block.

#
Jill wrote two more books, a Berkley hardcover called The Trouble With Eden and an Arbor House literary mainstream novel called A Week as Andrea Benstock. There are some good stories about both books, but I won’t tell them here. (You can find them, and far more detail on all the others, in Afterthoughts, a piecemeal memoir of my writing life. It’s composed of the afterwords I wrote for my Open Road eBooks, and will be out soon as a 99¢ eBook. The bargain price is there because we hope it’ll induce you to buy some of the other books. (Hey, call me insane, but you can’t say I’m not enterprising.)

A Week as Andrea Benstock came out in 1975, not long after the fourth Chip Harrison and the third Paul Kavanagh. And that was that. I was done being Jill, and I was done with pen names altogether. When the Harrison and Kavanagh books were reissued by new publishers, they came out with my own name on them.

No more pen names.

Yeah. Right.
 #
Cut to, oh, sometime last year. I’d written a couple of short stories about a hot and homicidal young lady, and now I watched as they coalesced into a book. (This had happened before; a short story about a wistful hitman named Keller grew into four books about the fellow.)

The book was an utter joy to write, and I couldn’t remember when I’d had more fun. But it was very different from Matthew Scudder’s line of country, and I decided the ideal publisher would be Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime. He loved the book and wanted it as his first-ever hardcover original.
And I knew how I wanted the byline to read.

#
GETTING OFF.
A Novel of Sex and Violence.
By Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson.
 #
For a couple of reasons.

One’s the experience I had with Small Town. That was my post-9/11 book, the big jam-packed multiple-viewpoint New York novel I’d been wanting to write for years. It was well-received by readers and reviewers, and sold reasonably well, but it also brought an unsettling amount of negative email. Some of it was downright hostile, and what it came down to was that the book’s sexual side was more than some readers were prepared to handle. The ones who came to the book from an affection for my lighthearted burglar and his faux-Manx cat were just plain not ready for Susan Pomerance and her Brazilian landscaping.

Fair enough. I knew what to do with those emails, being the happy owner of a keyboard with a DELETE button, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to go through all that again. I decided to make it very clear what sort of book I had this time around, so that it only got into the hands of readers who’d welcome its excesses.

Reason enough for a pen name. An open pen name, because I do want people to be able to find the damn book, but a pen name nonetheless.

As I said, reason enough. But not the only reason.
 #
See, it just felt right.

Being Jill again. I’d accessed something within myself when I heaved Shadows & Twilight onto Midwood’s slush pile. And I felt its creative empowerment while I wrote Getting Off. Part of it originally was based on its clandestine aspect, and this time around I’d be out there, my name twinned with Jill’s on the cover, even as all Jill’s early work now bears the same dual byline.

Hey, call me insane, but you can’t say I’m not having a good time.

THE END

You can call Lawrence Block insane, or you can call him Jill. To do so: lawbloc @ gmail.com; www.lawrenceblock.com; www.facebook.com/lawrence.block. To follow him on Twitter: @LawrenceBlock.

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7/5: Don't miss the "interview' on Alison Kent's Blog: Lawrence Block interviews Jill Emerson, his occasional alter ego HERE.