Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Tiger

(But he’d be up anyway, wouldn’t he? Never mind.)

Irony? Tanner, who leaps international borders the way Superman hops over tall buildings, could find himself refused entry to Canada, so that he’d be the first person who had to sneak in since Wolfe beat Montcalm. (On September 13, 1759, and neither man survived the day – but you knew that, right?) Oh, the possibilities for irony were everywhere, but in the end I set the book in Canada for the same reason that Tanner went there.

I wanted to go to Expo.

He took Minna, but I went by myself – to have a look at it, and to break a longstanding rule and actually know something about the setting of a Tanner book. I spent a week or so in Montreal, and visited the Cuban Pavilion, and I can tell you it’s just as described. It was quite remarkable. I don’t think they had trapdoors, and I don’t for a moment believe they were shanghaiing black people, but I can’t absolutely rule it out. I probably ought to explain about the tiger.

A couple of weeks after I turned in the book, I got a call from my agent. “They want a change,” he told me. “They want Arlette to be wearing a tigerskin coat.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, why?”

“So they can call the book Tanner’s Tiger. ”

“They can call it that anyway,” I said. They could call anything whatever they wanted, as they’d demonstrated, to my chagrin, with previous books.

“But without the coat,” he said, “it wouldn’t make any sense.”

“It would make as much sense,” I pointed out, “as it would for her to be wearing a tigerskin coat.” But my heart wasn’t in it, and I made the change, modifying it slightly – instead of a coat, I gave her a tigerskin beret, and a tigerskin throw for her bed. It’s not a bad title, although I can’t say it makes much sense.

You need a passport to cross the Peace Bridge these days, or some lesser form of government-issued photo ID. The world had changed, and that border with it. The Free Quebec movement never got much more violent than the occasional bomb in the occasional post box, though it did achieve some of its goals through peaceful means, and never did find it necessary to blow up the Queen of England.

But here’s the thing. You really never do know what the future holds.

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

New York Times bestselling author LAWRENCE BLOCK is one of the most widely recognized names in the crime fiction genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar® and Shamus awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He received the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, only the third American (after Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain) to be given this award. He is a prolific author, having written more than fifty books and numerous short stories, and is a devoted New Yorker who spends much of his time traveling. Readers can visit his website at www.lawrenceblock.com .