Lawrence Block - Tanner On Ice

“Once or twice.”

“I have it now. Perhaps we will be on the same side next time around. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? You and I, working together.”

“Interesting.”

“Or we might come up against one another, and that would be interesting, too. In another way, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s all I have to say, Tanner. That and to wish you good luck.”

I looked over at the shelf above the fireplace, where the three ivory figures stood in Oriental – sorry, Asian – splendor. Good Luck, Good Health, and Long Life.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’ll be seeing you, Tanner.”

“Yes,” I said. “You probably will.”

Evan Michael Tannerwas 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.