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
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author LAWRENCE BLOCK is one of the most widely recognized names in the crime fi ction 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 prolifi c author, having written more than fi fty 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.
