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.
Tanner’s Virgin, which you’ve just finished reading (unless you’re one of those unaccountable mavericks who read the afterword first), bore a different title when first it saw the light of day back in 1968. I had several editors over the years at Fawcett Gold Medal, including Knox Burger, Walter Fultz, and Joe Elder, but the capo di tutti capi was a man named Ralph Daigh, whom I never met, but who seems to have found a certain satisfaction in changing his authors’ titles.
My first book for Fawcett was a noir suspense novel. We were going to call it Grifter’s Game. I’m not sure what my original working title had been, although I think it may have been A Little Off the Top; I know it wasn’t Mona, which is the title Daigh slapped on it. And why, pray tell? Because he’d recently bought some cover art consisting of a sketch of a woman, so he wanted to call the book by the name of the femme fatale, in order to make the cover appropriate.
The book has since gone through many editions as Mona, and one as Sweet Slow Death (don’t ask), and has now finally been reprinted as Grifter’s Game.
After Daigh changed The Scoreless Thai to Two for Tanner, I pretty much quit trying to ring the titular bell. I can’t swear to it, but I believe the present volume was submitted as Tanner #6. When it was published, the title it bore was Here Comes a Hero.
Tanner #6 would have been better.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe nobody came up with Tanner’s Virgin back in the day. After all, it was Daigh who’d come up with Tanner’s Tiger as a title for the book immediately preceding this one. (And had me rewrite a scene so that Tanner’s love interest was wearing a tigerskin coat, to justify the title, and so that such a coat could appear on the cover.) Tanner’s Virgin would seem to be of a piece, so to speak, with Tanner’s Tiger, and there’d be no rewriting required, as there was already a perfectly good virgin in the book.
Well, nobody thought of it. And if somebody did, would anything have come of it? Probably not, not with Here Comes a Hero just crying out to be used.
Sheesh.
The storylines of Tanner’s adventures, as you may have noticed, generally range somewhere between farfetched and absurd. Nevertheless, there’s occasionally a grain of genuine grit at the core of Tanner’s pearls.
And so it was with Tanner’s Virgin.
A friend of a friend came back from London with a story. It seems someone asked this rather shady character what had happened to a young woman of their acquaintance. “Well, what do you think happened?” snapped the shady character. “I sold her. I told her that’s what would happen, but she would insist on coming along, so I sold her.”
Sold her into white slavery, that is to say. In Afghanistan.
And, my source reported, it turned out that this was Mr. Shady’s main source of income. He posed as a travel agent, offering fully escorted women-only tours of Afghanistan at an irresistibly low price, and managing to screen out any applicants with close family ties or persons likely to keep tabs on them. Once he had a group of a dozen or so nubile and unattached young women on board, he promptly escorted them to Afghanistan, where he sold the lot of them for whatever the going rate may have been and left them to get on with their lives, or what remained thereof.
“Not a nice person,” said the friend of a friend.
So Afghanistan was more or less handed to me. That was a couple of wars ago, and what I knew about the country you could put in a silk ear. Or a sow’s purse. Or, less metaphorically, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is where I did what I had the temerity to call my research.
Back then, all I knew about Afghanistan was that it was a hippie destination, because it didn’t cost much to live there. (It was even cheaper if you’d been sold into white slavery.) I knew about the hippies, and I knew about the coats that some of them (not the ones sold into white slavery) were bringing back, very attractive sheepskin garments with colorful embroidery. And I figured they must have at least one 1955 Chevy there.
Well, that was then and this is now. These days, if you want a 1955 Chevy, you’ll have to go to Havana.
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 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.
