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Where’s Tanner in all this?

Hovering, I suspect, soht 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, caht after the other

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep

Fact To 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 Gerlish throne

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Ti the Encyclopaedia Britannica They see 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 ties And what passion would drive hi, 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 ed the stove, because it was a couple of 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 ht books about hi up these splendid new editions of the Tanner books as they appear, and if you’ve been reading not only the books theent afterwords of mine, and if (finally) you’ve the sort of old-trunk-in-the-attic memory that retains trivial information, then youthis one, Tanner’s Twelve Swingers, was begun in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and completed in Dublin

When it was finished, I sent it off to ent and returned the typewriter to the firm around the corner from whom I’d rented it I’d landed in Dublin in mid-January, and it was the middle of February when I set out to see the country

I’d been to Ireland once before, and had felt a strong iht like to live there, and knew that one thing I didn’t want to do, not for a while, was go back to the States So I bundled up s and hit the road

I didn’t have all that e of socks and underwear and asince I’d arrived, so I purchased a knapsack and took a bus south of Dublin to a town called Bray Froured I could hitchhike

But that turned out to be uncommonly difficult I eventually learned that just a week or two earlier a hitchhiker had pulled a knife on ahis benefactor to drivehie at all, the leadline would have been so the lines of "Kindly Hitchhiker Spares Moron’s Life" But in Ireland, where this sort of thing didn’t happen, it was a nine-days wonder, and people who’d always picked up hitchhikers without a second thought now kept their eyes fixed straight ahead and drove on by

It took a while, but I ht the bike, but it , in Wexford Town It seeood idea at the ti but

For two reasons, really One was that I was in very hilly terrain, and that I was always going downhill on a bike that was careening out of control or walking alongside the bike as I pushed it up a hill

In the rain

I kept at it, and I got as far as a town called Enniscorthy I knew the town fro I put up at a bed and breakfast run by a Mrs Tworeatly aduile of a New Yorker to sell that bicycle to Mrs Twomey, and she, innocent denizen of rural Ireland, just bided her time while the price dropped After I’d been there three days – a long ti you in battle against the yeoe for what I owed her for ht, and I hoisted ot out of there, and by then, of course, all Ireland had forgotten about the villainous hitchhiker, and I had no trouble getting rides – to Cork City, and then on to Bantry

In Bantry, in the Anchor Hotel, I bought an Olivetti portable typewriter and began writing The Scoreless Thai I wrote three or four chapters, and by then it was themade me decide to return to the life I’d left behind in the States I hitchhiked to Shannon and flew hoot back to work and wrote the rest of the book

Tanner’s previous adventures all took place in Europe So about the character see around the crazy quilt of Eastern Europe, and I wasn’t sure hoell Tanner’s particular skills would lend theuess it worked out okay

I thought of the title early on, and found it irresistible, even inevitable A story about a Siaet laid? I mean, what else could you possibly call it?

Soed it to Two for Tanner I can’t begin to guess why, anymore than I can tell you who the titular tere supposed to be Sheesh The Scorless Thai, that’s the title, now and forever