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Afterword

Evan Michael Tanner was conceived in the suestation 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 e 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 so variety of people I amut 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 tie I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics I met people orked and people who found other ways of al 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

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 Encyclopedia 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 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 him

The first six Tanner novels, froin (nee Here Coinals by Fawcett Gold Medal While they were being written and published, I was also publishing hardcover fiction with Mac with Deadly Honeymoon in 1967 And, when I was ready to write a seventh book about Tanner, I offered it to Macmillan

Nowadays, alinal to hardcover was a Big Step Up And nowadays it generally is But things were different then, and the nificant reason for Macmillan’s publication of Deadly Honeymoon was that Gold Medal had already turned it down

Consider the nu a royalty on the total nu to somewhere between 2500 and 3000 (If they went back for a second printing, they paid a similar advance for all copies printed This, sad to say, never happened with any of the Tanner books)

Macainst royalties on copies sold, and in return they took 50 of any paperback earnings the book enerate

Now there were compensations Macmillan always took me out to lunch And hardcover books were et reviewed, for whatever that’s worth (Notfar ious about hardcover publication A hardcover book with one’s naraph on the flap, or even the back cover – looked good on the shelf, and made one’s h itbeen first rejected by a paperback house

Me Tanner, You Jane hadn’t been rejected by Gold Medal They see Tanner’s adventures The books weren’t selling terribly well – as I said, none of the six ever– nor did sales see froetting tired of the books – although I’m not sure I are of it at the tied from book to book, the characters and situations seeh, Tanner wasn’tupwards 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 theether, and one of us – I forget which one – thought perhaps it was tiured it orth a try By this tied for me to meet with my editor at Macmillan and pitch it

My first editor at Macht and edited Deadly Honeymoon and After the First Death, and moved on before the latter book was published Her replacement was Alan Rinzler – "I aan – 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 reht it was part of the job description

Still, he was a bright and personable fellow, and his status as a nondrinkerwith him in the ood ent I knew; Call Before Lunch hat it stood for)

So I went in and sat across the desk fro about this book I planned to write, furnishing hiround on the series, and it didn’t seeover

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 so, until the poor man held up a hand

"Stop for a minute," he said "See, I had so all that well today But I can see you’ve got a well-thought-out story here, and it sounds good to h a contract"

So then all I had to do rite the thing