Tanner On Ice

And, even if one was prepared for an action-adventure hero old enough to collect Social Security, how to explain his quarter-century absence? What the hell had he been doing since we saw him last? Sleeping? Not likely, since sleeping was the one thing he didn’t do at all.

Nope, I decided. There was no way to write more Ta

But I forgot to inform my subconscious mind.

What happened was I went to a concert. It was at Lincoln Center, and the New York Philharmonic was playing something or other, but all I recall of the evening is the idea that came to me. There are three things that happen to me at concerts, and I can’t cause them to happen, nor can I stop them from happening. One is sleep, and another is being absorbed in the music, and the third is a state where I’m very much awake but done concentrating on the music, so that my mind wanders.

Sometimes, while wandering, it produces (or allows the reception of) ideas.

Which is what happened that particular evening. All at once I thought of a way to account for the twenty-eight-year gap since we’d last heard from Ta

Once I had the idea, a world of possibilities opened, all of them deliciously Ta

I decided to set it in Burma, a country Ly

If I did so today, I’d take along a laptop. But this was just long enough ago to make me nervous about trying to use a computer that far from home. So instead I took a pen and some legal pads and sat down at a table in my room at the Listowel Arms and wrote the book in longhand.

(The computer, incidentally, is blamed for the fact that books are longer than they used to be. Writing’s become so much easier that writers are self-indulgent, and natter on at greater length than they ought to. Well, I might be self-indulgent, and I very likely natter on longer than I ought to, but that trip to Ireland proved that the computer has precious little to do with it. I wrote every word with a ballpoint pen, and my hand ached at the end of each day’s session, and still the bloody book ran 90,000 words, which made it almost half again as long as Ta

And will there be any additional Ta

Well, I’d tell you, I’ve learned, as they say, never to say never. Ta

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

Acknowledgments

The author is pleased to acknowledge the Listowel Arms Hotel, in Listowel, County Kerry, where this book was written. He is grateful, too, to Miriam Balmuth, Beverly Barsook, Ellen Benjamin, Ingeborg and Cody Engle, Jo Harberson, Lee and Wilson Harwood, Julia and Howard Klee, Margaret Milledge, Paul Smith, and Davida Tussman, brave travelers on the Burma Road, to Bob Schulte, and to Maren Rae and U Myint Oo.

Ta

And thanks to Sharon Nettles.

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 wi