Me Tanner, You Jane

So what I wanted to do was get him out of the grave and onto his feet and away from there.

None of which I managed. He simply wouldn’t wake up. I called his name and slapped his face and did everything I could think of. Nothing had any discernible effect whatsoever. He was out and he stayed out.

And it was getting light.

I tried lifting him, and that didn’t work either. He was too big and too heavy and too limp to budge. So I lifted the strongbox instead, which was easier, and Plum and I got out of the cemetery and carried the loot and the shotgun and the flashlight and the shovel back to the Pe

I bought smelling salts at a chemist’s shop, and we went back to the cemetery around ten in the morning. But we couldn’t get close to the grave, because somebody was already there.

The gravediggers. The three drunken gravediggers, passing a pint bottle back and forth, and laughing inanely, and staggering. And filling in that empty grave all the way to the top.

When they left, finally, arms linked and voices raised in song, I walked over to the grave. In the daylight I could read the little headstone. Gerhard Herdig, it said, and the year he was born and the year he died. I subtracted the one from the other and established that Herdig had lived to be eighty-two, which was more than the years of Bowman and the Retriever added together.

“May he rest in peace,” Plum said. “Can we go now, Evan?”

I couldn’t write on Gerhard Herdig’s stone. But I knew what the Retriever would want, because he had come right out and told me. I stood at his graveside and bowed my head and spoke Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph into the still morning air.

Under a wide and starry sky,

Dig my grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Plum said it was pretty Bugs Bu

Afterword

Evan Michael Ta

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 my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. 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 somebody’s apartment.

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 Ta

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 A

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time Magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Brita

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Ta

The first six Ta

Nowadays, almost anyone would assume that the move from paperback original to hardcover was a Big Step Up. And nowadays it generally is. But things were different then, and the most significant reason for Macmillan’s publication of Deadly Honeymoon was that Gold Medal had already turned it down.

Consider the numbers. Gold Medal paid an advance representing a royalty on the total number of copies printed, and generally amounting 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 Ta

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 Ta