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So my agent and I put our heads together, and one of us – I forget which one – thought perhaps it was time to move Ta
My first editor at Macmillan was a woman named Mary Heathcote. She bought and edited Deadly Honeymoon and After the First Death, and moved on before the latter book was published. Her replacement was Alan Rinzler – “I am the new Mary Heathcote,” his note to me began – and it was to him that I would propose Me Ta
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 remarkable. I thought everyone in publishing drank. I thought it was part of the job description.
Still, he was a bright and personable fellow, and his status as a nondrinker meant there was no great danger in meeting with him in the middle of the afternoon. (CBL read the notation on a good many cards in the Rolodex of one agent I knew; Call Before Lunch was what it stood for.)
So I went in and sat across the desk from him, and started talking about this book I pla
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 some plot elements, and just kept talking, talking, talking, until the poor man held up a hand.
“Stop for a minute,” he said. “See, I had some really dynamite hash last night, and I’m not tracking all that well today. But I can see you’ve got a well-thought-out story here, and it sounds good to me, so I’ll put through a contract.”
So then all I had to do was write the thing.
I don’t remember a great deal about the writing of Me Ta
The opening sequence gave me a chance to use something that had been stuck in my head for a couple of years. While I was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I made the acquaintance of a Latvian painter named Valdi Mais. (I had recently published Ta
I really loved that, and I wanted to have a character make errors of that sort, but I never was able to conjure up another example. So one of the chaps involved in Ta
But evidently I haven’t.
Looking back all these years later, it strikes me that having Jane call herself Sheena after the comic book character may be more than happenstance. Because I’ve long felt that there’s a comic-book aspect to this particular novel. (You could perhaps say as much for the whole series, but I think it’s truest for MTYJ.) I have a feeling the same thing happened to me when I was writing the book as when I was pitching it to poor Alan Rinzler. I imagined the reader’s eyes glazing over, and tried to bring him/her back by making every plot turn a little more outrageous.
I don’t dislike the book all these years later, not by any means, but by the time I finished it I knew I was done – not just with the book itself, but with the series. I’m sure I’d have changed my mind if it had been a huge success, or even a rather small success, but all it did was come out and sell a handful of copies and vanish. It didn’t even manage to get reprinted in paperback.
What it did do, oddly enough, was remain in print. Nowadays books get remaindered almost before the ink is dry; unless a book continues to sell at a pretty good pace, a publisher drops it from his list and ships the leftover copies to a cut-price wholesaler, and the next thing you know your novel is on the Bargain Books table at Barnes amp; Noble, pegged at about half the price it commands in paperback.
It was not ever thus. Until the government changed the rules, a publisher could keep a book in print as a service to readers and booksellers while still writing off the greater portion of costs for tax purposes. Some swine took the trouble to close this useful loophole, and that was the end of that.
But Me Ta
And here it is, all these years later, in a handsome paperback edition not that much more expensive than the original Macmillan hardcover.
I do hope you enjoyed it.
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 fi ction genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time wi