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Canada boasted a Lost Cause, too, in the advocates of liberation for the francophone province of Quebec. Every once in a while some Quebecois hothead would put a bomb in a mailbox, and a batch of postcards home would get blown to hell, but that was about the extent of it. It was, of course, the sort of cause Ta
(But he’d be up anyway, wouldn’t he? Never mind.)
Irony? Ta
I wanted to go to Expo.
He took Mi
A couple of weeks after I turned in the book, I got a call from my agent. “They want a change,” he told me. “They want Arlette to be wearing a tigerskin coat.”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh, why?”
“So they can call the book Ta
“They can call it that anyway,” I said. They could call anything whatever they wanted, as they’d demonstrated, to my chagrin, with previous books.
“But without the coat,” he said, “it wouldn’t make any sense.”
“It would make as much sense,” I pointed out, “as it would for her to be wearing a tigerskin coat.” But my heart wasn’t in it, and I made the change, modifying it slightly – instead of a coat, I gave her a tigerskin beret, and a tigerskin throw for her bed. It’s not a bad title, although I can’t say it makes much sense.
You need a passport to cross the Peace Bridge these days, or some lesser form of government-issued photo ID. The world had changed, and that border with it. The Free Quebec movement never got much more violent than the occasional bomb in the occasional post box, though it did achieve some of its goals through peaceful means, and never did find it necessary to blow up the Queen of England.
But here’s the thing. You really never do know what the future holds.
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 fiction genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time wi