Tanner's Twelve Swingers

I'm a member of a Facebook group where people share photos of favorite books and acquisitions and discuss great books and stories from the past. Recently I posted a few Lawrence Block titles from my library including a few of the Evan Tanner Fawcett Gold Medal editions I acquired back in the day.

I used to read Block's column in Writer's Digest, and that often sent me out to my favorite used book store back then, The Book Nook in Alexandria, LA, to look for titles he mentioned. I was fortunate. This was the early eighties, and The Book Nook had been around a while and housed holdings stretching back into the '60s at least.

I found Two For Tanner, Tanner's Tiger and Here Comes a Hero there and loved the semi-comic action adventure the show more books offered, a product of the '60s, James Bond-inspired spy craze.

Later I acquired Jove re-issues of The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, first in the series, and The Cancelled Czech and then the last book, Tanner on Ice, when it came out in 1998.

When I posted my collected pic, someone on Facebook noted Tanner's Twelve Swingers was his favorite, and it occurred to me I'd never sought it out though more re-issues had come along since my bachelor days when all of my disposable income could go to books.

What should I happen to run across when I was up in DeLand, FL, at my new favorite used bookstore, the Family Book Shop, but the Signet re-issue from 1994.

Fawcett Gold Medal edition
I'd love to find the original Fawcett edition, but for the moment it was a great find, and a great opportunity to rectify the deficiency in my Tanner reading.

My new favorite Tanner
I have to agree, it's now my favorite title too, kind of a perfect storm of Tanner elements, character, humor, offbeat politics and high adventure.

For the uninitiated, Tanner, who had the sleep center in his brain destroyed by shrapnel in Korea, never sleeps. He spends his time researching, reading and writing term papers and dissertations for lazy grad students. B plus guaranteed. And he has a passion for political lost causes that's drawn him peripherally into espionage work for a shadowy U.S. intelligence agency with a chief that thinks he works for them.

A complicated set of circumstances finds Tanner on the road as this tale begins. He's doing some border hopping through central Europe, on his way to Latvia to rescue the lost love of an old friend. Her name's Sofija, and he met her in 1964 at the Tokyo Olypmics where she competed as part of the Soviet Women's Gymnastics Troupe. It's the mid-sixties as the story unfolds.

A good portion of the tale unfolds on Tanner's journey up through Yugoslavia and Poland, traversing border fences and resting in the homes of acquaintances with similar political passions.

There's a great feel, even a warmth, to the little stops along the way including many revolutionaries and lone farm with an erudite and lonely young widow. All along the route Tanner acquires excess baggage including a Yugoslav polemicist and his manuscript who becomes a handy sidekick as the story unfolds.

Once in Latvia, Tanner discovers Sofija has a sister, and they have a horde of teammates who'd also like to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. (Block's original title for the book was The Lettish Tomatoes, since it followed the Cancelled Czech, but that title was changed by Fawcett.)

Everything in the tale sets up a challenging, rollicking and intricate finale as Tanner devises an exit strategy for the team along with assorted bits of microfilm, manuscripts, Chinese tracts and a young heir to a lost throne.

It's exciting, funny and a thrill-a-minute as plans fall apart and Tanner's forced to re-think his options. There's a payoff for just about everything mentioned in the book's setup as a new plan arises, and Block's enjoyable style and turn of phrase shine atop it all.

I'm late to this book, but it's great fun and a great taste of another era's leisure reading. show less

Cute. Almost formulaic, in a way; there are a couple of sex scenes in the beginning that feel kind of wierd - I doubt that women behind the Iron Curtain were all that liberated in 1967, but we get through those scenes with a kind of relief - now the sex is out of the way, let's get on to the story.

Block hasn't quite found his voice at this point. His later Burglar books are really funny farces, and the Scudder series are nicely blood-soaked thrillers, but Tanner wobbles back and forth between the two before ending up squarely on the side of farce. Which may have been where we intended to go all along, but you definitely wouldn't have known in the first part of the book, and the whole idea of Tanner never sleeping is taken so seriously show more it's wierd. A relic of 1967 science perhaps?

Maybe not a bad read overall, but certainly Block has written much better. show less

You may remember Tanner from previous reviews: the spy who can’t sleep. This novel takes place earlier than the one I had read and Block provides a more detailed explanation of just how Tanner got himself into this position ([book:The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep] is the first in the series and, naturally, has the most detail). Besides the small pension he gets monthly from the government for the head injury that resulted in his inability to sleep, Tanner writes term papers for hire for those students either “a) too lazy, or b) too stupid, or c) both of the above,” to do their own work. He loves doing research anyway and never having to sleep means he has plenty of extra time on his hands (sounds wonderful). He needs the money to show more pay the memberships and magazine subscriptions for all the tiny little weird organizations he belongs to, such as the Columbian Agrarian Revolutionary Movement (CARM). It’s this latter association that sends him off to Latvia to rescue the beloved of a fellow member of the Latvian Army-in-Exile. It seems that the chief of the organization Tanner reputedly works for, or at least the organization he believes he works for -- it’s so secret that once when in trouble when Tanner claimed to be on assignment for a mysterious chief who worked for the government someone actually believed him, including the chief – and they want him to go to Columbia to suppress CARM’s incipient revolution, something Tanner is loath to do, so he persuades the chief he is already on assignment to Latvia. With everything so secret, who’s to know otherwise? show less

Block's Evan Tanner is a non-spy-gone-awry, and this is one of the best of the series, with the introduction of Minna, heiress to the Lithuanian throne. The books were written in a pre-digital era, still-Soviet era, but somehow manage to be timeless and entertaining.