Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Block was born in 1938, and began publishing in the late '50s. He's written some SF, some romance, a fair amount of erotica, and other things, but he's been primarily a crime writer. He's probably best known for his Bernie Rhodenbarr and his Matthew Scudder series, as well as four novels about Chip Harrison, the first two comic soft porn, the other two crime novels. But his first series character to gain traction was Evan Tanner. Tanner appeared in seven novels between 1966 and 1970, with an eighth coming out in 1998. These novels are not crime novels, but lightly comic spy thrillers. (Based on the one book I have, they were packaged as titillatingly as possible, despite content that never really reaches event the softest porn (though there are mild sex scenes.))

I say "lightly comic", but I don't think that gets the tone quite right, based at least on Tanner's Twelve Swingers, which was the third in the series, coming out in 1967. There are definite comic bits, mind you, and in some ways it's kind of a sendup -- the action is implausible, and we're not supposed to believe in it, and the CIA, as well as political and other authorities in any number of countries, come in for plenty of mockery, but it's not really a funny novel. The character interactions feel real (if idealized, especially as to the way beautiful and good women keep wanting to sleep with Tanner), and the political commentary is often quite pointed. (Tanner is cynical about the US, the Soviet Union, China, and dictators everywhere -- his ideal is, really, a world of many more independent polities. It's striking to see him advocating strongly for the dissolution of the Yugoslavia into at least five different nations -- which of course happened (not without a terrible war) about a quarter century later.)

Evan Tanner fought in the Korean War, and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head, and destroyed his sleep center. He has a disability pension, and has used his extra 8 hours of wakefulness to learn a lot of stuff -- different languages, lots of science and other knowledge, memberships in all sorts of organizations from various revolutionary groups to the Flat Earth Society.) He writes term papers and even Ph. D. theses to make extra money. And, he does a bit of work on the side for a government organization without a name, which seems to allow him lots of latitude in his assignments.

In this book he has promised a Latvian friend to rescue his lost love from the USSR. (Yes, another thing Tanner advocates is the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent states. (Also, he's intrigued by the idea of 50 independent American states,)) Alas, he thinks the job is impossible. But when the organization he works for wants him to go to Colombia for what he thinks is a bad reason, he uses his mission to Latvia as an excuse to decline. He begins in Macedonia though, where it turns out he has a young son (presumably conceived in a previous book?) So he sees his son, and on the way out of Yugoslavia finds himself further burdened with a Montenegrin who has written a book calling for the splitting of Yugoslavia. The two proceed through Hungary and Poland to Lithuania and Latvia -- and somehow by the end he's picked up a 7 year old girl who is the rightful Queen of Lithuania, 12 extremely beautiful Latvian gymnasts (a package deal including his friend's lover) and eventually even a jazz-playing Russian pilot. All this of course further complicates his mission.

Does he succeed? Well, there are sequels to come! The means he uses to cross borders and foil the police and so on are, as the book goes on, increasingly absurd. He sleeps with a few women -- most of whom would be happy if he'd settle down with them, though in the end he has the one son, the prospects of perhaps another child but who knows?, and an adopted daughter. We don't have to believe in much of this -- but it's entertaining throughout, a truly professional but affecting performance.