In 1966 I was living at 16 Stratford Place in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I’d spent a year in Wisconsin as an editor in the coin supply division of Western Printing, and just when it looked as though I might have a future in the corporate world, I realized it was the last thing I wanted. I’d been writing books all along, and I moved east and resumed writing full-time.
My agent, Henry Morrison, came to me with an assignment. Lancer Books, for whom I’d written a few books during Larry T. Shaw’s editorship, wanted to publish a romantic espionage thriller in the tradition of Helen MacInnes. I hadn’t read anything by Ms. MacInnes, though I knew the byline; her books were published in hardcover and frequently wound up on bestseller lists. Mine would be published as a paperback original, and bestseller status would be not even a fleeting dream.
I don’t know if I actually read any of the books which were to be my model. I probably skimmed a couple. I knew what was required—a clean, sweet, likable American girl as the heroine; a reasonably exotic foreign locale; and a couple of people who were not what they appeared to be, including an evident villain who would become the unlikely hero and love interest and a dashingly attractive good guy who would turn out to be an absolute rotter.
I could do that.
I knew just where to set it. Ireland. Where else?
I’d actually been to Ireland, which gave it a leg up on the rest of the world. In the fall of 1964, a few months after a move to Racine, Wisconsin, my wife and I flew to Limerick and spent the better part of two weeks driving around Ireland. We spent a day in Edinburgh, Scotland and a few days in England, but Ireland got the bulk of our business.
Aside from brief forays into Canada and Mexico, this was my first time out of the States, and if it felt like an adventure, it felt even more like a homecoming. It’s clear to me that I spent at least one past life in Ireland. Among my earliest memories are of listening to Irish songs on the radio. (There was a girl who sang “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral That’s an Irish Lullaby” on a local amateur show, and I’m pleased to report that she was the winner three weeks running.) I had a set of The Book of Knowledge, and from it I learned all the words to “The Wearin’ o’ the Green.”
When I had begun selling short fiction and was casting about for a book to write, I decided a novel of the Irish rebellion and civil war might be a good choice. But what did I know about it? I amassed an extensive library of English and Irish history and read a surprising amount of it. Around the time that my interest in numismatics (currency) was steering me toward the job in Wisconsin, I began collecting Irish coins, tokens, and medals.
No question, then. I’d set the book in Ireland.
Ever since the trip, I’d been picking up records of Irish folk music. The Clancy Brothers, of course, but also a slew of Folkways albums on which various singers, some more gifted than others, collected songs of the 1798 Rising and other blighted periods in the land’s sad history. As G. K. Chesterton wrote:
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
Well, why not make my heroine a folksinger? Why not send her to Ireland to collect songs? There, of course, she could meet the wolf in sheep’s clothing and the sheep in wolf’s clothing, and things could look decidedly dark for a while, but eventually the sun would burst through. I mean, it would have to, sooner or later. As far as we could make out, it was always either raining or about to rain in Ireland, but maybe I could cheat and have a little sunshine toward the end.
I went to New York to write the book. Don Westlake had sublet a studio apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street in Chelsea; he’d lived there briefly during a marital rough spot, and kept it as a sometimes office until the lease was up. I moved in and brought home Passport to Peril ten days later. I don’t know if the title was mine, though I rather think it was. I know the pen name was mine, and I know that forty-five years later nobody else on earth knew it.
Henry knew back then, but I’m sure he’s long since forgotten. My first wife would have known, but I don’t think she ever read the book, and I would be surprised if she recalls anything about it. Irwin Stein at Lancer would have known but would have had no reason to remember. Among the book-collecting fraternity, no one had a clue. This book, and Fidel Castro Assassinated, are the two works of mine that somehow escaped detection. The latter, written under the name Lee Duncan, was recently reprinted as Killing Castro by Hard Case Crime. Passport to Peril now makes its first post-Lancer appearance as an ebook, and I can only hope you’ve enjoyed it.
I read it myself recently to ready it for publication, and I was surprised to find that I liked it. Remember what William Butler Yeats wrote?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
True, too, of the Ireland of the 1960s. It was a curious pleasure to revisit the time and place, if in my own work.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.