Me Tanner, You Jane sports a title lampooning Tarzan and Jane, which is fitting because the bulk of this novel takes place in equatorial Africa, where Tanner, the spy who never sleeps because of shrapnel from the Korean War, lodged in his brain, actually takes on a mission he was dutifully assigned: find the missing agent and persuade him to come home.
The opening scene is movie-worthy slapstick comedy as Tanner attends his own funeral in his own coffin and is buried alive with a hunk of cheese and a hunk of ham, but when his allies are supposed to rescue him, he finds that they have all fallen into drunken stupors and he has to claw his way out of a coffin into literally a coven of devil worshippers who are unnerved when he climbs out of his grave alive and ready to do whatever.
Block uses Tanner to poke fun of the unending sea of revolutions and counter-revolutions hitting post-colonial Africa around 1970 and sends him to Modonoland to rescue the missing agent Samuel Lonestar Bowman, a former burglar who beame a Black Muslim in jail, shot a policeman possibly in self-defense, and had to get out of the States, and who now absconded into the jungle with the deposed dictator Ndoro and a small fortune to boot. The agency had wanted to preserve Ndoro and the country’s treasury for use in case needed whether in Modonoland or elsewhere. They are at latest report off with a group of bandits, guerillas, what have you, but generally a band of Black religious fanatics led by a blonde jungle goddess of some sort, who Tanner jokingly refers to as Sheena, the Queen of the Jungle. Block also uses Tanner to poke fun at affirmative action when the Chief explains to Tanner that they want Bowman back because he is the agency’s only Black operative.
What follows, beginning with the scene of Tanner climbing out of his own grave, is a wild adventure that sets Tanner, mostly alone, but also in the company of a fifteen-year-old girl Plum who seduces Tanner in a bit of an odd off-putting scene.
Back to the jungle goddess, Jane or Sheena, as far as the eyes were concerned, we are told was a Playboy centerfold miraculously brought to life, but if “she looked like a wet dream, she sounded like Cotton Mather on an acid trip. She ran down the gospel according to St. Sheena with the precise cadence of a New England preacher.” Sam Bowman explains to Tanner that Jane doesn’t speak the native tongue and her followers don’t speak English, but they have an intuitive understanding, “a very down scene. She doesn’t tell them what to do so much as she does things, she gets into a set, and they act in concert with her.” Sheena or Jane turns out to be a literally madwoman and a cannibal to boot.
The whole thing is outrageous and one spoof on top of the next showing perhaps how outrageous all the CIA plots to put one dictator or another in charge of which third world country turned out to be.
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