Incoherent, bonkers fluff from Block circa 1966.

Wearing its Bond influences on its sleeve Tanner travels throughout Europe in a mad plot to recover lost gold while stirring up trouble and literally fomenting a revolution.

As mad as an attaché case full of frogs, but somehow charming in its daftness. ( )

Yeah, this one just didn't do it for me. I really liked the premise but Tanner was so unlikable that I just couldn't connect with the character. On top of that, the casual violence of the uprising, describing death as one would describe a walk in the park, really turned me off. I realize that it was meant as dark humor, but it just didn't work that way for me. I'll take a hard pass on any more Evan Tanner books. ( )

“The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep” is a comedic adventure, the first in a series by Block. Evan Tanner is a guy who caught a piece of shrapnel in his brain during the Korean War and it apparently did something to his sleep center. He doesn’t sleep. Ever. He stays up, instead, learning languages and joining lost causes and random political groups. He sometimes supports himself by writing Phd thesises for students or taking tests for them. He wanders the earth from country to country when adventure takes him there. No one seems to understand who he is or what he is doing in their country. Not the Turks. Not the Irish. No one. When he learns of a lost hoard of Armenian gold, he journeys across the world, thinking that there could be millions there and he could then fund all kinds of lost political causes.

The concept sounds kind of silly and, at times, slapstick, but Block gets some contact on the ball here and hits it out. It is adventure that is hard to put down and fun to read. James Bond he is not, but his adventures and misadventures are a lot of fun, particularly his reasoning on why he goes and does things.

In globetrotting journeys, Tanner ends up in Turkish prisons, Irish airports, in custody, out of custody, sneaking across borders with a madman, and the like.

This is simply a good, old-fashioned, fun story to read. ( )

Evan Tanner goes from one predicament to another trying to reach a successful conclusion to his spy type adventure. A fun read. Built for speed.

A wonderful 'origin story' for Evan Turner. What starts out as a treasure hunt ends up as something surprisingly different. Tanner is an ex-GI whose sleep center was destroyed by shrapnel in Korea. To fill sleepless nights, he learns languages, studies so many subjects that he can write term papers on almost anything on a for hire basis and subscribes to a number of radical organizations. All these factors combine to make him an original type of espionage hero. ( )