The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep

Afterword

Evan Michael Ta

That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time-except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed-hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.

What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)

But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.

Where’s Ta

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen A

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Brita

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple of more years before Ta

The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep was Ta

Bill Higgle was a numismatist-if you Google him, you’ll find he wrote a book on the coinage, tokens, and paper money of the Virgin Islands-and I was editing a numismatic magazine at the time. He showed up at the office, I brought him home to di

Remarkably, I recalled our conversation the next day. And, more remarkably, I remembered the as-yet unemployed fellow with the damaged sleep center and the passion for lost causes. I put the two together and, well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the result.

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author LAWRENCE BLOCK is one of the most widely recognized names in the crime fiction genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time wi

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