Book four in Block’s Evan Tanner espionage series was originally published as Two for Tanner in 1967 and then re-titled The Scoreless Thai on republication. Tanner is sort of a spoof on the James Bond franchise. Tanner, who took some shrapnel in Korea, has lost his sleep center in his brain, doesn’t sleep, earns a living ghost-writing thesis papers for college students in New York, and is sort of a secret agent – sort of, in the sense that, he has never really been vetted and hired, but no one really knows that. More often than not, he sets off on his own adventures for his own reasons, stumbling sort of over official policy.
In New York, he has been dating jazz-singing, London-educated, Kenyan-born Tuppence, who he met at a Back to Africa meeting in New York. Tanner attends every meeting and receives every subversive newsletter he can correspond to. It is interesting reading for an insomniac and it offers him a wide variety of connections around the world. Anyway, back to Tuppence, who, with her jazz band, goes to Bangkok to play a royal concert for the King of Thailand (sort of like Anna in the King and I, but a bit different), and vanishes along with the crown jewels (literally) of Thailand. Tanner receives a cryptic telegram from Tuppence and decides he must play knight-errant and rescue her.
Nevertheless, as luck would have it, Tanner is promptly captured by guerillas – this is Southeast Asia in 1968 – and placed in a cage hoisted above the jungle floor awaiting his execution. He, though, has apparently one friend there- a local – who confides in Tanner that he has never had a woman and only joined up for the promise of meeting foxy guerilla chicks in the southeast Asian jungle. Tanner promptly promises this young man – Dhang- that he will make all the proper introductions to women and that Dhang will have his golden opportunity to make love to a woman and that promise gets Tanner help.
What follows, of course, is a slapstick comedy with Dhang ever hoping to have a chance with a woman, but always, just always falling short of success in that endeavor. So this odd couple marches through the humid jungle in search of Tuppence to rescue her before the Queen orders her head chopped off.
Comedy also rears its head in the form of one Barclay Houghton Hewlitt, who decides when Tanner arrives in Bangkok, that he will be Tanner’s local contact and promptly and most assuredly stays in Tanner’s way.
It would not do to fail to note that this novel was published in 1968 during the heart of the Vietnam War and there are episodes with Tanner blundering into the middle of the battle in a North Vietnamese Tank trying to avoid being shot by American planes and to avoid shooting back. So you get a bit of a taste of the war-strewn chaos he had blundered into.
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