The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block

First published in 2022; published by Subterranean Press on October 31, 2023

Fredric Brown wrote pulp fiction from the 1930s to the 1970s. Lawrence Block is a prolific crime writer whose most productive years began in the 1970s, although he won most of his awards in the 1980s and 1990s. The burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr is one of his ongoing characters.

Bernie owns a used bookstore in Greenwich Village. He’s fortunate to own the building that houses the store so he doesn’t need to worry about rent increases. Bernie hasn’t burgled much in recent years because he can’t pick a digital lock and security cameras are everywhere.

One night, Bernie falls asleep reading Brown’s What Mad Universe, a 1949 novel about an alternative universe that predates the modern understanding of the multiverse. When Bernie wakes up, he finds himself in an alternate universe that is similar to his own but better. A couple of Greenwich Village businesses that closed are still operating. A fence who died long ago is still alive. Amazon doesn’t exist so his store is doing a brisk business. Security cameras and digital locks are mostly nonexistent. And his best friend Carolyn wants to have sex with him. In his universe, Carolyn is a lesbian; in this one, she still is but she has the hots for Bernie.

Bernie takes advantage of the changes to steal a famous diamond, unencumbered by digital locks and security cameras. The convoluted plot then introduces jade figurines that alternate Bernie may already have stolen, an insurance scam, a few murders (the victims seem to be from Alice in Wonderland), and a classic reveal in which multiple suspects gather in the bookstore so that Bernie can set things right before returning to his own universe.

While the novel’s dip into science fiction is a bit odd (Block dabbled in the genre in his early years but generally stuck to crime fiction), the story flows effortlessly. Block riffs on Candide’s notion about the best of all possible worlds. The novel’s message (Block spells it out to make sure the reader takes his point) is “If you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. And then you won’t want it anymore.” When we scratch an itch, the itch goes away. A corollary is that we don’t always know what we want until we get it.

The book is ultimately about friendship. I don’t know if it’s politically correct for two people to have a cisgendered relationship after a lifetime of feeling no sexual attraction because of their sexual identities, but Block is too old to give a crap about being politically correct. His point is that we are all free to scratch our itches, that it’s nobody’s business if we do, and that friends are allowed to mark and change the boundaries of their friendships without judgment. While this is the strangest of the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels I’ve read, it proves that Block, at the age of 85, still has worthwhile stories to tell.

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The Night and the Music by Lawrence Block

First published in 2011; published in a deluxe edition by Subterranean Press on September 30, 2021

Lawrence Block has always been an observer of humanity. Much of his fiction fits within a softer, less hardboiled version of the noir tradition. Not long ago, Subterranean Press released a volume of Block’s stories about Bernie Rhodenbarr, the gentleman bandit. The Night and the Music collects short stories that feature Block’s best recurring character, Matthew Scudder. It concludes with Block's explanation of his history with Scudder and his memories of the collected stories.

Scudder began the series as a damaged man, not quite an antihero but far from a role model. Scudder is an ex-cop. When he was on the force, he shot at a murderer and one of his shots killed a little girl. End of his job, end of his marriage, end of his relationship with his children, end of his sobriety. “People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.”

Scudder’s life has changed for the better over the years that Block has written about him. Over the course of 17 novels published between 1976 and 2011, Scudder stopped drinking and married a former hooker. Throughout the series, Scudder never lost his empathy for individuals who have lived unfortunate lives.

Scudder’s world is filled with corrupt and racist cops, newsstand gossips, and neighborhood residents who are panhandlers, drunks, homeless, unbalanced. Scudder tolerates the cops and treats the residents with dignity and respect. He sees the people on the street, even as wealthier residents pretend they don’t exist or want them chased away.

“A Candle for the Bag Lady” is the best story in the volume and one of the best short stories in crime fiction. A shopping bag lady on the periphery of Scudder’s existence is murdered. She leaves him $1,200 in her will. Scudder investigates both the murder and the reason she named him as her beneficiary. The story is about the ways that people touch lives without knowing the impact they’ve made. The moral of the story is that everybody matters. Whether we think about them or not, whether we notice them or not, they matter.

Most of the other stories are quite good. A man claims to be framed for his wife’s murder and asks for Scudder’s help. Scudder gives him exactly what he deserves. A waitress at Scudder’s gin joint dives out a seventeenth-floor window, naked. Her sister believes she was murdered. Scudder investigates the case, taking on a locked door mystery in the process. Years after Scudder sent a man to prison for murder, the man tells Scudder his life story. The story is interesting because of the unusual motive that the man had for killing his lover — and because of the gruesome way in which the killer achieved his objective.

In one of the most entertaining stories, Scudder recalls a time when he was a somewhat corrupt cop who was asked to help some poker players deal with a stabbing death. Scudder immediately sees through their lies but also sees how he can create an outcome that will do justice while making everyone happy.

In the collection’s most offbeat story, Scudder joins a crew that has been hired to confiscate unlicensed Batman products from New York street vendors. Scudder realizes he doesn’t have the heart to bully people who don’t speak English and don’t know anything about copyright law. Another story that breaks the pattern of private detective fiction is a sensitive contemplation of AIDS and death, a story that has Scudder looking for an angel of death who might be a mercy killer.

I love Block’s dialog, the way collateral characters ramble about nothing yet reveal something of their place in the world. For my money, Block has always written some of the best dialog in crime fiction.

A few of the stories failed to resonate with me. The title story and a couple of others seem designed to tie up loose ends in Scudder’s life; they don’t work well as independent stories. Most of the stories, however, will appeal to fans of the Scudder novels — which should include most fans of crime fiction.

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The Burglar in Short Order by Lawrence Block

Published by Subterranean Press on February 29, 2020

Lawrence Block has been a prolific crime writer since the 1970s, when he decided that crime might pay more than softcore porn. The two primary series protagonists he has gifted the world are Matthew Scudder (beginning with The Sins of the Fathers) and a much lighter series about Bernie Rhodenbarr, the last of the gentleman burglars. He knocked out a bunch of other crime novels over the years, including an amusing series I admire about a hit man named Keller.

Block has slowed his production a in his senior years. He suggests in his afterword that this is likely to be Rhodenbarr’s final contribution to the world of crime fiction characters, and that the volume might be Block’s final contribution to crime fiction. The Burglar in Short Order is a collection of stories and essays, ranging from 1977 to 2018, about Rhodenbarr. The collection also features a new introduction that provides a retrospective of Rhodenbarr’s life, and an afterword that discuss the character’s future, which he intends to experience in privacy, free from the scrutiny of curious readers.

Aspiring writers might be heartened by Block’s story of how, a month’s rent away from homelessness, he was considering burglary as a profession, imagined some farfetched stumbling blocks to a life of crime, and turned one of his imaginings into the plot for a novel that saved his career. Between writing novels regularly and selling movie rights to some of them, Block has done well for himself without actually turning to crime.

Speaking of movie rights, another essay provides Block’s take on a movie called Burglar that cast Whoopie Goldberg in the role of Rhodenbarr. In Block’s view, it was not an inspired decision. Like me, Block admires Whoopie and finds Bobcat Goldthwait to be a bit grating. I haven’t seen the movie, but in Block’s view, Whoopie did the best she could with substandard material. It isn’t a movie he felt the need to see twice.

One of two excellent stories in the volume involves a tabloid that hires Rhodenbarr to break into Graceland and photograph Elvis’ bedroom. In the other, Rhodenbarr solves a locked room mystery involving the death of a book lover. A few of the stories, a few pages each, are essentially a setup and a punchline. Some of those describe a visit by an unnamed narrator to the bookshop that Rhodenbarr owns and a conversation that ensues between the two men. The afterword (again written as a conversation between a narrator and Rhodenbarr) makes clear that the unidentified narrator is, in fact, Block, paying a visit to his literary creation.

Although Rhodenbarr has not aged over the years, the world that surrounds him has moved forward. Times have changed. Rhodenbarr’s bookstore never made money (it gave him a safe haven and the chance to meet literate women while earning his real income at night), but it has recently started to lose money. Fewer people read, and those who do read books digitally. If they actually want to hold a book or if they want to read one they can’t find on a Kindle, they order it online. Independent bookstores, Rhodenbarr laments, have been lost to progress.

Block admits that, unlike Rhodenbarr, he has gotten old, the biggest mistake he ever made. He has been editing anthologies in recent years, but he sounds very much as if this volume is his final work, or close to it. His fans might want to pick it up just to pay their respects to an excellent crime writer. New fans might be better served by starting with The Sins of the Fathers and by browsing his other novels.

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A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

Published by Subterranean on January 31, 2019

Lawrence Block has concocted some interesting plots in his many decades as a writer of crime fiction, some of them in his popular Matthew Scudder series. A Time to Scatter Stones is a novella-length Scudder story that has more dialog than plot. The dialog is often entertaining, and it is to Block’s credit that he didn’t pad a story in which very little happens.

Scudder met Elaine when Scudder was married and still an NYPD detective. He met her again years later, when he was divorced and sober. They’ve been together for years, but when they first met, Elaine was a working girl. Scudder still goes to AA meetings but Elaine only recently joined a support group for former prostitutes called Tarts.

Elaine has a friend from Tarts named Ellen. Much of the novel consists of Elaine and Ellen discussing the kinky (or not) desires of Johns who engage the services of prostitutes. Scudder happily joins those conversations and even more happily fantasizes about doing a three-way with Elaine and Ellen. Elaine doesn’t mind the fantasy, so all is well and good.

Ah, but the plot? Well, a former client of Ellen’s won’t accept that she’s left the business. He wants to keep her on the payroll and is threatening to rape her if she won’t give him what he wants, including things were never on Ellen’s menu. Scudder tracks him down and teaches him some manners. That diversion takes little of Scudder’s time, allowing him to get back to what he enjoys, which (since he no longer drinks) seems to consist of talking about and having sex.

The story is littered with amusing musings and bad jokes and discussions of various combinations of sex partners who the two retired prostitutes have encountered. If you’re looking for a narrative version of Red Shoe Diaries with a beat-down thrown in, this is the novella for you. If you’re a fan of the Scudder series and wonder what Scudder is doing in his senior years, the novella will answer your question. If you’re looking for a thrilling crime story, you might want to look elsewhere. I enjoyed it as a voyeuristic and not particularly realistic look at the lives of prostitutes, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a crime story.

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Hit Man by Lawrence Block

Published by William Morrow on January 21, 1998

Hit Man is the first in a series of books starring J.P. Keller, a laid-back assassin who, save for his profession, is just like the rest of us:  he walks his dog, goes out on dates, wonders about the lives of strangers he passes on the street, and takes up stamp collecting to alleviate his boredom.  Hit Man isn't a conventional thriller; it's an unconventional portrayal of a remorseless killer as an ordinary guy.

Block started writing about Keller in short stories that mostly appeared in Playboy.  Hit Man collects many of those stories and adds more material, but it still reads like a series of related stories rather than the novel it purports to be. There is no central plot. Keller gets a call from Dot in White Plains, who works for the old man; Dot relays an assignment to Keller, or Keller gets it directly from the old man; and Keller travels to wherever and makes the hit. Along the way Keller philosophizes and muses about his life and the lives of others, whether clients, victims, or total strangers. Some hits are more difficult than others; some present Keller with ethical dilemmas, creating interesting situations for a man who operates outside the boundaries of ethical behavior.  Toward the end the old man becomes a bit dotty, forcing  Keller to decide whether he wants to continue working in his chosen profession.

The interplay between Dot and Keller is often hilarious. Keller is an affable killer; the stories are surprisingly lighthearted and amusing, given the subject matter.  Readers looking for a thriller or a mystery might be disappointed with Hit Man.  This isn't a mystery and it isn't exciting; it's a series of scenes from a man's life.  The man happens to be a killer.  On that basis, the book works.

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