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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