The Burglar In The Rye - Lawrence Block

    1999; 352 pages.  New Author? : No.  Book #9  (out of 10, or 11, or 12, depending how you count them) in the Bernie Rhodenbarr “Burglar” series.  Genre : Crime-Humor.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    The timing is going to be tricky, but it’s all for a good cause.  Bernie Rhodenbarr, retired burglar, is going to unretire for a bit in order to purloin some highly-sought letters from the reclusive author, Gulliver “Gully” Fairborn to his one-time agent, Anthea Landau.

    It won’t be easy.  Dear old Anthea is a recluse who almost never ventures out from her room at the Paddington Hotel, and Bernie isn’t sure where in her room the letters might be stashed.  In fact, he doesn’t even know which room is hers.

    But where there’s a will, or t least some letters, there’s a way, especially if some money can be made along the way.  And Bernie’s larceny skills are certainly up to the challenge.

    Unfortunately, someone saw him just outside Anthea’s hotel room door.  And someone else can prove Bernie was registered at that hotel under an assumed name.  And someone else must also be wanting those letters, because when Bernie makes it into Anthea’s room, she’s dead, and there are no letters to be found.

    Worst of all, someone’s already called the cops.  They’re at the door, and Bernie’s stuck inside.

What’s To Like...

    The Burglar In The Rye has the usual structure used in the Lawrence Block “Burglar” series, and I mean that in a most positive way.  Bernie gets talked into doing “one last heist”, and this isn't his first relapse.  Things go awry, Bernie gets implicated, and he and the reader spend the rest of the book navigating the many plot twists until Bernie, and sometimes the reader, figure out the whodunit.

    The murder-mystery is well-done.  The clues are there, if you’re astute enough to spot them.  But it’s just as much fun to meet a bunch of zany characters – both new and recurring – and to listen in on the sparkling wit that permeates every conversation in a Bernie Rhodenbarr book.  Lawrence Block also revels in imparting obscure trivia to the reader.  Here, we learn all about Chester Alan Arthur (who?) and the dreaded candiru, aka the “toothpick fish”.  The author doesn’t make this stuff up.  Wiki “candiru” to learn, as Bernie did, why you’ll never want to sneak a pee while swimming in a river again.

    As with any of the Burglar books, the new characters introduced are fascinating studies.  The reclusive Gulliver Fairborn sparkles, but my favorite newbie was Isis Gauthier, the first person I can recall that leaves Bernie flummoxed with her incisive questions.

    It also should be noted that, although the book was published in 1999, Bernie’s best friend throughout this series, Carolyn Kaiser, is gay.  No biggie, I hear you say, but what’s impressive is the way Lawrence Block makes her a three-dimensional character.  Yes, she’s gay, but that isn’t her only raison d’etre.  She owns a dog-grooming business, shares meals and drinks with Bernie, and swaps various insights with him over various relationship issues they both have.

    The Burglar In The Rye is a quick and easy read, told in the first-person POV (Bernie’s).  There is some mild cussing, one instance of aural sex (I’ll let you suss that out), and two, unconnected instances of urination fascination.  Maybe Lawrence Block was on diuretics when he wrote this.  This is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.

Kewlest New Word . . .

Twee (adj.) : Excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental.

Excerpts...

    “The day I moved in he told me he wanted me to stay as long as I wanted, and that he hoped I would never leave him.  But that he would leave me.”

    “He told you that?”

    “He stated it as a fact.  The sky is blue, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the day will come when you’ll wake up and I’ll be gone.”

    “It could be a country song,” I said, “except that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny would be tough for Garth Brooks to sing with real conviction.”  (loc. 1085)

    For God’s sake, he’s a self-proclaimed burglar.”

    “Actually,” Carolyn put in, I think ‘admitted’ would be a better word for Bernie than ‘self-proclaimed.’  It’s not as though he goes around making proclamations.  If anything, he’s a little ashamed of being a burglar.”

    “Then why doesn’t he stop burgling?” Isis wanted to know.

    “Just between us, I think it’s an addiction.”

    “Has the man tried therapy?  Or some sort of twelve-step program?”

    “Nothing seems to work.”  (loc. 3414)

Kindle Details...

    The Burglar In The Rye sells for $6.49 at Amazon.  All the rest of the books in the series are in the  $3.99  to $5.99 price range.  Lawrence Block wrote several other, less lighthearted detective series, and those e-books are in the $2.74-$9.99 range.  One of them is the “Matthew Scudder” series, which I am eager to check out.

He was a bear, of course, but not the sort whose predilection for sylvan defecation is as proverbial as the Holy Father’s Catholicism.  (loc. 69)

    There’s not much to quibble about in The Burglar in the Rye.  At one point Bernie, desperately fleeing the police, enters a random hotel room, and stumbles across some extremely valuable rubies, They just happen to play a key part in solving the crime.  Yeah, it’s kinda of a “WTF moment”, but hey, without those gems, the whole investigation would come to naught.  So we’ll let it slide.

    The ending is suitably dramatic, albeit a two-stage affair.  Just about everyone you’ve figured was the culprit gets put under the Bernie Rhodenbarr spotlight, but I doubt you’ll have fingered the actual murderer.  That gets wrapped up at 88%, then it’s time to also resolve the matter of the missing and much-coveted letters.  That may sound anticlimactic, but it actually all works out quite nicely.

    8½ Stars.  I borrowed the Kindle version of Burglar In The Rye from my local library.  They carry the complete series, and it seems like very few patrons remember Lawrence Block.  It may be time to read a couple more of these, before the library deletes them due to inactivity.