The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
July 1999

So this time Bernie's trying to steal the highly personal letters of an author before the author's agent can publish them.

Are you listening, Joyce "Just Putting My Kids Through College" Maynard?

If J. D. Salinger reads this novel, he's going to be one happy dude. Because he'll say, See what happens to people who sell the love letters of people they once knew intimately?

While The Burglar in the Rye isn't the exact equivalent of Joyce Maynard selling J. D. Salinger's letters at auction, it's close enough. Too bad ole J. D. doesn't know Bernie's phone number. He's in the book, J. D. Just look him up.

Anyway, in this here particular installment of the Bernie saga, author wants letters back, Bernie goes to offending party's office and finds offending party dead. I wonder if Block had any particular agent in mind when he killed this one off.

So Bernie has to solve a murder. And in the meantime meets all the strange and wonderful people only Bernie seems to meet while solving a murder. Most of them are funny; a few are sad-funny. Block gives even the walk-ons real lives. It's one of the things that makes him major.

This one seems more Nero Wolfe-ian than ever. It's a true head-scratching whodunit, with Block pulling more bamboozles and switchbacks and Mexican hat tricks than ever. It's one of the things that makes him so entertaining.

We have Carolyn, his gay friend, and even more important, we have Bernie's singularly oddball take on the city. A burglar looks at a city in a different way from the rest of us. Hiding places. Sumptuouslytemptingplaces to burgle. The weirdo you turn to while on the run from the city's finest. Block has a great and idiosyncratic take on the city. It's one of the things that makes him enduring.

I first read Bernie Rhodenbarr 20 years ago, and I'm not sick of him yet. I doubt I ever will get sick of him. Block seems to be at the pinnacle of his creative powers. And Bernie just keeps getting funnier and funnier and funnier.

—Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman's latest novels include Daughter of Darkness, Harlot's Moon, and Black River Falls, the latter of which "proves Gorman's mastery of the pure suspense novel," says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. ABC-TV has optioned the novel as a movie. Gorman is also the editor of Mystery Scene magazine, which Stephen King calls "indispensable" for mystery readers.

From the Publisher

Gulliver Fairborn's novel, Nobody's Baby, changed Bernie Rhodenbarr's life. And now pretty Alice Cottrell, Fairborn's one-time paramour, wants the bookselling, book-loving burglar to break into a room in New York's teeth-achingly charming Paddington Hotel and purloin some of the writer's very personal letters before an unscrupulous agent can sell them. Here's an opportunity to use his unique talents in the service of the revered, famously reclusive author. But when Bernie gets there, the agent is dead . . . and Bernie's wanted for murder. (He really hates when that happens!)

Perhaps it's karmic payback; Bernie did help himself to a ruby necklace on his way out. (But it was lying there. And he is a burglar.) Now he's in even hotter water. And he'll need to use every trick in the book—maybe going so far as to entice the hermitic Fairborn himself out of seclusion—to bring this increasingly twisted plot to a satisfying denouement.

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

...[A]mystery stuffed to the eyeballs with endearing oddballs....By the time this amiably amoral hero assembles all the interested parties for his droll summation (''I suppose you're wondering why I summoned you all here''), he has earned his teddy bear.

Publishers Weekly

Block's addictive series about bookseller/burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr (The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian, etc.) continues as our hero invades the hotel suite of an aged literary agent in search of a cache of letters, by a respected and reclusive writer, that are wanted by people both legitimate and not. As he usually does, Bernie finds a corpse on the other side of the locked door he so neatly opens, and he is immediately suspected of murder by his nemesis, sticky-fingered Ray Kirschmann of the NYPD. More murder ensues before Bernie, with the help of his lesbian buddy Carolyn, can get a handle on the proceedings. But when he does, and has gathered all the principals into a room for the inevitable explanatory/accusatory windup ("I suppose you're wondering why I summoned you all here," he gets to say, to his and the reader's delight, time and again), he hits on a solution that fingers a most unlikely suspect, satisfies all the claimants to the letters and leaves him (and Ray) richer. Block's effortless mastery of his material, his relaxed ease, are as pleasurable as always, and he has some splendid fun with an author not unlike J.D. Salinger. This is the prolific Block's only new novel of the year, and it's a steal at any price. (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

After all the reissues, here's something that's actually billed as "a new Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery." When Bernie is asked to locate a reclusive author's missing letters, he runs into murder.

The Mystery Review - Bob Smith

This is one great book- intriguing, delightful, suspenseful, laugh-out-loud wonderful.

Kirkus Reviews

If you catch the allusion in Block's title, you're in just the right mood for Bernie Rhodenbarr's ninth spot of burglary-cum-detection. Alice Cottrell, a former teen prodigy who spent three of her Wonder years with Gulliver Fairborn, the famously reclusive American writer whose first novel changed the life of every teenager who read it, has hired Bernie to steal Gully's letters to Anthea Landau—the ex-agent who's about to put them up for auction even though Gully copyrighted them—so that Alice can protect her old mentor by destroying them. Bernie checks into Anthea's hotel (the seedy, genteel, splendidly evoked Paddington) breaks sedately into her room, and begins his search for the letters. But he has to leave half a step ahead of the law when he realizes that the reason Anthea isn't listening to his burglarious noises is that she's dead and the cops are knocking. Except for the corpse, this may sound as familiar as last week's literary gossip, but when Bernie stops to purloin a ruby necklace from another Paddington guestroom he passes through during his escape, he opens a whole new can of worms and unleashes a comic nightmare of collectors, scholars, spurned lovers, and garden-variety thieves. The shaggy mystery, which requires an even more hyperextended finale than The Burglar in the Library (1997), manages to honor most of the conventions of the formal detective story even while sending them all giddily up. And if Bernie Rhodenbarr weren't already irresistible, the Salinger/Maynard tie-in would hook the stragglers.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Lawrence Block: I'm great, and eager to talk. I head off on a book tour tomorrow, and I'm champing at the bit.

Lawrence Block: Bernie's the burglar I would have been if writing hadn't worked out.

Lawrence Block: I wouldn't say outraged. If anything, I suppose I was delighted at the way life imitates art. My book was already rolling off the press when Joyce put the letters up for auction. She's got the right, you know. Letters belong to the recipient, and the copyright belongs to the author. It's all pretty clear-cut.

Lawrence Block: Well, not this trip. But this month I'm coming to B&N stores in Redding, Chico, and Fresno, all in California.

Lawrence Block: I knew when I was 15 or so, started selling stories a few years later, and was 19 or 20 when I sold my first novel.

Lawrence Block: Hi, Gerald. Actually, that part comes easy to me. When I wrote TANNER ON ICE, I was writing a character I'd last written 25 years before, and I wondered if I could get into the voice. I sat down and picked up a pen and there Tanner was, as if he'd just stepped out for a cup of coffee. It was that easy.

Lawrence Block: Something like 60 cities, and I can't wait.

Lawrence Block: I walk the city a lot, but not usually during the writing of the book. By the time I sit down and get to work, I go from what I've already soaked up. Unless I have to go check something.

Lawrence Block: Rye is Gulliver Fairborn's drink of choice, and Bernie drinks a lot of it in this book. I mean, what else could it refer to?

Lawrence Block: Nope. Not interested in it.

Lawrence Block: Well, I don't have much of a job history. I've really been writing ever since school.

Lawrence Block: Hope so. I just got back from a month in Australia, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next one in the series is TANNER DOWN UNDER.

Lawrence Block: Well, writing. Getting it down and getting it right. And it doesn't ever get any easier.

Lawrence Block: I make it up as I go along. Never use written outlines.

Lawrence Block: I wish. No, it has elements of the Gramercy and the Chelsea, among others.

Lawrence Block: Well, I didn't know it would turn out to be a series. And I'd been half-thinking about burglary as a career, and I wondered what would happen if something went wrong, and, well, that turned into BURGLARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS.

Lawrence Block: Not of baseball cards. Stamps, poker chips, Indian fetish carvings...

Lawrence Block: I don't have a daily schedule, but when I'm working on a book I prioritize it. Maybe I get a lot done because I'm easily satisfied...

Lawrence Block: Thanks, David. Hard to answer. I just try to write books that I would like to read. Elmore Leonard says he tries to leave out the parts that people skip -- I think that's a good way to put it.

Lawrence Block: I'm hosting the Zodiac Killer episode on "Case Reopened," a new show on the Learning Channel. I believe the air date is October 10th.

Lawrence Block: I grew up in Buffalo but have lived most of my so-called adult life in NYC. And I just love it -- it's exciting and stimulating and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Lawrence Block: Thanks, Bill. Hard to say. I never really know what I'm going to do next. I want to continue all the series, and I don't want to write more than a book a year, so where does that leave us? One of each every few years, I guess. Unless something else comes up...

Lawrence Block: Well, I can't say I think much of MFA programs. They turn out some good writers, but I don't know that the programs can take credit for it.

Lawrence Block: Bernie? Married? I don't think so.

Lawrence Block: I don't know. I'm always fondest of the most recent book, but that's not quite what you asked. My wife and I have been to 70 towns and cities named Buffalo -- now there's an accomplishment...

Lawrence Block: I don't really think in those terms. I just get into a mess and sort of write my way out of it.

Lawrence Block: Well, I tend to love them all. The Burglar books, curiously, are the most difficult to write, although people tell me they seem effortless. But the plotting is difficult.

Lawrence Block: No, I'm on a book tour for the whole summer. And nobody's likely to mistake it for a vacation.

Lawrence Block: The writing itself, really. After that, the freedom to travel.

Lawrence Block: The book was already in print before she put the letters up for auction. The inspiration was two-fold -- Maynard announced that she had written a biography, and Candida Donadio, a literary agent, announced that she was selling letters Thomas Pynchon had written her.

Lawrence Block: John Sandford's CERTAIN PREY, Martin Cruz Smith's HAVANA BAY, and Thomas Harris's HANNIBAL.

Lawrence Block: Quietly.

Lawrence Block: Next one -- it's about half done now -- is a sequel to HIT MAN.

Lawrence Block: Yeah, THE MALTESE FALCON.

Lawrence Block: It's difficult, but it seems to me it's always been difficult. I suspect that's how it ought to be in the arts. All you can do is keep at it.

Lawrence Block: Not if I can help it

Lawrence Block: I've been to most of the places Keller has gone, but found different things to do there. And yes, I'm working on another book about Keller.

Lawrence Block: I should be ashamed to admit it, but I flat-out love them all.

Lawrence Block: Some. I read a lot less than I used to.

Lawrence Block: Luck and a trust fund.

Lawrence Block: Gosh, John, I'm my favorite living writer. John O'Hara's my favorite non-living writer.

Lawrence Block: Sure -- buy THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE!

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The lobby was a bit the worse for wear. The large oriental carpet had seen better days, lots of them. The facing Lawson sofas sagged invitingly and, like the rest of the furniture, showed the effects of long use. They were in use now; two women sat in animated conversation, and, a few yards away, a man with a long oval face and a high forehead sat reading a copy of GQ. He wore sunglasses, which made him look dapper and sly. I don't know how they made the magazine look. Dark, I suppose.

While the lobby may have been the least bit down at the heels, the overall impression was not so much of shabbiness as of comfort. The glow of a fire in the fireplace, a welcome sight on a brisk October day, put everything in the best possible light. And, centered above the fireplace mantel, painted with such . . .