The Burglar in Short Order Read online

  More by Lawrence Block

  THE BERNIE RHODENBARR MYSTERIES

  BURGLARS CAN’T BE CHOOSERS • THE BURGLAR IN THE CLOSET • THE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING • THE BURGLAR WHO STUDIED SPINOZA • THE BURGLAR WHO PAINTED LIKE MONDRIAN • THE BURGLAR WHO TRADED TED WILLIAMS • THE BURGLAR WHO THOUGHT HE WAS BOGART • THE BURGLAR IN THE LIBRARY • THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE • THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL • THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS

  NOVELS

  A DIET OF TREACLE • AFTER THE FIRST DEATH • ARIEL • BORDERLINE • CAMPUS TRAMP • CINDERELLA SIMS • COWARD’S KISS • DEADLY HONEYMOON • GETTING OFF • THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART • GRIFTER’S GAME • KILLING CASTRO • LUCKY AT CARDS • NOT COMIN’ HOME TO YOU • RANDOM WALK • RONALD RABBIT IS A DIRTY OLD MAN • SMALL TOWN • THE SPECIALISTS • STRANGE EMBRACE/69 BARROW STREET • SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS • THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL • YOU COULD CALL IT MURDER • THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES

  THE MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVELS

  THE SINS OF THE FATHERS • TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE • IN THE MIDST OF DEATH • A STAB IN THE DARK • EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE • WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES • OUT ON THE CUTTING EDGE • A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD • A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE • A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES • THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD • A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN • EVEN THE WICKED • EVERYBODY DIES • HOPE TO DIE • ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING • A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF • THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC

  KELLER’S GREATEST HITS

  HIT MAN • HIT LIST • HIT PARADE • HIT & RUN • HIT ME

  THE ADVENTURES OF EVAN TANNER

  THE THIEF WHO COULDN’T SLEEP • THE CANCELED CZECH • TANNER’S TWELVE SWINGERS • TWO FOR TANNER • TANNER’S TIGER • HERE COMES A HERO • ME TANNER, YOU JANE • TANNER ON ICE

  THE AFFAIRS OF CHIP HARRISON

  NO SCORE • CHIP HARRISON SCORES AGAIN • MAKE OUT WITH MURDER • THE TOPLESS TULIP CAPER

  COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

  SOMETIMES THEY BITE • LIKE A LAMB TO SLAUGHTER • SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR • ONE NIGHT STANDS AND LOST WEEKENDS • ENOUGH ROPE • CATCH AND RELEASE • DEFENDER OF THE INNOCENT

  BOOKS FOR WRITERS

  WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT • TELLING LIES FOR FUN & PROFIT• SPIDER, SPIN ME A WEB • WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE • THE LIAR’S BIBLE • THE LIAR’S COMPANION • AFTERTHOUGHTS

  WRITTEN FOR PERFORMANCE

  TILT! (EPISODIC TELEVISION) • HOW FAR? (ONE-ACT PLAY) • MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (FILM)

  ANTHOLOGIES EDITED

  DEATH CRUISE • MASTER’S CHOICE • OPENING SHOTS • MASTER’S CHOICE 2 • SPEAKING OF LUST • OPENING SHOTS 2 • SPEAKING OF GREED • BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS • GANGSTERS, SWINDLERS, KILLERS, & THIEVES • MANHATTAN NOIR • MANHATTAN NOIR 2 • DARK CITY LIGHTS

  NON-FICTION

  STEP BY STEP • GENERALLY SPEAKING • THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES

  Contents

  Foreword: A Burglar’s Origins

  A Bad Night for Burglars

  Mr. Rhodenbarr, Bookseller, Advises a Young Customer on Seeking a Vocation

  The Burglar Who Strove to Go Straight

  Like a Thief in the Night

  The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis

  The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke

  The Burglar Who Collected Copernicus

  A Burglar’s-eye View of Greed

  The Burglar on Location

  Five Books Bernie Has Read More Than Once

  A Burglar’s Complaint

  The Burglar Takes a Cat

  The Burglar on the Screen

  Afterword: A Burglar’s Future

  About the Author

  The Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries

  The Burglar in Short Order

  Lawrence Block

  A Lawrence Block Production

  Copyright © 2020 Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover illustration Copyright © 2020 by Jeff Wong

  Interior by QA Productions

  “A Bad Night for Burglars”, first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1977

  “Mr. Rhodenbarr, Bookseller, Advises a Young Customer on Seeking a Vocation”, copyright © 1980 by Lawrence Block

  “The Burglar Who Strove to Go Straight”, first published in Florida Happens: Bouchercon 2018, Greg Herren, ed.

  “Like a Thief in the Night”, first published in Cosmopolitan, May 1983

  “The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis”, first published in Playboy, April 1980

  “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke”, first published in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Summer/Fall 1997

  “The Burglar Who Collected Copernicus”, first published in Chicago Tribune, 2000

  “A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed”, first published in New York Newsday, 2002

  “The Burglar on Location”, first published in New York Daily News

  “Five Books Bernie Has Read More Than Once”, first published in Crimespree Magazine, November 2013

  “A Burglar’s Complaint”, first published in 38 Hours

  “The Burglar Takes a Cat”, first Published in Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories, February 2010, Ellen Datlow, ed.

  “The Burglar on the Screen”, first Published in Hollywood vs. The Author, November 2018, Stephen Jay Schwartz, ed.

  “Afterword: A Burglar’s Future”, copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Block

  Special thanks to Bill Schafer and Jeff Wong at Subterranean Press for generously allowing the use of the beautiful cover for this edition.

  Foreword:

  A Burglar’s Origins

  Origins are difficult to pin down.

  Well, not always. Consider Athena, patron of Athens, invaluable guide to Odysseus, goddess of wisdom, her symbols the owl and the olive tree. As you very likely recall, she sprang full-blown from the head of her father, Zeus.

  Now that’s pretty clear-cut, isn’t it? Bernie Rhodenbarr, the larcenous hero of eleven novels and the shorter works which comprise this volume, emerged from some chamber of myself, but Bernie is no Athena. His entry into the world of fiction may be closer to seepage than to full-blown springing.

  So how did he get here?

  His debut in print, arguably, was in “A Bad Night for Burglars,” published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in April, 1977. As best I can recall, I wrote the story the previous September, during a month in Rodanthe, on the North Carolina Outer Banks, where I fished off the pier every day and lived on what I hauled out of the water. (Spot, mostly, but also croaker and skate and, when I was lucky, pompano.)

  When I wasn’t fishing, I was writing short stories, and this one about a hapless burglar was among them. Most of the others sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, but my agent sent this one to Fred Dannay at EQMM, and early in 1977, shortly after I moved into the Magic Hotel in Hollywood, I learned it had been accepted. It was my first-ever sale to the magazine, and came at a time when I couldn’t get much written and couldn’t sell much of what I did write, so the news of its acceptance was welcome indeed.

  Fred, who with his cousin Manfred Lee constituted “Ellery Queen,” never in his capacity as editor met a title he didn’t want to change. He published this one as “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” already widely familiar as the title of a best-selling novel by Laura Z. Hobson, and as soon as I got the opportunity I changed it right back to “A Bad Night for Burglars.” That’s what it is, and thus it shall remain.

  But is the protagonist Bernie Rhodenbarr?

  Well, I never called him that. He doesn’t really need a name, not in this story, nor does he appear to have one. And it’s clear at the story’s end that he doesn’t have much of a future, either. The likelihood
of his returning as the titular hero of a whole string of novels would have seemed rather unlikely.

  But it’s pretty clear to me that he’s Bernie. The attitude, the personality—really, who else could he be?

  So there I was, ensconced at the Magic Hotel on Hollywood’s Franklin Avenue, and a single sale of a short story to Fred Dannay, however welcome, was not enough to make me solvent. I’ve written elsewhere of what I’d been going through, and how having spent the past two decades as a free-lance writer left me unqualified for any actual employment. I needed a job and couldn’t summon up the grit to apply for one.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. After I left Rodanthe I landed for a few weeks in Charleston, South Carolina, where one day I responded to a card in a shoe repairman’s window. He was looking for an apprentice, and I was addled enough to think this was something I might do. Now 37 is an advanced age for an apprenticeship, and while my fingers could cope with a typewriter keyboard they were hardly agile enough for a cobbler’s work, so I’d be hard put to come up with a job for which I was less qualified.

  The fellow was set to hire me, but he needed someone who’d stick around, and I figured I’d be leaving Charleston by the end of the month. I could have had a few weeks’ work, and earned a few meals, but I didn’t have the heart to disappoint the man. He appreciated my honesty, he told me, and had the feeling I had the makings of a damn good shoe repairman—and in the dry and dismal months that followed I wondered if I’d passed up the opportunity of a lifetime.

  But I went on drifting, and kept trying to get something written. I was in a motel room outside of Mobile, Alabama, when I wrote what was trying to be the first chapter of a Matthew Scudder novel. In it, an oafish fellow turns up at Scudder’s table at Armstrong’s. Scudder had arrested him for burglary some years back, and the fellow hadn’t learned his lesson, but now the cops were after him for a murder he hadn’t committed, and he was on the run and wanted Scudder to find a way to clear him.

  Well, it was a premise, but it never got anywhere. I wrote ten or twenty pages, and that was the end of that. It wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened, nor was it the last. Some ideas turn into books; many more turn into landfill.

  But those few pages, long since tossed aside and forgotten, gave a name to a character I hadn’t yet developed.

  Back to the Magic Hotel. I couldn’t write anything, I couldn’t sell anything, and I’d missed my chance in the world of shoe repair. What the hell could I do to turn a buck?

  I’ve written before about the little voice that spoke to me. “Don’t rule out crime,” it said.

  Crime?

  “You don’t need a résumé,” it pointed out, “or a curriculum vitae. You know how all the job ads say ‘Experience a must’? Well, walk into a liquor store and point a gun at the clerk and he’s not going to ask you if you’ve done this before.”

  But I didn’t want to point a gun at anybody, and I sure as hell didn’t want anyone to point a gun at me. Violence? The mere threat of violence? No, I don’t think so.

  “Burglary,” the voice continued. “Actually, it’s a lot like writing. You do all you can to avoid human contact. You set your own hours, and you can work at night if you want.”

  And so on.

  I thought about it. Seriously? Well, that’s hard to say. I did teach myself to use an otherwise useless credit card to breach the door of my hotel room, but I never tried the trick on somebody else’s door. So I’d characterize the notion as a fantasy, but a serious fantasy.

  Still, who knows where it might have led?

  What I do know is where it did lead, to this conversation with the little voice:

  “Wait a minute. Suppose I got caught?”

  “That’s where inexperience is an asset. As a first offender, you might get probation. At worst you’d be sure of a light sentence.”

  “A prison sentence? Me?”

  “How bad would it be? They’d have to feed you. You wouldn’t have to worry about coming up with the rent.”

  “I guess it might not be that terrible, and—wait a minute. Suppose I broke into somebody’s house, and the cops came, and I was all set to go quietly, and then—”

  “And then what?”

  “And then there was a dead body in the other room. Not my doing, but—”

  “That would be a problem,” said the voice.

  A problem? A problem?

  The hell you say. That would be a book.

  And so it was, of course. I sat down and wrote a few chapters and a very sketchy outline. While I was proofreading it and wondering what to call it, I saw a phrase I’d written for my narrator’s internal monologue. “Burglars can’t be choosers,” he’d mused, and there was my title. I packed it up and mailed it off to my agent, and he sent it straight off to Lee Wright, the legendary mystery editor at Random House. And, remarkably, she bought it almost immediately, and I worked on it over the summer, and in early fall I finished it in Greenville, South Carolina.

  When I’d begun writing, my lead character kept surprising me. The last thing I’d expected was comedy. I’d imagined myself in these unfortunate circumstances, having been caught committing a burglary only to be charged with homicide, and I hadn’t seen anything inherently amusing about it. But this fellow, this Bernie Rhodenbarr, while aware of the dire nature of his situation, kept finding humor in it.

  This is coming out funny, I thought. I’ll have to change it.

  “No, you moron,” said the little voice. “Just leave it alone.”

  You think?

  “Definitely. Let Bernie be Bernie.”

  Bernie.

  Bernie Rhodenbarr.

  And where did the name come from?

  Well, I don’t know exactly. I had a sort of shirt-tail cousin whose last name was Rodenberg, and I had always liked the sound of that, but I played with it and liked the look and sound of Rhodenbarr better. But that didn’t happen at the Magic Hotel. It happened in that motel outside of Mobile.

  That’s right. Back in Alabama, where I’d been trying to start a Scudder novel. That guy sitting across the table from Matt had a name, and it was Bernie. He had a last name, too, and it was Rhodenbarr.

  And I’d pretty much forgotten about him when I started writing Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, but I evidently remembered his name, and appropriated it for this new chap, a fellow not at all similar in tone and attitude and worldview to the poor guy in “A Bad Night for Burglars.” A fellow, I might add, who had nothing in common with that Alabama klutz aside from his name and his occupation.

  If “A Bad Night for Burglars” was Bernie’s debut, although he didn’t have a name, and if a previously-aborted Scudder novel named him, then Burglars Can’t Be Choosers closed the deal. I put that credit card back in my wallet, and before too long I was able to start using it again, but in the manner for which it was intended, opening metaphoric rather than literal doors.

  So you could say that Bernie Rhodenbarr saved me from a life of crime.

  And if I was off and running, so was Bernie. Burglars Can’t Be Choosers was published in 1977, and it was followed in short order by The Burglar in the Closet (1978) and The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979).

  It was in Kipling, the third book in the series, that Bernie really got his footing. In it he acquired the two defining elements in his life—Barnegat Books, the secondhand bookstore (or antiquarian bookshop, if you prefer) on East Eleventh Street, and, a mere two doors east of the store, Carolyn Kaiser, who grooms dogs at The Poodle Factory, harbors cats in Arbor Court, and who is without question Bernie’s Best Friend Forever.

  The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, I should note, is the source of two of the pieces in this present volume. A distinguished bookseller in Delaware liked the novel’s first chapter, in which Bernie turns the tables on a shoplifter, and arranged to publish it separately in 1980 in an edition of 250 copies, via his imprint Oak Knoll Books. It’s now a very collectible item, commanding a strong premium,
and it seems reasonable to include it here under the title of the special printing, “Mr. Rhodenbarr, Bookseller, Advises a Young Customer on Seeking a Vocation.”

  And then, four decades later, the people organizing Bouchercon, the annual mystery convention, began plans for an anthology of Florida-based crime stories, as the 2018 convention was set for St. Petersburg (in Florida, not Russia!). Greg Herren was enlisted to edit the volume and Three Rooms Press signed on to publish it, and Bouchercon official Erin Mitchell wondered if I had a Florida story to contribute.

  Well, I had set a whole book in Florida recently (The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes) but if I ever set a short story there, I couldn’t think of it. It was Erin’s idea to choose the second chapter of Kipling, with a Florida reference if not a setting. I agreed, and we decided to call it “The Burglar Who Strove to Go Straight.”

  The anthology, Florida Happens, won an Anthony Award—but the only credit I’ll claim for that was that my contribution wasn’t sufficiently off-putting to kill the deal altogether. I’m including it here because, well, it was published separately . . .

  But I may be getting ahead of myself here.

  In the late 1970s, what began as an insert in New York Magazine had taken shape as Savvy, a magazine for executive women. At least one of their editors was a fan of mine, and thought perhaps I could write a story for them—although they had never published any fiction. Their offices were in the Port Authority building on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, now all these years later the home of Google, and late hours in the office led them to consider what a spooky place it could be after everyone else went home. Was there a story lurking in those unsettling halls? And could I unearth it and write it?

  I could and did, and as you’ll see it’s a third-person story in which Bernie is not the narrator but plays a strong supporting role. They liked it just fine at Savvy, and they paid for it, and I kept waiting for it to appear. It was scheduled, I’d be advised, and then it was bumped, and rescheduled, and bumped again. The problem was that Savvy was really not a vehicle for fiction, and eventually they realized as much and freed me to publish the story elsewhere.