Of all the schizophrenic crime writers, Lawrence Block's personalities
may be the most split. The gulf between his hard-boiled Matt Scudder
and his parlour-sleuth Bernie Rhodenbarr is huge, even if Scudder seems
to be mellowing as he settles into a sort of domestic bliss in Hell's
Kitchen.
I've never been a huge fan of Bernie the book-dealing thief, for
a few reasons. First, the characters all seem to exist to indulge in
wordplay with each other, and they're all so facile it becomes difficult to
tell them apart. The dialogue reminds me of plays by Ben Hecht or George
S Kaufman, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but there isn't a lot
of extra time available for characterization. There is, however, time for
some of the minutiae of book dealing and collecting, and frankly, it bores
me. As someone who reads, rather than collects, I can't get excited about
signed first editions, and there are other book-dealing detectives who
irritate me far more than Bernie does.
Having said that, however, this book plays on a literary conceit,
using characters who are thinly disguised versions of JD Salinger, the
famous reclusive novelist, and Joyce Maynard, the teenager elevated to
media stardom by the New York Times in the early 70s, who married the much-older Salinger and has recently published a kiss and tell memoir ratting out the author of Catcher in the Rye. It won't be giving away too much to tell you that the Maynard character in Block's novel turns out to be almost as unpleasant as Maynard appears to be in real life, whatever reality may be to her.
My other problem with the Burglar books is the way Block loves
the drawing room revelation scene, and constructs the Rhodenbarr books
carefully to assemble all the characters for the denouement. In some of
his stories, the solution has relied on Bernie, or his sidekick Carolyn the
dog-grooming dyke, either knowing arcane information or not knowing simple
things, usually both at the same time. In this volume, Block plays more fair with the reader, though the solution does require a leap of lesbian intuition
which I'm surprised Bernie manages. I hate to say that if you like this
sort of thing, you'll like this one, but Block writes so well I'm sure
you will.
