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4.0 

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

By Lawrence Block
The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

Suppose you're Bernie Rhodenbarr.

 

You've got a dream job, running your own cozy secondhand bookstore, complete with Raffles, your caudally challenged cat. It's in Greenwich Village, and your best friend's dog grooming salon is two doors away, and the two of you lunch together and meet for drinks after work.

 

And you've got another way to make a buck. Every once in a while you put your conscience on the shelf and let yourself into someone else's residence, and you leave with more than you came with. You're a burglar, and you know it's wrong, but you love it.

 

And you're good at it. You've got two ways to make a living, one larcenous, the other literary and legitimate, and you're good at both of them.

Nice, huh?

 

Until the 21st Century pulls the rug out from under you. All of a sudden the streets of your city are so overpopulated with security cameras and closed-circuit TV that you have to lock yourself in the bathroom to have an undocumented moment. And locks, which used to provide the recreational pleasure of a moderately challenging crossword puzzle, have become genuinely pickproof.

 

Meanwhile, internet booksellers have muscled your legit enterprise into obsolescence. The new breed of customers browse your bookshop, find what they're looking for, then whip out their phones and order their books online.

 

Wonderful. You had two ways to make a living, and neither of them works anymore.

 

But suppose you keep on supposing, okay?

 

Suppose you wake up one morning in a world just like the one in which you fell asleep—but with a couple of differences.

The first one you notice doesn't amount to much. The Metrocard in your wallet has somehow changed color and morphed into what seems to be called a SubwayCard. That's puzzling, but you swipe it at the turnstile same as always, and it gets you on the subway, so what difference does it make?

 

But that's not the only thing that's changed. The Internet's up and running, as robust as ever, but nobody seems to be using it to sell books. Doors are secured not with pickproof electronic gizmos but with good old reliable Rabson locks, the kind you can open with your eyes closed. And what happened to all those security cameras? Where'd they go?

 

All of a sudden you've got your life back, and your bookshop's packed with eager customers, and how are you gonna find time to steal something?

Well, just suppose one of the world's worst human beings has recently acquired one of the world's most glamorous gems. When the legendary Kloppmann Diamond is up for grabs, what can you possibly do but grab it?

 

And what could possibly go wrong?

7 Reviews

4.0
“Classic Lawrence Block. Burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr is back, this time with his eye on a priceless diamond. But the security cameras surrounding the penthouse apartment are impenetrable. Until Bernie reads a book about time travel (by Fredric Brown) and suddenly he and Carolyn are in an alternate universe with little security, a resurgence of lesbian bars, and the return of a bowling alley. Block's wit and inventiveness are on full display here, and the book was a joy to read-- with some surprising twists. Highly recommended for any fans of mystery fiction as well as speculative fiction.”

About Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His newest book, pitched by his Hollywood agent as “James M. Cain on Viagra,” is The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. His other recent novels include The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr; Hit Me, featuring philatelist and assassin Keller; and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film, A Walk Among The Tombstones.  Several of his other books have also been filmed, although not terribly well.  He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and has just published a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners, The Crime Of Our Lives.  In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) And the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights.  He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

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