Onyx reviews: The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 11/23/2022

It's not easy being a burglar in the 21st century—especially not a burglar like Bernie Rhodenbarr, who has selective tastes, favoring well-guarded items such as paintings by Mondrian and the works of Spinoza. The omnipresence of CCTV cameras and digital locks has sent him into semi-retirement from his predilection for acquiring objets d'art. His secondary occupation as proprietor of Barnegat Books, an antiquarian and used bookstore in Manhattan, has also been endangered by Amazon and eBay. Fortunately, he has a steady revenue stream from the other tenants of the building he owns.

By the same token, it's not easy for authors of crime fiction writing about a certain kind of burglar who has to deal with modern technology and all the ways it limits traditional mysteries. Lawrence Block has come up with a creative solution to this problem in his latest "Burglar" novel—his first in nearly a decade and only the second in the new millennium. Rather than going to great lengths to neutralize technological issues, he sends his series character into a parallel universe where they don't exist.

His inspiration is the 1949 Frederic Brown novel What Mad Universe, about a man who is able to jump between parallel worlds. Only slight differences distinguish one from the next. Bernie goes to sleep one night after reading the Brown novel and wakes up to find himself in a reality where much has changed in his favor. There are no more security cameras. The internet exists, but not the two commercial sites that have been the bane of his bookselling existence. The bowling alley up the street is back. His nemesis, NYPD detective Ray Kirschmann. is less sleazy in this reality, and Bernie's longtime fence is no longer dead. He isn't the only one who benefits from the subtle changes. His best friend, Carolyn Kaiser, observes that some lesbian clubs she used to frequent are back, too.

It takes the duo a while to come to terms with the changes and the reason for them but, once they realize the implications, Bernie is determined to get back to business. The burgling kind. A once unattainable gem is now within his grasp. As in other books in this series, though, things rarely go smoothly and Bernie often finds himself burgling a location where some other crime is or has been recently committed, putting him on the hook for those incidents as well, often murder.

Bernie also realizes he has entered the life of a parallel Bernie, who had a life before "our Bernie" jumped into it, and he has no memory of what that alternate Bernie may have done in the past. When he's implicated in another robbery, he can't be certain whether he did it or not. Another twist in the tale involvs an interesting development in his longtime platonic relationship with Carolyn, with whom he exchanges witty, rapid-paced banter, has lunch with almost every day and drinks after work most evenings.

Is it real or a dream? And, if it is real, will things return to normal or are Bernie and Carolyn forever trapped in this new universe? Might they leap on to yet another, like Keith Winton does in What Mad Universe? If they return to their original reality, will anything that happened in the alternate universe make a difference? Block has given himself plenty to play with in this delightful installment in a series that has been running for nigh unto half a century.