Several people are enclosed in a manor house, or on an island, or in a train. The weather worsens, and they are trapped for a few days. And then a body is discovered. Over the course of the next few chapters, it emerges that most of them had a good reason to wish the victim dead….
Such a plot, I suspect, would be very familiar to many readers like myself who grew up reading Agatha Christie. Who knew that Lawrence Block, was among them? Block is a prolific author but is best known for two excellent series: the brilliant but bleak New York noir novels featuring Matt Scudder, and the charmingly entertaining novels featuring burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr.
The Burglar in the Library is perhaps the most amusing of the Rhodenbarr books, with a plot that is a homage to a Christie manor murder, and with shout-outs to a host of other mystery writers.
Bernie Rhodenbarr is a bookseller, proprietor of Barnegat Books in Greenwich Village, New York. (Block’s books are all loving odes to New York City). Bernie is also a burglar, and much as he loves books, the burglary is how he makes his living. Bernie’s not your standard break-and-enter, jewellery-and-electronics sort of burglar; he only burgles rare items, and after careful planning and investigation. Along with each burglary, he stumbles onto or into a murder, is accused of it, and has to investigate in order to clear his name. Or sometimes, so that he can get away with his burglary.
In this novel, Bernie and his loyal sidekick Carolyn are off to a faux-English country house north of New York City, along with Raffles the cat. Bernie has just been thrown over by a girlfriend, Lettice.
[Carolyn] “Lettice. What kind of a name is that, anyway?”
[Bernie] “I guess it’s English.”
“You know, ever since you started seeing her I’ve been good about resisting the obvious jokes. Like, what kind of a name is that for a tomato? Or, has she got a sister named Parsley? Or, I hope she’s not the original Iceberg Lettice.”
“She’s not.”
“I don’t know, Bern. She was cool as a cucumber the other day.”
Block’s dialogue is always delightful, with conversational balls tossed rapidly between quick-witted speakers.
Needless to say, Bernie has an ulterior motive for this long weekend, and it involves the two original creators of American mystery noir: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Here, Hammett and Chandler supposedly met in the 1940s, and Chandler gave Hammett an inscribed copy of a first edition of his own The Big Sleep. This copy would be priceless, of course, and Bernie thinks it is lying unnoticed in the library of the house.
The residents and visitors to the country house this weekend are an array of characters described firmly with tongue in cheek. There is the slow, hulking Orris (“the young’un”), and an emotional housemaid. The host is Nigel Eglantine, with a “rich laugh”, who says things like “That’s the spirit”. Colonel Blount-Buller is, of course, florid and pompous. Gordon Wolpert, fiftyish and mysterious. Precocious young Millicent Savage and her parents. Miss Dinmont, in a wheelchair (but does she really need it?) and her ‘companion’ Miss Hardesty. Carolyn, who happens to be lesbian, lays this out for Bernie.
[Carolyn] “The frail Miss Dinmont and the outgoing Miss Hardesty.”
[Bernie] “If you say so. I couldn’t keep them straight.”
“Neither could God, Bern.”
“Huh?”
“Keep them straight.”
And the last two guests turn out to be Lettice, Bernie’s ex, and her new husband.
People move around the house at night, hearing whispers and seeing unidentifiable other shadows. And then:
‘Scream bloody murder’ is, of course, just an expression, and just because you’ve heard such a scream doesn’t mean you’re going to find a body in the library.
But we did.
Of course, it starts snowing heavily. The telephone lines are cut, and the road to the house is inaccessible. Will there be another corpse before the means, motive and murderer are identified? Will there be red herrings? Will Bernie get away with the Chandler book? The readers would be disappointed indeed if there was not a neat conclusion, but that is not at all the point of this cheerful novel.
It’s not just Christie, Hammett and Chandler that Block tips his hat to. His characters throw out generous praise to old and new real-life authors.
She picked out half a dozen books by Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George.
Raffles had removed himself to an open spot in the Philosophy and Religion section, on the same high shelf with the bust of Immanuel Kant. “Up there with the father of the categorical imperative”, [said Bernie]. “Which figures, because it’s imperative that he get in the cat carrier, and he’s categorically opposed to it.”
“What exactly is toad-in-the-hole? […] It always makes me think of The Wind in the Willows.”
“Ed McBain signed his new book for me. […] Whenever I read one of his Eighty-seventh Precinct books, I wind up looking at cops in a new light. I see them as real human beings, sensitive and vulnerable, and, well, human.”
and some gentle digs:
A Philip Friedman courtroom novel. It was the author’s latest, and from the looks of it, his longest; if I’d borrowed [it] and stood on the top of it I might not have needed the library steps.
Honestly, there are plenty of contrived events over the course of this book, but does it really matter? The pleasure of this charming novel is in the journey, in Block’s playful callbacks to the mavens of murder mysteries both past and present, in the snappy dialogue, and in the way he makes an English murder mystery so thoroughly his own.
it sounds charming!