The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022) by Lawrence Block

Once upon a time, I was quite the priggish, fundamentally-minded purist who viewed the post-WWII landscape of the crime-and detective genre as an arid, desolate wasteland and despises everything that was not like John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen – who were to me the only measuring sticks for good detective fiction. An attitude that was not without its hypocrisy as modern authors like A.C. Baantjer and M.P.O. Books were exempt from scorn. It took some years for my personal taste and preferences to mature and get fine-tuned. Not that they became "respectable" or anything of the sort. God forbid that ever happens! I simply learned over the years good detective fiction is not bound to a time or place and has everything to do with who's doing the writing and plotting. Whenever they may be.

There were a handful of so-called modernists who helped nudge me in that direction beginning with William L. DeAndrea, Christopher Fowler and eventually Bill Pronzini and Herbert Resnicow. But there was another writer who has been shamefully neglected on this blog.

Lawrence Block is an American crime writer best known for his private eye series about a reformed alcoholic, Matthew Scudder, but I really enjoyed his creation of a modern-day, gentleman thief, Bernie Rhodenbarr. A series that was recommended to me following my enthusiastic discovery of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983) and The Burglar in the Library (1997) were among the highlights of the series. You can find The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (1994) and the short story "The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke" (1997) on "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." I kind of forgot about Block and Rhodenbarr after finishing the series and had completely missed the releases of The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (2013) and the short story collection The Burglar in Short Order (2020). This would have likely continued, if the universe had not decided to be weird and bring the series back to my attention.

Ever since the English publications of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), the subject of the largely unexplored, genre-warping hybrid mysteries has come up around these parts a couple of times – particularly their untapped potential as the genre's next frontier. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of hybrid mysteries is a detective story with a science-fiction (Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, 1954) or fantasy (Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians, 1966) setting, but a hybrid mystery can also take place a lot closer to home. Like a parallel universe or an alternate timeline. It strikes me as teeming with potential for cleverly-twisted, dual narrative trickery and removed difficult customers like robots and sorcerers while maintaining that otherworldly quality of a science-fiction or fantasy mystery hybrid (see some of my old comments here and here).

So was a little surprised when learning last year that Lawrence Block had not only published a brand new Bernie Rhodenbarr novel, but one in which Bernie is hurled headfirst into a parallel universe. Well, I know when to take a hint. 

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022) is the thirteenth outing for Bernie Rhodenbarr, owner of a secondhand bookstore in Greenwich Village, New York, who moonlights as a burglar with his best friend and partner in crime, Carolyn Kaiser – who runs a dog grooming salon near his bookshop. They have been getting into trouble throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, but the world has dramatically altered since he began selling books and burglarizing houses. Both have seen a downturn in the new millennium. Nowadays, the only people browsing his bookstore "were looking for a preview of something they could subsequently order online" and his sign reading "please wait until you have exited the premises before ordering the book from Amazon" was either overlooked or ignored. It simply was "infinitely easier and more efficient, not to mention cheaper, to do your book hunting at your computer." The simple burglary business is not much better as Bernie's lock-picking skills entirely useless when pitted against electronic locks. Not to mention that security cameras are now everywhere ("...and started the old rant about security cameras and electronic locks").

The world couldn't have picked a worst time to dabble in a little dystopianism as "one of the most contemptible human beings on the planet," Orrin Vandenbrinck, who plunked down a cool sixty million dollars ("plus Sotheby's ten percent bidder's premium") for the Kloppmann Diamond. Maddeningly, Vandenbrinck announced to the world he's keeping the famous diamond at his New York apartment. So close, yet so far away, as the up-to-date security places the diamond far out of his reach. 

After ranting to Carolyn about it, Bernie retires to bed with Fredric Brown's 1949 science-fiction novel What Mad Universe. A story in which the protagonist is thrown into an alternate universe. When he wakes up, Bernie slowly begins to realize he, somehow, slipped into a different reality while he was asleep. Bernie first notices some small, but hard to miss, differences like how his orange-and-blue Metrocard is now a green-and-white SubwayCard. There are no security cameras anywhere, buildings that had been torn down have returned and the internet still exists with Google, YouTube and Wikipedia – except no Amazon or eBay ("What's that, Pig Latin?"). I can only imagine that would be possible in a universe where severe restrictions were placed on internet retailers in order to protect brick-and-mortar stores and shopping malls, but the story never really addresses this. Nevertheless, it means customers have returned to Bernie's bookstore and the Kloppmann Diamond is now behind locks he can pick open without security cameras looking over his shoulders.

Bernie is the only one who ended up in this somewhat familiar looking, but strange, parallel universe. Carolyn is right there with him and believes it was Bernie who shuttled them into a different universe as it appears to be a "tailor-made world." It has and lacks everything to make both of his vocations a whole lot easier. I should note here that The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown is a character piece exploring the long-standing relationship of two "best friends who had this unconscious and unacknowledged itch," which got scratched, but at the expense of a criminally underutilized setting and plot.

Firstly, the setting is not, to quote Carolyn, "some horseshit dream" or sprung into existence, but had already been there with its own versions of Bernie Rhodenbarr and Carolyn Kaiser. The actions of that universe's Bernie will go on to pose a problem for the visiting Bernie as he has no memory of a burglary he committed before arriving in that universe. Regrettably, that's about the most interesting thing the story pulled off with its alternate universe setting and not for a lack of possibilities. Bernie and Carolyn discuss the possibility being stuck there forever or the chance of another unexpected somersault that would throw them back into their own universe. Why not have them effortlessly break into the building and the moment Bernie lays his hands on the diamond, they get pulled back into their own reality. Now they find themselves holding a sixty million dollar diamond on the top floor penthouse of a high rise building secured with cameras, electronic locks, bodyguards and a desk attendant in the lobby. It would have made for a much more exciting ending as they try to escape from the 29th floor without getting caught or leave trail leading right up to their doorstep. Bernie's unexplained ability to tumble into another universe can be used for later books with him preparing burglaries of places out of his reach in his own universe, but easily accessible in the other. Whenever he finds himself in the other universe, all he has to do is set his plans into motion. There even some fascinating possibilities that can be done with the characters. What if Bernie found himself alone on one of his trips and had to work together with the alternate Carolyn who has no idea this Bernie is not hers. The alternate universe setting here is only to give the story and character-arc a slightly off-world feeling. Secondly, the plot is trivial to the point of irrelevance.

One thing that remained unaltered in this universe is Bernie's ability, whenever he tries to peacefully breaking and entering a place, to attract a murder or two and places him in the cross hairs of "the best cop money can buy," Ray Kirschmann – forcing him to occasionally don the deerstalker ("...if you just focus on certain episodes in your life, you're a detective"). This time is no different. Regrettably, there's no real (satisfying) resolutions to the problems they encountered in the other universe and had a sort of “not my universe, not my problem” hand waving about it. There's even a line that entirely undermined the little bit of intriguing world-building that was done (SPOILER/ROT13: “Ohg gur havirefr jr pbawherq vagb rkvfgrapr znqr guvatf hc nf vg jrag nybat, naq gurl qvqa’g unir gb znxr frafr”) and seemingly contradicted (ROT13) gur zbarl gurl oebhtug onpx sebz gur nygreangr havirefr.

So the story ended up being somewhat disappointing and muddled in the details, plot-wise, but enjoyed returning to the characters and appreciated the attempt to do something with an alternate universe in a crime novel. Even if didn't go much beyond having an alternate, slightly off universe. The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown is simply a character-piece that I can only recommend to dedicated fans of the series or readers with a specialized interest in hybrid mysteries. 

Note for the curious: yes, this is one of those trailing, lukewarm reviews, but please keep in mind that there was a time I would have angrily tossed The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown aside, denounced its author as a hack and officially declared the modern crime genre a landfill. I would never have taken and judged the book on its own terms. All that would have mattered at the time is that the ending breaks with the sacred traditions of the great detective stories of the past and therefore heretical. I think I've been fair to The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown and regret it didn't turn out to be as good as The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams or The Burglar in the Library.