Bernie Rhodenbarr, Burglar

"I know this is all morally reprehensible and there are days when it bothers me, but there’s no getting around it. My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr and I’m a thief and I love to steal. I just plain love it." (The Burglar in the Closet, Kindle Locations 153-154).

My most recently read Bernie Rhodenbarr novel.

Bernie Rhodenbarr, the likable house-breaker who narrates the crime fiction series by Lawrence Block, is intelligent, well-spoken, honest (as long as you don't count burglary), and a lover of good food, good booze, and beautiful women (but he's respectful). I've read four or five of these light-hearted novels in the past several months, and quite enjoyed them.

Bernie has to be very resourceful, because someone by chance is murdered during almost every one of his break-ins. Once he's burgling someone's New York apartment -- after he cleverly gets past attentive doormen and nosy neighbors or climbs over dangerous roofs -- disaster always seems to strike. The police suspect him whenever this happens, and he finds himself working with or against dishonest cops or bungling plainclothesmen to find the real culprit.

By the way, the details about New York and what it's like to live there are a lot of fun to read, as some of the books were written a number of years ago: The Burglar in the Closet dates from 1978; the most recent one dates from 2013.

Just for fun, here's Bernie's stream-of-consciousness as he waits inside a closet in an apartment from which he's just collected all the jewelry. He's stuck there because the woman whose jewelry he was burgling unexpectedly came home: with a man. He doesn't want to listen to them so he fantasizes what he'll be doing after work; that is, after burgling --

"I hadn’t had the before-dinner drinks and I hadn’t had the dinner either, preferring to postpone that pleasure until I could do it in style and in celebration. I’d been thinking in terms of a latish supper at a little hideaway I know on Cornelia Street in the Village. Those two marts first, of course, and then that cold asparagus soup they do such a good job with, and then the sweetbreads with mushrooms, God, those sweetbreads, and a salad of arugola and spinach with mandarin orange sections, ah yes, and perhaps a half bottle of something nice to go with the sweetbreads. A white wine, of course, but what white wine? It was something to ponder. 

"Then coffee, lots of coffee, all of it black. And of course a postprandial brandy with the coffee. No dessert, no point in overdoing it, got to watch the old waistline even if one’s not quite obsessive enough to jog around Gramercy Park. No dessert, then, but perhaps a second snifter of that brandy just to take the edge off all that coffee and reward oneself for a job well done. ...

"I stood there in the closet and found my thoughts turning inexorably in the direction of alcohol. I thought about the martinis, cold as the Klondike, three hearty ounces of crystal-clear Tanqueray gin with just the most fleeting kiss of Noilly Prat vermouth, a ribbon of twisted lemon peel afloat, the stemmed glass perfectly frosted. Then my mind moved to the wine. Just what white wine would be ideal?" (Kindle Locations 237-249). 

You see what a gourmet Bernie could be. He can afford to indulge when he manages to steal and fence enough jewelry or collectible coins or rare books or other items. In each book I've read, he has a somewhat different objective in his burgling life. In some of the books, he also has an honest profession -- owning a book store. He dabbles in other activities sometimes too, as you can see from some of the titles:

• The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza
• The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling
• The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian
• The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

These books are fun to read, and usually rather short as well. Not too many twists and turns of the plot or elaborately-drawn characters that you have to remember. Just a lot of smart remarks about being a burglar. Like this:

"We had a glass of wine each at the gallery, then moved on to an Ethiopian place in Tribeca where you bring your own wine and eat unpronounceable dishes at your peril. We brought a rosé to see if it really does go with anything, and it did, but not terribly well. Our dishes, hers made with chicken and mine with lamb, were identically sauced and hot enough to blister paint. They came with a disc of spongy bread the size of a small pizza, and we tore off hunks of this gooey muck and used it to scoop up mouthfuls of the hot stuff. In the name of ethnic authenticity, a whole lot of New Yorkers are relearning the table manners of messy children." (The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, published 1980. Kindle Locations 1067-1071).