The Burglar in the Library by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] there was always a chance that Carolyn's wandering hand would fasten on a part of me not entirely consistent with the fabric of her dream, and that might give new meaning to the term 'rude awakening.'"

I read two first installments in Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr series ( The Burglar in the Closet and Burglars Can't Be Choosers) and liked them quite a lot. However, when I fast-forwarded about 20 years in the series and read The Burglar in the Library (1997), I found it quite disappointing. While it is always interesting to see how the author handles the passage of time in the series the newer installments in a long-running series tend to exude that "made-to-readers'-order", customized, musty sense of familiarity.

Bernie is now the owner of Barnegat Books, a used book store. His friend, Carolyn, visits him to talk about their planned stay in Cuttleford House, a genuine English country house in the Berkshires. The reader learns that the travel has something to do with Raymond Chandler. Then there is a flashback in narration to ten days earlier and we learn about what happened between Bernie and his most recent girlfriend, Lettice.

After that we are in the parody territory, immersed in an imitation of a classical English country-house mystery:

"Perfectly nice people, some of them slightly wacky, but all of them well-bred and well-spoken. Some of them may not be what they seem, and a couple of them have a dark secret in their past, and they're isolated somewhere, and somebody gets killed. And then somebody says, 'Oh, it must have been some passing tramp who did it, because otherwise it would have to have been one of us [...]'"

I found the whole parody concept silly and lacking any charm. The book became the dreaded "page-turner", when one turns page after page without really reading the text, in hopes that the silliness will soon end.

Three redeeming qualities save the novel from the bottom, one-star rating. First is the tastefully written and amusing thread of Bernie's erotic adventures. The only good thing about the mystery plot is the "three chairs conundrum." Finally, the whole Raymond Chandler business is a little intriguing, way more interesting than the plot itself.

I will try another newer installment of the series and if it is as weak as this one, I will return to the old Bernie, when the author still had creative ideas.

One-and-three-quarter stars.

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