STEAL THIS BLOG part II

by Steve Steinbock

Last week I wrote about John Dortmunder, Arsène Lupin, and a few other larcenous heroes of crime fiction. Philosophically I’m not keen on glorifying crime, and I’m not all that crazy about the “caper” subgenre. But I do love Ed Hoch’s “Nick Velvet” stories.  And I can’t get enough of the “Bernie Rhodenbarr” novels of Lawrence Block.

Block, incidentally, has written a number of good thief/burglar short stories, including two and a half featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr.  I’m counting the story "Like a Thief in the Night" as the half story.  It features a burglar named "Bernie" but it’s not really a Bernie Rhodenbarr story.  In the story, however, Block does make nice references to the Hitchcock film "To Catch a Thief" with Grace Kelley and Cary Grant.

Otto Penzler

One of the Rhodenbarr short stories, “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke,” is set in The Mysterious Bookshop (in it’s original midtown Manhattan location) and features a guest appearance of store owner and mystery anthologist Otto Penzler.

Block’s collection, Enough Rope, opens with a great non-series story, “A Bad Night for Burglars,” and also contains all three Bernie Rhodenbarr stories.  (The British volume of Lawrence Block’s Collected Mystery Stories opens with Bernie).

The story goes that E.W. ("Willie") Hornung wrote the Raffles stories as a sort of tribute to his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle.  The story also goes that Doyle was displeased at having a thief-hero born in his honor. The first part of the story is testified by Hornung’s dedication in the first Raffles collection, The Amateur Cracksman.  I’m not sure about the second part.  I like the stories of Raffles and his sidekick Bunny Manders, and they are the source of everything I know about the game of cricket.

But I didn’t intend to write about Raffles or Rhodenbarr in this week’s column. Rather, I wanted to share some thoughts on another thief, Flambeau, and how his rehabilitation in the company of a little priest marked a watershed moment in crime fiction.  But once again I’ve rambled on far too long.  So it is time again to disappear like a thief in the night.