I think The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons may be my favorite Lawrence Block book in a long time. It's a bookish book, with lots of references to books and reading; Bernie Rhodenbarr, the narrator, runs a bookstore when he's not burgling, and he's thinking about all the things bookish people are thinking about right now in 2014: digital books, what books are, why we read them. This particular book, perhaps more than others, references multiple other mystery authors: Rex Stout, RIchard Stark, Ed McBain.
I've been reading Block since I was a kid (see my previous posts on the topic here and here) and it's been fun to grow old with him. The Burglar books are fairly wholesome, as crime novels go -- there may be a murder or two, but they happen fairly quickly and bloodlessly. In this book, Block seems to be consciously aware of what kind of writer he is and what kind of crime-solver Bernie is. There's a passage toward the end where Bernie's friend Carolyn tries to convince him to turn away from the dark side, and Bernie points out that when Dan Marlowe's character Earl Drake turned wholesome, the books lost their bite. He's right: we need Bernie to be a burglar, or he'd just be blah.
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