I first encountered Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries in college, and thoroughly enjoyed the stories of his burglar/bookstore owner (I think that day job came later in the series but I’m not certain) with a knack for stumbling over bodies and having to prove he didn’t kill them. I gave up the series in the 1980s when Block devoted increasing amounts of each book to Bernie and his BFF, lesbian dog-groomer Carolyn just sitting and bantering.
I came back to the series recently because THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN sounded intriguing. Bernie has given up crime because modern security tech makes successful burglary impossible (at least for someone who isn’t into electronic locks and hacking security cameras) and his bookstore’s suffering under the competition from Amazon and ebay. After reading What Mad Universe, Fredric Brown’s fantasy about a man sucked into an alt.universe modeled on pulp SF cliches, Bernie and Carolyn wake up in a parallel world where security cameras and keypad locks don’t exist and neither do online booksellers. Now he can pull off one last theft, enjoy selling to customers and he and Carolyn wind up in bed together. But inevitably, there’s a body …
The premise is a hand-wave which I don’t mind. However it’s still an endless slog of banter between the two buddies, and it’s very self-indulgent — Block must have had much more fun writing it than I did reading it. There are even jokes about how given the number of murders Bernie’s had to solve he could almost be a cozy-series amateur sleuth; that would be fine as a quick joke but Block stretches it out way too long.
THE GREAT MOVIE SHORTS was a 1970s book by Leonard Maltin looking at the short comedy films that were once an essential part of movie-going and in some cases (Laurel and Hardy, for instance), more popular than the main attractions. Maltin looks at several sound short series I knew at least by repute such as the Little Rascals (above), the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, WC Fields and Buster Keaton. He also looks at more obscure series: The Boy Friends (the Little Rascals if they were teenagers), Leon Errol, Andy Clyde and the buddy team of Patsy Kelly and Thelma Todd. He also covers other short subjects such as newsreels and travelogues, showing what a big deal they were in the pre-TV era when they might be the only opportunity to see news footage. Maltin was writing pre-VHS, pre-DVD, pre-steraming which makes me curious how many of these are available to view in the 21st century (but I have other stuff to watch first).
