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Playing With Guns and Stopping to Smell the Roses
Oh, man! Wouldn't it be great just to live alone, in a neat little apartment with a great view of New York City, go out to movies once in a while, play some chess maybe, eat in restaurants all the time, maybe get a dog for company, and then, if you're lucky, some great girl will happen by, and you could have some fun, and maybe even some romance, but after a while she'd drift away, no hard feelings, and you could have dinner alone again? That would be heaven, wouldn't it? And to top it off, you'd get to kill somebody once in a while. You'd even get paid for doing it. Most of these wrongdoing turkeys would deserve it, God knows, so you could just live out your life in relative peace and quiet, traveling around, socking money in safe-deposit boxes against the proverbial rainy day. You'd be self-contained, untouched either by emotions or by those debilitating responsibilities that turn you into an old fud. Sounds great, doesn't it? Even I'd like it, and I'm not a guy. Keller, the \"hero\" of \"Hit Man,\" lives that life. He's low-key to the max, always wanting just a little less than he has, so he's contented, or he tries to be. But when he goes out to Oregon on a job, he can't help daydreaming about the house he could buy there, even the family he might have. Or sometimes he meets a victim who's too nice to kill. You shouldn't have to kill a decent person, and so Keller doesn't. He just declines. What a wonderful thing to have these godlike attributes -- not only to take life away but also to bestow it.
Newspaper Article
The Crook, the Thief, the Wife and the Lover
If you are at all sensible, that diverting volume will be a light novel, and if you've ever read any of Lawrence Block's ingratiating mysteries featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr, it may well be his latest, The Burglar in the Library. Most fiction makes at least a few demands on readers: not the Burglar capers. They are as easy to enjoy -- and as refreshing -- as that cool drink at your side. Lawrence Block has written scores of books, most of them mysteries of one sort or another, and he knows everything about crafting literate summer entertainment: Just kick back and relax. In his eighth adventure, burglar and bookseller Bernie Rhodenbarr journeys three hours from New York City, in the middle of March, to an English-style inn called Cuttleford House. This is a grand place, built by a 19th-century multimillionaire named Ferdinand Cathcart. \"That's a familiar name,\" observes Bernie's good friend, the lesbian dog-groomer Carolyn Kaiser. \"He was one of the robber barons,\" replies our hero, \"and he made his money the old-fashioned way.\" \"By grinding the faces of the poor?\" \"How else?\" Originally, Bernie had been intending to spend a long weekend at Cuttleford House with a honey-blonde named Lettice -- but she unexpectedly throws him over to get married. So much for the hope of mixing pleasure with business. For Bernie definitely has some light-fingered business in mind: The theft of a unique and extremely valuable first edition of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. According to a forgotten hack-writer's memoir, Chandler met Dashiell Hammett in 1941 at this very same country estate -- and there presented him with an inscribed copy of his first novel about detective Philip Marlowe. For various (unlikely) reasons, odds are good that the book, worth at least $25,000, is still there, shelved someplace in the huge old-fashioned library pictured in Cuttleford House's glossy brochure.
Newspaper Article
