The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,121

hand over fist.”

He gave me a look. “Every now and then,” he said, “somebody actually buys a book. It’s a good thing I don’t have to depend on this place to keep body and soul together.”

He doesn’t have to pay rent, either, having bought the building with the profits from his other career as the last of the gentleman burglars. Seriously, I told him, lots of people were making big bucks selling books on the Internet. Couldn’t he do the same?

“I could,” he agreed. “I could list my entire stock on eBay and spend my time wrapping books and shlepping them to the Post Office. I could close the store, because who needs a retail outlet when you’ve got a computer and a modem? But I didn’t open this store to get rich. I opened it so I could have a bookstore, and have fun running it, and occasionally meet girls. See, I’m not greedy.”

“But you steal,” I pointed out.

He frowned, and nodded toward St. Sebastian’s biggest fan. “Not to get rich,” he said. “Only enough to get by. I don’t want to get rich, see, because it would turn me into a greedy pig.”

“You’re saying the rich are greedy?”

“They don’t necessarily start out that way,” he said, “but that’s how it seems to work. Look at all the CEOs with their eight-figure salaries. The more you pay them, the more they want, and when the company goes down the tubes they float down on their golden parachute and look for another corporation to sink. Or look at baseball.”

“Baseball?”

“America’s pastime,” he said. “The players used to have off-season jobs so they could make ends meet. The owners were always rich guys, but they were in it for the sport. They didn’t expect to make money.”

“And?”

“And now the players average something like two million dollars a year, and the owners have watched their investments increase in value by a factor of five or ten, and everybody’s rich, so everybody’s greedy. And that’s why we’re going to have a strike this fall. Because they’re all pigs, and all they want is more.”

“In other words,” I said, “success turns men to swine.”

“And women,” he said. “Success is an equal-opportunity corrupter. And it seems to be inevitable nowadays. Nobody’s happy just running a business and making a living. Everybody wants to grow the business, and either franchise it or sell it to a huge corporation. Luckily, I’m safe. Nobody’s aching to franchise Barnegat Books, and no multinational corporation’s trying to buy me out.”

“So you’ll go on selling books.”

“Every now and then,” he said, as the young woman put St. Sebastian back on the shelf and walked away empty-handed. “I’ll tell you, it’s a good thing I’m a thief. It keeps me honest.”

—Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block on New York

(In 2003, the BBC’s “The World Today” presented a series on writers and their “;beats.” On August 6 they caught up with one of New York City’s definitive novelists.)

I think New York works superbly well as a setting in fiction. One reason so many writers have chosen it as a setting is that so many of us have lived at least part of our lives here. One reason that it works very well for readers, I believe, is that so many people, wherever they live, have at least a surface acquaintance with New York. Even if they haven’t been here, they’ve seen the iconography of the skyline in innumerable films; they’ve seen television programs set here; so there’s an immediate identification even for those who have not been here.

New York’s certainly thought of as a dark setting for fiction; it’s also a setting for some of the lightest, most effervescent work—that of Damon Runyon, for example, and Guys and Dolls.

New York is so rich and so varied that you can find the dark and the light here easily. I do two New York series myself, the Matt Scudder novels and the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, and occasionally I get someone asking could Matt and Bernie ever meet in a single book and I say, No—because they live in two very different universes. They both live in a city named New York, but in one, Scudder’s, it’s a very dark place and in the other, Bernie’s, it’s a very light one.

So many writers have written about the city and have done it so well that it’s almost impossible to develop a short list of favorites. The Library of America recently brought out a book called Writing New York, and the