Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Burglary, I thought. Go in when nobody’s home, get out before they return. You work alone, and in pleasant surroundings-Robin Hood, after all, had just shown good sense in stealing from the rich. You avoid all human contact. You don’t shoot anyone, and no one shoots you.

How seriously did I entertain the notion? Beats me. I did go so far as to try to learn to open my motel-room door without the key, utterly ruining a credit card in the process. (No great loss, that. That card had long since ceased to open any doors for me.)

Then I thought about the plot notion I’d gotten nowhere with back in Mobile. Maybe if I lost the detective and just told the burglar’s story, maybe something would come of it.

So I sat down at the typewriter to see what would happen.

I never thought it would come out fu

I wrote three or four chapters and a vague outline. All I needed was a title, and I found that while I was proofreading. Burglars can’t be choosers, Bernie mused, and I looked up, startled. I didn’t remember writing the line, but I knew a title when I saw one.

I sent it to my agent, who sent it to Lee Wright at Random House, who sent me a contract. I went back to work on the book. In July my kids came out to LA to spend the summer with me. They joined me for a month at the Magic Hotel, and then we spent August driving back east. Now and then we’d stay someplace for several days in a row so that I could get in some work on the book. One place we stopped was Yellow Springs, Ohio, where we stayed with my friends Steve and Nancy Schwerner. I talked to them about the book and said I was having problems with the solution. “Oh, that’s easy,” Steve said, and told me who he figured had du

I dropped the girls with their mother in New York and wound up finishing the book in Greenville, South Carolina. (Don’t ask why.) I was very pleased with the way the book had turned out, but I never thought I’d be writing anything else about Bernie. Shows what I know.

– Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

July 1994

About the Author

Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and a multiple wi