THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE

            If you catch the allusion in Block’s title, you’re in just the right mood for Bernie Rhodenbarr’s ninth spot of burglary-cum-detection.  Alice Cottrell, a former teen prodigy who spent three of her Wonder years with Gulliver Fairborn, the famously reclusive American writer whose first novel changed the life of every teenager who read it, has hired Bernie to steal Gully’s letters to Anthea Landau – the ex-agent who’s about to put them up for auction even though Gully copyrighted them – so that Alice can protect her old mentor by destroying them.  Bernie checks into Anthea’s hotel (the seedy, genteel, splendidly evoked Paddington) breaks sedately into her room, and begins his search for the letters.  But he has to leave half a step ahead of the law when he realizes that the reason Anthea isn’t listening to his burglarious noises is that she’s dead and the cops are knocking.  Except for the corpse, this may sound as familiar as last week’s literary gossip, but when Bernie stops to purloin a ruby necklace from another Paddington guestroom he passes through during his escape, he opens a whole new can of worms and unleashes a comic nightmare of collectors, scholars, spurned lovers, and garden-variety thieves.

            The shaggy mystery, which requires an even more hyperextended finale than The Burglar in the Library (1997), manages to honor most of the conventions of the formal detective story even while sending them all giddily up.  And if Bernie Rhodenbarr weren’t already irresistible, the Salinger/Maynard tie-in would hook the stragglers.