THE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING by Lawrence Block

 Refinished Th 3/31/22

This is one of my old paperbacks that I finished over a three day weekend; Su 4/7/02

From the book's page at Goodreads.com:

"Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone legit – almost – as the new owner of a used bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village. Of course, dusty old tomes don't always turn a profit, so to make ends meet, Bernie's forced, on occasion, to indulge in his previous occupation: burglary. Besides which, he likes it.

Now a collector is offering Bernie an opportunity to combine his twin passions by stealing a very rare and very bad book-length poem from a rich man's library.

The heist goes off without a hitch. The delivery of the ill-gotten volume, however, is a different story. Drugged by the client's female go-between, Bernie wakes up in her apartment to find the book gone, the lady dead, a smoking gun in his hand, and the cops at the door. And suddenly he's got to extricate himself from a rather sticky real-life murder mystery and find a killer – before he's booked for Murder One."

Premise:

'The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow' is a book length poem by Rudyard Kipling. According to the novel (I don't know if this is true) Kipling was an anti-Semite and this poem revealed his sentiments. Supposedly there was only one copy left as the entire printing was destroyed. One of the copies is autographed by Adolf Hitler and he possibly used this verse to firm up his thinking before he wrote Mein Kamp. H. Rider Haggard was the original owner of this remaining copy.

A man approaches Bernie Rhodenbarr is arrange a sale of this very valuable volume. However, the scam is that there are numerous 'last' copies. Since the deals are always secret, no one is aware that there are many 'one of a kinds'.  

I would read anything by Lawrence Block, but I prefer the Matthew Scudder series. Bernie Rhodenbarr is just a good as Donald Westlake's character John Dortmunder.