2007-08-27 Hit and Miss

My second Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, and quite a disappointing one, I have to say. This one suffers from the same problem as the first one I read (Burglar in the Closet) Rhodenbarr doesn't logically discover the clues he needs to solve the crime, as is conventional in a whodunnit. Rather, we have various set pieces in which Rhodenbarr admittedly does a lot of legwork, and then a conclusion where he simply guesses what happened...and gets it right. What connections there are, I find, are tenuous at best. Although there may be a connection between, say, people, it takes a leap of faith to connect them in the first place.

People buy whodunits because the implicit promise is that the reader will have access to the same information as the detective and try and work out the solution at the same time. The skill of the writer comes in where the hero works it out before the reader. In Rhodenbarr's world, he speaks to a lot of people, and then cobbles a long and convoluted theory together...which just happens to be the right one. Indeed, by the burglar's own admission, many of his conclusions are pure guesswork and conjecture. In this particular volume, he admits that there are many coincidences at work...which should set alarm bells ringing. Any writer that relies on the existence of conclusions, especially the half dozen or so in this novel, leaves himself open to accusations of poor plotting. Indeed, this book smacks of Block writing it `ad hoc' and getting a bit lost...then having to resort to cobbling together a narrative at the end which tells us what happened.

I like Block's gentle humour in these novels, but I'm finding them unsatisfactory in terms of the whodunnit plots. It simply doesn't have the "aaah, yeah!" factor that Christie's work, for example, has - the logical placing of clues so that the denoument is inevitable and you, the reader, should have seen coming.