Like a Thief in the Night: a Bernie Rhodenbarr story

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Like a Thief in the Night: a Bernie Rhodenbarr story

â€œLike a Thief in the Nightâ€ is a Bernie Rhodenbarr short story thatâ€™s probably entirely unknown to most of Bernieâ€™s fans. Not only does it lack the word burglar in the title, but Bernieâ€™s not the storyâ€™s viewpoint character. Itâ€™s told entirely through the spirited and enterprising young woman whose fate it is to walk in on our lad in mid-job, all in a near-empty office building in the middle of the night. That could be pretty frightening, but hey, itâ€™s Bernie. Sheâ€™s got nothing to be afraid of, and neither do we.

The story originated in the late 70s, commissioned by a womenâ€™s magazine called Savvy, with a suite of offices in the huge old Port Authority building on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. A couple of editors decided it was an intimidating location late at night, and thought it would be a good setting for a short story, even though they hadnâ€™t yet run any fiction. One of them knew my work, and they got in touch.

I wrote the story, and they loved it and paid a decent price for it, but they never seemed to find room for it in an issue of the magazine. They kept scheduling it and changing their minds, and it seems to me they changed editors in the bargain, and after a couple of years of this they went out of business. Which was a pity, because it was an interesting publication, except for the fictionâ€”of which, alas, there wasnâ€™t any. My agent got the story back, and I believe he sent it over to Cosmopolitan, and no end of online sources now assure me that it ran in that magazineâ€™s May 1983 issue.

And maybe it did. Except I donâ€™t have a copy of the magazine, and donâ€™t think I ever saw one. Iâ€™ve seen Cosmoâ€™s May 1983 cover, itâ€™s not hard to find online, and they blurbed eight or nine major pieces on it, and my story is not among them. Well, really, what difference does it make? It either ran there or it didnâ€™t, and itâ€™s been in short story collections of mine since, including my omnibus, Enough Rope. I had to read it closely in order to format the scanned story for ePublication, and I was pleased to find that I like it a lot. I can only hope, Dear Reader, that it works as well for you.

Country	USA
Author	Lawrence Block
Binding	Kindle Edition
Format	Kindle eBook
IsAdultProduct
Label	Lawrence Block
Manufacturer	Lawrence Block
NumberOfPages	17
PublicationDate	2011-08-20
Publisher	Lawrence Block
ReleaseDate	2011-08-20
Studio	Lawrence Block

Like a Thief in the Night: a Bernie Rhodenbarr story

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