I’m ambivalent towards Block’s book. That is, I found the books the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels to be really entertaining (they’re comedic mysteries), so I tried the Scudder books and found them to be pretty dull, but read more than a handful, and finally tried the Evan Tanner books, and found them to be barely readable.
And, man, he’s written a lot of books, but I guess this short story collection (which I bought a couple years ago, before the Tanner debacle) will be the last one. Probably.
As a short story collection, it’s a bit odd. That is, Block just doesn’t have enough short stories to publish a collection, really. So what we get are three chapters from two different novels (the excuse for this is that these had been published separately (after the novels had been published) either as chapbooks or in magazines), a long introduction, an essay that repeats the information from the introduction (cut and paste, mostly), some “interviews” with the main character…
And three actual short stories. Two of them are pretty entertaining.
So I guess you could say that this collection is Block’s writing career in microcosm.
The Burglar in Short Order (2020) by Lawrence Block (buy new, buy used, 3.84 on Goodreads)