Welcome to the fourth and final day of Berniepalooza!
Today’s special price for THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS is just $5.99, good only today (March 9). Tomorrow it goes back up to the regular price, so now’s your chance to save a few bucks!
Click here to get the ebook.
Today’s we have more Qs and As from The Man Himself about everyone’s favorite gentleman burglar. In case you missed them, be sure to take a look at Bernie’s recipe, The Bernie Quiz, and the first set of Q&As.
Is Barnegat Books based on a real store? Is Ray based on a real cop? Is Carolyn based on a real dog washer? Is Raffles based on a real cat?
Barnegat Books is the store I’d have if I had a store like that. Which, all things considered, I’m deeply grateful I don’t, but it remains an alluring fantasy. Ray’s a complete fabrication; he happened right there on the page in the very first book, BURGLARS CAN’T BE CHOOSERS. And yet a couple of cops who’ve read the books tell me they’ve known guys just like him.
Carolyn, like the bookstore, turned up in the third book, THE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING, and I’ve always felt that’s when the series achieved self-actualization and figured out what it was. At the time, I’d become good friends with several gay women, and it struck me that a lesbian would be in ideal best friend for our hero, providing sexual difference without the possibility of sexual tension. He’s a guy, she’s a gal, and they’re not gonna fall in love or get all sweaty, and it works. Carolyn herself probably amounts to an unconscious synthesis of three of those women, but she’s herself, and she and Bernie play so well together that I have to be careful to rein them in.
As for Raffles, he’s not based on a real cat. He is a real cat—who, unfortunately, has no corporeal existence outside the books.
Bernie and Carolyn–and even Ray in his own way–are infinitely curious. Are you similarly inquisitive?
So asketh the Grand Inquisitor herself, eh? I dunno. I suppose I am. The world is a fascinating place. It’s a hostile environment, to be sure, and it’s out to kill us all for no particular reason, but in the meantime there’s a lot to look at and sift through.
I love all the characters. They are perfectly matched and just make each story more interesting and believable. As soon as they all gelled in the third book it just felt right. Their relationships together are different and they just work. Love the books.
In The Burglar In the Rye, Bernie admits that when he steals stamp collections he often picks out British Empire issues for a relative’s collection who is a specialist in that area. In another instance, in one of the books, I remember Bernie stating that often he will remove valuable parts of a collection, but not enough for the collector to notice for quite some time that something is missing. It makes me wonder, does Keller ever revisit his collections and their contents over time?