Please Pass the Guilt

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Please Pass the Guilt (Viking, 1973).


When I first read Rex Stout's considerable body of work, I found myself running out of steam at the end, and it felt like there were at least four books that I just blew through as quickly as possible to get to the last one, the masterful Family Affair. If I may express an unpopular opinion, Stout really did write too darn many of these stories, and he began repeating himself even before the 1960s, but his plots and the sparkling wit of his storytelling went a long way toward papering over the problems.

On my second read, I was in no hurry, perceived or otherwise, and I resolved to do right by Please Pass the Guilt, the penultimate of the stories, and which suffered the worst of my impatience a couple of years back. But the reality is that it's incredibly dreary, just Wolfe-by-the-numbers. There is, briefly, the twist that the television network executive who was killed in an explosion might not have been the intended target, but Stout wasn't able to drive the storyline past the interminable delays and roadblocks caused by the rules around the characters.

A good quarter of the book is spent just drumming up somebody to serve as the client, and then there's the long-winded problem of tediously getting everybody to Wolfe's office for another of his meetings... at this point, it really feels like Stout was completely bored and fed up with his own structure, and, restless and aggravated by all the hoops that he had to jump through to play by these rules, he put his characters through the same grind in every bit as bad of a mood.

Desperate for some levity or humor, I found myself casting the roles of the players with actors who were active in Hollywood in 1973. I figured parts for David Janssen, Peter Falk, Ed Asner and Loretta Swit before concluding that any book that gives a fellow nothing more to do but pretend it's one of those old Million Dollar Movies of the Week doesn't have a lot to say at all, really. Not recommended.

The Doorbell Rang

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of the The Doorbell Rang (Viking, 1965).


When I first wrote a short review of this book back in 2010, I noted how bleak and black-and-white it appeared. By black-and-white, I don't mean "lacking nuance" or "straightforward," but rather, I visualized it, then, as feeling like it was coming from the same white-hot, intense, paranoid land of TV's Naked City, The Fugitive and Route 66. These programs were all capable of light - the phenomenally bleak Route 66 even indulged in outright whimsy at least twice - but adult drama on television, particularly in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, picked up a really harsh undercurrent. The Fugitive's very premise is that the American criminal justice system has completely failed.

As I'm rereading Rex Stout, however, my wife and I are approaching it a little differently. When I first read the canon in 2009-2010, it was almost totally fresh, with only three of the television adaptations starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton preceding my reading, and those by months. Their visual influence over my reading had long faded by the time I got this deep into the series. This time out, I bought the box set of DVDs, and after reading each story or novel that was adapted, my wife and I sat down and watched the TV version.

The effect, over time, has been downright weird. Since most of the guest roles are taken by members of a loose repertory company, I found myself visualizing the settings, and casting, in my mind's eye, all of the speaking parts from the same crowd of nine or ten faces. When we came to a story that was adapted, I punched the air whenever that episode's casting director and I employed the same artist. And, after weeks of familiarity with the settings, the musical cues, and the house directorial style, rereading The Doorbell Rang had an entirely different, and much more colorful effect on me.

It is still, assuredly, an angry and contemptuous novel. Stout, inspired by Fred J. Cook's expose The FBI Nobody Knows, was incensed by what he saw as that agency's overreach, and crafted a labyrinthine gem of a novel where Nero Wolfe can just punch that agency in the nose and kick its defenders when they're down. The casual, albeit angry, acceptance among the players that they are being followed and their phones tapped is revelatory. Under Hoover, the FBI had grown too powerful, and influential people like Stout were justifiably furious. The right wing, then, could not imagine the government acting in such an intrusive and impossible way - it was, then, those subversives on the left who were undermining trust in a government that would never put regular Americans on unjustified surveillance. Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, the man certainly turned things completely on their head, didn't he?

The book's coda is one last bit of kicking, and it is completely brilliant. Not content with spending two hundred pages making the FBI into the villains - well, to be fair, there is a murderer at large here not employed by that agency - Stout engages in one last twist of the knife, a direct, blunt, personal and beautiful kiss-off to J. Edgar Hoover himself. I love it to pieces, even if, under the influence of the TV series, this previously stark and black-and-white narrative became musical and colorful in my rereading.

One last note about the TV series. Another adaptation, of The Mother Hunt, is, curiously, credited as being directed by Alan Smithee, the standard guild-approved pseudonym. It is usually deployed to cover a displeased director, or work finished outside their control, leading some viewers to suspect some behind-the-scenes unhappiness from an unfamiliar director, unused to the program's house style. It certainly doesn't bear the standard look and feel of the other episodes. Interestingly, among the cast, easily the most recognizable actor is Carrie Fisher, who has an incredibly small part, and whom you wouldn't think would have much need to trek off to central Ontario on what looks like an awfully cold shoot, for a single day's filming and all of maybe four lines. I wonder what director could have encouraged Fisher to join the production. Perhaps it was actually, in fact, Fisher herself? Just a theory, of course.

Some Buried Caesar

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Some Buried Caesar (Farrar & Rhinehart, 1939).



I began rereading Rex Stout in early November, and while I don't intend to regularly feature (or, in many cases, re-feature) these books on this blog, I thought that I'd like to have the chance for a note or two when I stumble upon a neat trick or two that surprised me the second time around. Frequently, you find things that you missed the first time through.

In Some Buried Caesar, the sixth Nero Wolfe novel, the normally house-bound eccentric is in upstate New York to exhibit orchids at a county fair to show up a rival, and circumstances have led him and Archie Goodwin to a large farmhouse, where they are enjoying the hospitality of the wealthy owner of a chain of inexpensive restaurants. He has purchased Caesar, a prized Guernsey bull, for $45,000 and intends to have the bull butchered and served to a hundred guests at a barbecue for the publicity, outraging a cattlemen's association that wants to continue Caesar's bloodline.

So Wolfe is on Pratt's back patio and Pratt introduces a nephew, almost with the words "This is my nephew, WHO HAS A MOTIVE TO KILL ME." Almost immediately, furious representatives of the cattlemen's association show up and express their displeasure with his publicity stunt, pretty much saying "WE'VE GOT MOTIVES TO KILL YOU." Then Pratt's neighbor's son stops by with a friend, for not much other reason than to tell Pratt "I'VE GOT A MOTIVE TO KILL YOU." It's contrived and, had Pratt ended up the corpse, it would have felt as artificial as Agatha Christie. Pratt doesn't die. The neighbor's son does.

It's also interesting to see Archie's long-running flame, Lily Rowan, in her first appearance. She's introduced through the eyes of other characters and not at all flattered by their descriptions. As she develops into a sympathetic recurring character, the judgments expressed about her here seem very harsh and very strange.

The book is just great fun from start to finish, with Wolfe finding something to appreciate in the chicken fricassee at the Methodist tent to Archie-the-Agitator starting a labor movement in the county jail. That there's a murder to solve is just frosting on a very entertaining cake. Highly recommended.

At Wolfe's Door

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of At Wolfe's Door (James A. Rock, 2003).



Before I said goodbye to Nero Wolfe in these reviews, I did want to let any of my readers who are following my detective fiction reviews or are curious about the character know about this neat little book. Written by J. Kenneth van Dover, a professor of English at Lincoln University and published by a small company in Maryland, it's a guidebook to the series, with spoiler-free synopses, details and analysis of all the Wolfe novels and short stories, and handier, to my mind, than using Wikipedia to track down information. It also contains material about Rex Stout's other detective characters and critical essays, including a really fascinating piece looking at connections between Stout's corpus and that of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason.

While it doesn't touch on ancillary material like the A&E series or the Robert Goldsborough novels beyond quickie lists in an appendix, it accomplishes its modest goals very well and is penned in a light, engaging tone that's perfect for either study or briefly finding facts. If you enjoy Rex Stout's world, I'd certainly recommend you give this a look. I just wish Wolfe was more popular with a modern audience to warrant a more intensive study guide.

Death Times Three

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Death Times Three (Bantam, 1985).



Here's the Rex Stout apocrypha; three short stories which, for varying reasons, didn't make it into the Nero Wolfe canon. Actually, there's a single, and very good, reason: they aren't particularly good.

"Bitter End" is the least of the three. It started life as a novel featuring a minor recurring Stout character named Tecumseh Fox and was rewritten for a magazine as a Wolfe and Archie story. The characterization and the style seem notably, and jarringly, different from what I came to know as Archie's voice. This feels like a second-rate imitation of Stout, with a flow so hesitant that I couldn't enjoy the story, which was about some quinine-tainted food.

"Frame-Up for Murder" is an expanded version of the short story "Murder is No Joke," but is not radically different from the prior version. If John McAleer's lengthy introduction did not expound upon the differences between the stories, I doubt that I would trust myself to detect them. Much more interesting is "Assault on a Brownstone," an earlier draft of what would become the terrific short story "Counterfeit for Murder." It's notably inferior to the final version, as Stout elected to swap murder victims, but fascinating to see how the events played out differently between the two stories. In the original, a really fun supporting character gets knocked off. In "Counterfeit," she sensibly lives long enough to aggravate and annoy Nero Wolfe. You can almost see the gears in Stout's head click into position as he realized what an opportunity he missed.

I found that last story quite fun from an "academic" viewpoint, but the honest reality is that "Assault" really is the poorer cousin to its final version, "Frame-Up" is, like "No Joke," Stout by-the-numbers, and "Bitter End" is just plain awful. I'm glad that these stories are out there for fans to study, but reading them as a coda to the canon is bound to disappoint. I really wish that I had read them before I read Stout's amazing final novel, A Family Affair.

A Family Affair

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of A Family Affair (Viking, 1975).



This was Rex Stout's final adventure of Nero Wolfe, and I think it was obvious to him upon writing it that he was getting pretty old and the saga would need concluding, and that, honestly, he was no longer at the height of his powers. I didn't mention the previous two books. Well, I didn't mention lots of books as I've done these quasi-articles, but I specifically declined writing anything about Death of a Dude and Please Pass the Guilt because those were the first, and only, books in the series that really disappointed me. Well, Too Many Cooks had disappointed me for having the audacity to be written back in a period of disagreeable views about race in America. Just because one can't legitimately fault a book for being a product of its time doesn't make the experience of reading the dated thing necessarily any more pleasurable.

But 1969's Death of a Dude and 1973's Please Pass the Guilt felt tired and rote to me. Perhaps that's because I rampaged through the last ten or so books in the series rather than breaking the flow with other novels, but not even changing the setting of one to rural Wyoming or someplace didn't spark any new electricity in the format.

One thing I did note was that as the sixties wore on, Stout's apparent contempt for the police seemed to escalate into downright ugliness on the page. Inspector Cramer had always maintained a friction with Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but surely seventy-odd examples of Wolfe being fair and mostly honest with the character of Cramer should have resulted in more patience between the two. By Please Pass the Guilt, this friction, previously amusing and witty, had erupted into outright hostility and their conflict stopped being funny. It simply wasn't pleasurable watching the police abuse their authority in these books, particularly when corruption and incompetence among their ranks comes to light under Cramer's nose. It's as though all the series' previous platitudes about Cramer being a good cop were nothing more than lip service. These seeds were certainly sown in the FBI-baiting The Doorbell Rang in 1965, but I never dreamed it would get that unpleasant.

I wonder whether Stout recognized this? When you also consider the identically obnoxious rural cops in Death of a Dude and the uncharacteristic four-year gap between it and Please Pass the Guilt, it looks like Stout was, apart from simply and understandably slowing down, reevaluating a lot about society and how his fictional characters related to it. At any rate, both a little bored and disappointed with the trends and tropes over the last couple of books, I was completely unprepared for how violent and wild and downright eye-popping the final book was.

A Family Affair begins with Wolfe's favorite waiter from Rusterman's knocking on the brownstone door late at night. He tells Archie that somebody is trying to kill him, and Archie lets him take the guest room so that he may speak to Wolfe in the morning. He doesn't make it that long; someone has secreted a small bomb into his pocket.

I haven't read his biography, but I feel that Stout must have known that he was finishing up the series, because the waiter's not the only thing that gets blown up in this story. It's tough and it's mean and it dives right into the paranoid heart of Richard Nixon's corrupt administration, making absolutely clear that distrust of both the presidency and the police was, in the early seventies, understandable and essential. Whatever remained of Wolfe and Cramer's relationship in the wake of Please Pass the Guilt is completely gone by the end of it, and other relationships are similarly wrecked. (On that note, although Wikipedia's editors did not totally spoil the plot, they left enough obnoxious clues in the writeup there that anybody who reads the article there will have far too clear an idea where this book is going. So don't look up this book on Wikipedia. I'm serious.)

There is one last collection of Rex Stout's stories, published posthumously, available which I'll come back to later in the month. I'm absolutely convinced that readers should read that before A Family Affair. I'm just about to start Robert Goldsborough's continuation novels after a short break from Wolfe and Archie, and I'm sure they're okay, but A Family Affair is as grand a finale as anybody in fiction has enjoyed. As far as detective fiction goes, Stout's farewell to the characters is probably only equaled by Colin Dexter's last Inspector Morse novel. Really, it's that good, and definitely one of the series' many highlights. I'm really going to enjoy rereading Stout in a couple of years, but darned if I'm not in a mood to reread Dexter after this.

The Father Hunt

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Father Hunt (Viking, 1968).



There's a really tricky and bothersome challenge for Wolfe in 1968's The Father Hunt. This time, the great detective must determine the identity of a man who emphatically does not want to be named, who has left about a quarter of a million dollars for Wolfe's client amid a possibility that he might be her father, and who might have been behind the client's mother's recent death.

The focus of the book shifts somewhat when Wolfe decides to look into that hit-and-run death. He reasons that a three month-old murder will be easier to solve than a twenty-two year-old question of paternity, but this just makes elements of the business even less pleasant for everyone.

I really enjoyed this one, especially the greater emphasis paid to Archie's relationship with Lily Rowan. This had seemed to me in many earlier novels to be unimportant to Rex Stout, but by the time of this book, he really wanted to flesh out the supporting cast more. It's in this book that Saul, Fred and Orrie get their nickname "The 'teers," even though they only have two more New York-based novels left until the end of the series. This and the previous adventure, Death of a Doxy, really made the trio shine terrifically. I was very happy with it, and sorry to see the pile of books in the series left to read shrinking away.

Death of a Doxy

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Death of a Doxy (Viking, 1966).



Interesting how different readers can see a character so differently. This is apparently the Nero Wolfe adventure that my wife likes the least, because she finds one of the characters, a nightclub singer named Julie Jacquette, incredibly shrill and shallow. I thought she was a complete hoot instead, and I loved the way that she instantly took a needle to Wolfe's pomposity upon meeting him by bursting out into song. I was surprised, however, when I popped over to Amazon for the link above and saw a customer review that described Jacquette as a stripper. I didn't get that impression at all; I thought she was more of a Lanie Kazan type. Maybe the discretion of Rex Stout's prose in the sixties was obscuring what he intended.

I enjoy the stories where there's a more personal stake for our heroes. In this one, regular supporting player Orrie Cather asks Archie to break into one of his girlfriends' apartments. Orrie is fixing to settle down with a stewardess, but one of his ladyfriends objects and is threatening to bust up the nuptials with some proof that Orrie is a regular visitor to her little love nest, a place paid for by a wealthy banker named Ballou. But Archie breaks in to find the ladyfriend's corpse waiting for him. Orrie is arrested and the details of the lady's life come spiraling into the brownstone on West 35th Street. Ballou, the obvious suspect, isn't responsible - in fact, he becomes, unexpectedly, a recurring player in some of these last five novels - leading the team down very surprising avenues.

I thought this one was really fun, and it dug into the relationship between Wolfe and Archie and the three operatives whom they most frequently hire for surveillance and other jobs. (There had been four; an operative named Johnny Keems, seen in several of the earlier stories, quite surprisingly exited the series about halfway through it.) I'm actually writing this little review a few weeks after having read the book, so as to spread out the Nero Wolfe books' appearances on this blog. I actually finished the last of Stout's Wolfe novels two days ago, and I certainly would not have enjoyed it as much had I not read Death of a Doxy, where these characters open up and relate to each other better than in any previous book. Great stuff; I'd love to see the A&E adaptation sometime soon.

The Doorbell Rang

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Doorbell Rang (Viking, 1965).



I had been waiting for this novel since I sat down with the first, Fer-de-Lance, in August of last year, and it created one set of disappointments while really knocking me on my backside at the same time. This story was actually my first exposure to Nero Wolfe - my wife and I watched the A&E adaptation of this and a couple of other stories - I think just Champagne for One and Prisoner's Base - before she decided against the Netflix subscription and I started reading the books.

The problem - and I want to clarify up front that the book itself doesn't have a problem at all - is that the TV series is set in sort of a nebulous, nostalgic, bright n' shiny postwar period. It wasn't designed anywhere nearly as well as Mad Men; it just sort of evoked a sunny, Eisenhower America. But the book was written in a dark, LBJ period. I'd love to study more about the way that noir literature, as well as Kennedy's assassination, started influencing all of the popular media of the day. What's unshakable is this: The Doorbell Rang, with its paranoid, tense distrust of the FBI and the government, comes from the same place as television's Route 66 and The Fugitive, and the TV adaptation doesn't reflect that at all.

I think you can trace the way Stout was being influenced by the nation's darker tone throughout his books in this period. In the previous novel, Archie's visits to the much smaller towns of Racine and Evansville take the focus out of the shiny New York City and occasional jaunts to nearby, upstate communities, in much the same way that television, particularly those two shows above, started exploring the breadth of our country for the first time. When you add the darker mood of the period to stories that move a little more freely outside the confines of the series' traditional venues, and then mix in some much meaner and bleaker stories - the ongoing narrative and bodycount of The Mother Hunt, the unforgettable climax of Gambit - any adaptation just cries out for a black and white presentation and a CBS logo. This book is as 1964 as fiction gets.

When I did my customary, cursory "research" after finishing this novel, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Stout's anti-government, anti-FBI stance had cost him one celebrated reader. Actor John Wayne, a noted conservative, sent Stout a curt "goodbye" after reading an abridged version of the novel in the anthology magazine Argosy. Wayne should have stuck around another forty years. These days, the way the right pillories the government, Wayne would have renewed his Argosy subscription and sent Stout flowers.

A Right to Die

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of A Right to Die (Viking, 1964).



You know, it took me a month of Sundays, but I finally found a Nero Wolfe novel that I just plain did not enjoy very much. There was definitely a suspension of disbelief issue with A Right to Die that I couldn't overcome. This is the book which quite unambiguously states that the novels and stories take place in real time, as it returns to the events of Too Many Cooks, written some twenty-six years previously, and reintroduces a supporting character from that book. He has aged 26 years and has an adult son who's now in trouble. For this to be true, Wolfe and the rest of the cast must also have aged, meaning that perenially mid-thirties gadfly Archie must now be on the AARP's contact list, yet they haven't.

Interestingly - well, to me, anyway - I sketch out what a notional proper TV series adaptation of all the Wolfe canon, in order, would look like, and Too Many Cooks, with its deeply dated view of race in the 1930s, was one that I would consider dropping from modern teevee. (A key point involves blackface, which certainly could not be done on television today!) Since A Right to Die calls back to it and puts the canon into some level of confusion, I'd be in favor of dropping both of them.

On the other hand, this does provide some amusements as Archie goes out into the field to find out what's there to dislike in a background check done as "an obligation" for their acquaintance from the earlier novel. He travels, separately, to Racine, Wisconsin and to Evansville, Indiana, two places that Wolfe knows nothing whatever about. I won't claim that the novel really goes into detail about life in either city in the early sixties, but there are tantalizing glimpses of contemporary life in the period. Just the way that Archie can take a phone call at 7.30 in the morning in Racine ordering him home on a change of plans, and then assure Wolfe that he'll be home around 1, and then go back to sleep, is fascinating. The very idea that people in the sixties could just drive to Chicago and hop a flight back to Idlewild with the same ease as hailing a cab is lovely. I like my toys and my cell phones, but we certainly gave up some freedom along the last fifty years, didn't we?

The Mother Hunt

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Mother Hunt (Viking, 1963).



Wow, this one was a mean, mean book. This time, and presumably knowing that the celebrated Nero Wolfe only gets hired for cases that will end up with somebody getting killed along the way, a young widow hires Wolfe and his indefatigable man-at-arms Archie to find out who left a toddler on her doorstep with the note "A BOY SHOULD LIVE IN HIS FATHERS HOUSE." It's the sort of story that should not result in a body count, but Archie's not able to question anybody about this without them ending up in somebody's crosshairs.

The books in this series are the most entertaining when circumstances throw Wolfe out of his comfort zone and agitate him to fury, and I don't think any yet have done it as well as this one. I mean, this one's a pretty bleak and heavy story and unlike anything Stout had tried in the canon before. On the other hand, I've grown depressingly tired of the trope of Inspector Cramer throwing his weight around and arresting Archie, pointlessly, as a material witness in the hopes of getting him to cough up something that Cramer is certain that he knows but, honestly, doesn't. Yet.

Apologies if anybody's actually following along my Rex Stout label at this blog looking for something more insightful and deep in the form of review, but this are as much notes to myself to help me recall the adventure down the line as anything else, and it's awfully difficult to pick out a story for really detailed analysis when each story in the canon has so much in common with the others. Highlighting the differences seems to work for casual browsing, anyway.

Gambit

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Gambit (Viking, 1962).



I won't say that Gambit is anywhere near my favorite of the Nero Wolfe series, because I do enjoy the stories for their breezy and light touch. This one, nevertheless, has such a fascinating structure that I found it compelling even as it descends into something really dark and ugly towards the end. It honestly reminded me more of the bleaker examples of hard-boiled noir that I have read than anything else in this series.

The story begins in a very light-hearted fashion, with Wolfe, in a fit of pique, burning the newest edition of a dictionary because he disagrees with a definition. Hired to look into the poisoning death of a chess master, which has left an innocent man under arrest for want of any other suspects, Wolfe sends Archie to look into the Gambit Club, and for a good while, the book is every bit as lighthearted and funny as its predecessors.

Things get a lot darker when it becomes evident that Wolfe knows who did it but, in a matter that reminded me of PD James' later novel A Certain Justice, he will never prove it. The ending is quite unforgettable, and for once I found myself pretty sympathetic to Inspector Cramer, whose fury this time out is pretty justified. Did Stout intend for things to play out this way, or did he write himself into a corner with a murder this perfect? Recommended.

The Final Deduction

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Final Deduction (Viking, 1961).



As I'm moving into the "home stretch" of Rex Stout's novels, I find that I'm not wanting to alternate with other writers. I'm enjoying them enough that I'd like to just try and get them all finished before the end of October. Should be doable.

So The Final Deduction is from 1961 and sees Wolfe and Archie hired to consult on a ransom case. It seems to turn out all right - half a million is paid and Althea Vail's kidnapped husband is returned, but when a member of the household staff turns up dead, the family has to confront the unpleasant reality that the kidnapper had inside help. But then just two days after he is returned safely, Jimmy Vail is killed, crushed to death by a fallen statue of Benjamin Franklin, and Inspector Cramer wants to know what Archie was doing at the Vail's house earlier on the night the man died...

I really enjoyed the way that this novel got increasingly complicated, and how Wolfe keeps stirring trouble, and infuriating Cramer, by accepting a commission from one of the Vails' children to find the ransom money. Honestly, this one started a little dry - I can't imagine many readers finding Althea Vail as being either very sympathetic or very engaging - but I was enjoying it tremendously by the time I finished. Perhaps not the meatiest of Wolfe adventures, but a very welcome distraction. Recommended.

Too Many Clients

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Too Many Clients (Viking, 1960).



The classic film Chinatown begins with Los Angeles PI Jake Gittis being hired by a lady who is not the woman that she claims to be. Chinatown was such a major influence on the genre of detective fiction that upon reading a book that predates it by a good fourteen years, I knew exactly what was going on when a client calls on Archie Goodwin for an unusual tailing job. In Too Many Clients, he's the first of what would be several individuals wanting to hire Wolfe and Archie. One or two of them are even who they claim to be.

Of course, Chinatown goes off in its own direction. Too Many Clients sees the real gentleman turn up dead the same evening that an impostor has hired Archie, leaving a lot of awkward questions and the discovery of a very interesting windowless apartment, its interior covered in racy pin-ups, ostensibly used for late-night "dictation." This is a somewhat more action-oriented adventure than many of the other novels. Archie plants one of the firm's reliable freelance operatives in the apartment to see who will turn up, and this generates a few laughs.

Would "entertaining, but unmemorable" be too great a cliche? I am a little behind on writing these reviews, but I find details from the heavier plot of the next book in the series overwhelming my memory of this one, a book I read just a week ago. Too Many Clients arguably features an atypical flow for a Nero Wolfe adventure, but it's still amusing and while I enjoyed it, it seems after just a very short time to be a little more of a "popcorn" sort of story, and unsatisfying in the long term. That's the problem with being sandwiched between two better books, I suppose.

Plot it Yourself

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Plot it Yourself (Viking, 1959)



Interestingly, the previous novel in the Nero Wolfe series, Champagne for One, left me pretty cold, but the next one up, Plot it Yourself, is a real treat, one of my absolute favorites. In it, a consortium of publishers and agents have uncovered a plot to force authors to cough up settlements in bogus plagiarism claims, the sort of thing that J.K. Rowling has had to fight more than once. Everybody agrees that the authors are being scammed, but nobody can figure how the perpetrators are getting their "proof" into the authors' homes or agents' files.

It usually doesn't take long for a body to turn up in these stories, but this one is an entertaining slow burn watching Archie and Wolfe at work on a very different sort of case for them. When somebody does get killed, it's a result of Wolfe planning a trap for their unknown enemy, using one of the fellows who claimed to have been ripped off as bait. But somebody blabbed and someone is killed and Wolfe responds with a very entertaining rage and fury.

It's always very enjoyable when an author can take a series with as many formulaic elements as these and subvert readers' expectations. While I never manage to guess whodunit in these books - I don't try to guess, but it occasionally happens in other writers' fiction - this is a rare example of a novel where I genuinely could not guess anything that would happen next. Wolfe admits that he's firing in the dark and that his investigation could be long and expensive, but I had no clue where it would go, and when the first murder victim appeared, it seriously surprised the daylights out of me. Simply a triumph, and one of the best novels in the canon. Highly recommended.

Champagne for One

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Champagne for One (Viking, 1958)



I'm past the halfway mark in reading all of Rex Stout's novels and stories about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and this might be the first to really leave me unsatisfied, although it still has much that would interest a contemporary reader. In this one, the police would love to quickly close a case in which a woman known to be suicidal seems to poison herself at a party, except that somebody has alerted Archie, with his superhuman powers of observation, and he's been watching her like a hawk and insists that she had no opportunity to take any cyanide.

I'm not sure what part of the story rubs me the wrong way, but it might have something to do with the introduction of the poison. I watched the TV adaptation of it and reread the relevant section after finishing the book and I'm still confused by it. We'll chalk that up to my own poor reading skills, but it really does seem convoluted. Otherwise, this one still seems pretty dry, with Wolfe almost detached from the events and never really either engaged or engaging, and no sense of danger or menace from any of the action. There's a great scene where Archie and Saul, working individually, tail a couple to a restaurant and bust them in the act of covering up something, but this leads to a plot twist that has been rendered dull by the passage of time and countless subsequent uses in fiction.

In its favor, however, there's a really interesting look at society's morals from more than fifty years ago, with the rich well-to-dos of New York culture taking a special interest in those poor, unfortunate unwed mothers, and a strangely condescending attitude towards helping them re-enter society. While this is very much one of the most dated books in the series, it's certainly a curiosity on this front. Recommended, without much enthusiasm, for readers following the series, but certainly not any newcomers.

Three Witnesses

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Three Witnesses (Viking, 1956).



I seem to be about a year in and halfway through my complete reading of the Nero Wolfe stories, and while I certainly prefer the longer novels and their twists and turns, sometimes one of the short stories provides a nice surprise. Three Witnesses collects three novellas from the mid-fifties, and the first of them might be my favorite of that length that I've found so far.

"The Next Witness" is a very fun story which starts with Nero Wolfe furiously out of his comfort zone. He's been subpoenaed to appear in court at the trial of a man who had attempted to hire him, and who is now accused of murder. Incensed that his testimony will be used to help convict a man that Wolfe believes to be innocent, he chooses to bolt, risking a contempt charge and being arrested by a police force that would just love to rub his arrogant face in it. I had a ball with every page of this one.

The other stories were also quite good, although I personally would have preferred that they had been placed before "The Next Witness" so I would not have compared them unfavorably. There's a good yarn about accidental bigamy, and one where Archie brings home a dog and intends to aggravate his boss with its presence, only to have it backfire on the one hand and prove critical to a murder case on the other. They were all very fun, and I see that both "The Next Witness" and "Die Like a Dog" were adapted for the A&E TV series. I'd love to check those out sometime. Recommended.

The Black Mountain and Before Midnight

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Black Mountain and Before Midnight (Viking, 1954 and 1955).



I hate to say it, but for me, the story of how I acquired Three Trumps: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus trumps its actual contents. It's a collection of three Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout, two of which had been missing from my wife's collection. Stout wrote an awful lot of detective fiction, all of it very entertaining, but more than Marie had managed to collect. After I read Fer-de-Lance, the first of the novels, I resolved to complete her collection. Living in a city with several decent used and antiquarian bookstores helps, but I'm good with that.

Actually, I don't much care for omnibus collections of novels; I would rather have each book separate, particularly as publishers rarely collect them in the correct order. However, I could tell I would need a little help. My wife was missing fourteen books in total when I started. I found ten in a couple of weeks, four looked to be a little more scarce. I noticed that The Black Mountain and Before Midnight each promised to be a bit more elusive, but both were compiled in this particular reprint. The former is one much sought by new and longtime Stout fans alike; while few of the novels and stories change the continuity or characters in any real way, The Black Mountain emphatically does.

I think it's a shame that practically every review gives away the event that sends Wolfe back to his apparent birthplace of Montenegro. Reading the opening chapters of this book would have been far more shocking had I not known. If you've been curious about starting this wonderful series, I recommend jumping to The Black Mountain early in your read so that you can enjoy the experience without the spoiler.

Honestly, I thought it was a good book, but nowhere near my favorite. It really was most entertaining to see Archie Goodwin so completely out of his element, and watching the duo forced to improvise outside of their comfort zone in the hunt for a killer, but I certainly prefer the New York-based stories like Before Midnight.

I'll certainly give Stout all the credit in the world for changing his playbook so effectively in this novel, but I did prefer Before Midnight. This is another story where Wolfe chooses to navigate one of the more absurd facets of contemporary American society: an advertising competition meant to sell some product or other sees the winners become suspects when the man with the answers is found murdered.

I really enjoyed the hair-splitting that Wolfe and Inspector Cramer get into in this one. Cramer is on the hunt for the killer but Wolfe has been hired to find who stole the answers. They both know the other's more than likely looking for the same man, but the distinction is enough to keep the two, legally, at arms' length, in places very amusingly so.

So I was four away from a complete set, and wondering whether I'd have to pay a little more for them when I pulled into the local branch of The Book Nook. Out front of two of the locations, they have these dollar bins that I stopped looking into more than a decade ago; they're useful for nothing but gag gifts. The short version is that, by chance, I happened to pull into the one parking space available in front, and had I parked anywhere else, I wouldn't have seen Rex Stout's name on a green hardback dust jacket and wondered whether it might be the Three Trumps omnibus that I was looking for. Now that's how you find missing books.

The Second Confession

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Second Confession (Viking, 1949).




As readers may have noticed, I've been devouring all of Rex Stout's stories of Nero Wolfe in order. When I read And Be a Villain, the novel that preceded this one, I mentioned to my wife how much I enjoyed it, and how I hoped that we'd see the clearly-inspired-by-Moriarty character of Arnold Zeck again. Then I went and read the Wikipedia entry for that book and spoiled my discovery that we would. Stupid Wikipedia. Because it's the service's fault and not mine.

The Second Confession is an interesting book that really plays with the rules of the series. It has rather less in common with the refined English school of detective fiction that informs most of the series, taking inspiration from radio and film thrillers. Wolfe is asked by a millionaire bigwig to find evidence that the man courting his daughter is a communist, and Wolfe only agrees to get involved with something like that because he's a strident patriot who hates the reds.

Unfortunately, the potential red is also being scouted by another source, leading to a faked holdup by the side of the road, and an ominous phone call from the master criminal Zeck, warning our heroes to lay off their investigation. When Zeck realizes that his threats require a little proof that he's serious, he brings it on with a surprising attack on Wolfe's property. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this adventure isn't as witty or lighthearted as others in the series, but it's so tremendously exciting to follow that I enjoyed it all the same. Recommended, but not as your first Stout novel.

And Be a Villain

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of And Be a Villain (Viking, 1948).



I wonder whether future generations will still be able to make any sense of this novel at all. The murder that gets Nero Wolfe involved happens live on the air during a radio talk show, during a sponsor's segment where the hostess, Manhattan socialite Madeline Fraser, and her guests drink some cola called Hi-Spot and tell the audience how wonderful it is. That's such a strange little relic of the past that even I have difficulty imagining it. Amazingly, the murder - poison slipped into one of the bottles - wouldn't have worked had the patient guests not played along, rather than insisting they be served a scotch and soda. It's radio; who'd know the difference?

Yet the book has a timeless zing anyway, thanks to the presence of a teenage fangirl who adores Miss Fraser, talks a mile a minute in some remarkably entertaining late '40s slang, and who quickly drives Wolfe to distraction with her firecracker attitude and surly petulance. Sixty years later, this same character could be dropped into a murder mystery about Twilight fans with minimal alteration. Highly amusing, entertaining, and recommended.