Rex Stout’s Over My Dead Body

Over My Dead Body was the seventh of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. It was published in 1940.

A young woman, apparently from Montenegro, wants Wolfe to represent another young Montenegrin woman accused of stealing some diamonds. For some reason (which we will soon discover) Wolfe has a horror of anything remotely connected to the Balkans. He wants nothing to do with the case. Until he is informed of a certain fact which makes it impossible for him not to become involved.

The woman accused of the theft, Neya Tormic, is provided with an alibi in circumstances which occasion a good deal of surprise and even scepticism on the part of Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

The first murder occurs soon thereafter. It won’t be the last.

The big question is why a British spy should be mixed up in all this. And a German spy as well. And why are the Feds so interested? Wolfe and Archie are not accustomed to G-men taking an interest in their case and they’re not very happy about it. Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Bureau is even less fond of the FBI and even less happy. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the G-men appear not to have a clue what they’re doing and as the tale unfolds they become steadily more ineffectual and bewildered.

And it’s not just spies. There’s a princess involved as well, and princesses are even more worrying than spies.

So this is a political thriller of sorts as well as a murder mystery. Fortunately Wolfe resists the temptation to focus too much on the political aspects. The Balkan angle adds colour and a touch of exoticism rather than being an excuse to belabour us with political lectures. Although Wolfe does display a vast contempt for bankers and international financiers.

In this book we find out some very surprising things about Wolfe’s past. It’s more than a little disconcerting to think of Wolfe as a father. Which he is. Possibly. In a way.

There’s nothing startling about the murder methods employed in this novel (even if one takes place in a fencing academy). There’s certainly nothing remotely impossible about any of the crimes. Alibis play a comparatively minor rôle. The motives are more important than the method. Indeed, the motives behind the alibis are more important than the alibis. Stout is often disparaged for his plotting abilities. He was certainly no Freeman Wills Crofts but he was actually quite competent in that area and the plot in this case is perfectly serviceable. In fact it’s quite good.

I’m more and more struck by the similarities between Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason. Both are willing to play fast and loose with legal niceties to protect the interests of their clients, even to the extent of concealing witnesses and concealing vital information from the police. They’re both fundamentally honest and they’re carful not to do anything actually illegal but both are aware that the odds are stacked against the individual so that it’s necessary for both an attorney and a private detective to take steps to protect a client from the overwhelming power of the police and the legal system.

Archie Goodwin is in fine form, relishing the various opportunities the case offers to hoodwink the police. And he gets to slug a witness which he enjoys very much indeed.

Over My Dead Body offers a decent plot, intriguing revelations about Nero Wolfe, international intrigue, sparkling dialogue and plenty of fun. Not the best of the Nero Wolfe mysteries but still extremely good. Highly recommended.

Rex Stout's Cordially Invited to Meet Death

Cordially Invited to Meet Death is a 1942 Nero Wolfe novella by Rex Stout, published as a double-header with Black Orchids.

Bess Huddleston organises parties. She organises parties for very very rich people and she gets paid an enormous amount of money for offering this service. Now someone is sending letters that could ruin her business. Nero Wolfe isn’t particularly interested in the case but the fee being offered is very substantial, and Nero Wolfe is always very interested in substantial fees.

Nobody really expected that it would end in murder. The circumstances limit the possible suspects to five. There’s Miss Huddleston’s brother Daniel (whose bizarre chemical experiments she finances), her virtually unemployable nephew Larry, her secretary Maryella Timms, her party-organising chief assistant Janet Nicholls and a certain Dr Brady. The chimpanzee is almost certainly innocent and the bears have an alibi.

The centrepiece of this novella is the unusual murder method. Whether it would actually work in practice is perhaps open to debate but it certainly sounds chillingly plausible. And very difficult indeed to prove.

Cordially Invited to Meet Death is also notable as an example of Wolfe’s stubbornness. Inspector Cramer should know by know that trying to bully Wolfe just irritates him without achieving anything. It can irritate Wolfe so much that it inspires him to solve a case that he would otherwise not trouble himself over.

On balance it’s probably just as well Archie didn’t take his gun with him on his first visit to the Huddleston estate. There was no reason to shoot the chimpanzee. He was just playing. And the alligators were just being alligators.

Incidentally, those famous black orchids make an appearance in this story.

This story has a pretty decent plot. It’s very fairly clued but there’s enough misdirection to keep us guessing (well it managed to keep me guessing anyway). Wolfe’s solution is satisfying. Wolfe is in pretty good form. There’s a fairly colourful cast of suspects. There are some eccentric and even bizarre elements. And had he not taken the case Wolfe would never have discovered the secret of a really successful corned beef hash. A case that has a genuine gastronomic payoff is always a satisfactory case.

Cordially Invited to Meet Death is a most enjoyable tale. Highly recommended. And the edition that includes both this novella and the also excellent Black Orchids is a must-buy for Wolfe fans.

Rex Stout’s Black Orchids

Black Orchids is one of Rex Stout’s early Nero Wolfe novellas. The novellas came about when Stout discovered a lucrative slick magazine market for short format mysteries. He could churn them out quickly and they could later be collected two, three or four to a volume in book form. The book publication versions were usually slightly longer than the magazine versions. Between 1940 and 1963 Stout wrote forty-one Wolfe novellas. Black Orchids was the longest of them. It appeared in The American Magazine in 1941 and in book form (paired with Cordially Invited to Meet Death) in 1942.

Archie Goodwin is not an overly happy man at the beginning of the story. He knew that Wolfe would expect him to go to the flower show but he hadn’t anticipated having to spend four consecutive days there. There is some consolation though - one of the exhibits features a rustic tableau that includes a rather pretty female. An actual human female. Archie has nothing against flowers but his interest in human females is considerably more keen. The reason he has to be there for four days is a simple one. A rival orchid fancier has three black orchids on display. Nero Wolfe is consumed by curiosity and by envy. In fact it gets so bad that Wolfe breaks his number one rule. He leaves the house. He has to see those black orchids.

He and Archie see more than orchids. They see murder. In fact everyone at the flower show sees the murder but seeing a murder and actually seeing a murder are two different things (which becomes obvious when you read the story).

Finding out who killed Harry is easy but that doesn’t solve the murder (which also becomes obvious when you read the story).

Obviously a novella is going to have plotting on the same complex scale as a novel. And there are those (including some of his biggest fans) who maintain that you don’t read Rex Stout for his plotting anyway. There may be something in that although personally I’ve generally found Stout’s plots to be quite satisfactory. Black Orchids in fact has a pretty nifty little plot.

What no-one will deny is that the biggest attraction of the Nero Wolfe stories is that they feature two of the most engaging and fascinating characters in all of detective fiction. Nero Wolfe is not just an eccentric. He is a bizarre exotic. Everything about him is on the grand scale - his waistline, his passion for orchids, his deductive genius, his greed and his childishness. In spite of all this the reader never feels tempted to despise him or to dislike him. Nero Wolfe is Nero Wolfe and if you accept him as such you grow to love him. Archie Goodwin is his chief assistant and his Dr Watson. Wolfe is aristocratic in temperament and tastes, highly educated and fastidious. Archie’s education was gained on the streets but he’s shrewd and perceptive. The interplay between these two is always a delight.

They’re both in good form in Black Orchids. We get to see the best and the worst of Wolfe’s character, with a breathtaking example of Wolfe’s avarice, and his petulant childish envy.

One thing that really struck me was the interesting similarities to the Perry Mason stories of Erle Stanley Gardner. Both Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe are suspicious of authority, and for very similar reasons. It’s not that the police or the D.A. are necessarily crooks. On the whole in the Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe stories the police are essentially honest. But the balance of power lies too strongly in favour of the police and the D.A. and they rely to a large extent on intimidating or misleading witnesses and suspects into saying things that legally they don’t have to. The danger is not corrupt cops - it’s over-zealous cops and District Attorneys.

Both Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe know that it’s very often wise to keep witnesses away from the police. For Perry Mason this is not all that difficult. Being a lawyer has its advantages. For Nero Wolfe it’s more risky, private investigators have some legal privileges but not many, but Wolfe knows the law pretty well and he has money and contacts and the police know that he is prepared to get lawyered up if he needs to.

It’s not that Mason or Wolfe are lacking in respect for law and order, they’re both quite happy to see the guilty punished, it’s just that they have a lot more respect for the rights of witnesses and suspects. And of course in both cases the motivation is partly idealistic and partly self-serving. They put their own clients’ interests first, although they would argue that it is an essential part of a healthy criminal justice system that lawyers and private investigators should do this. Wolfe gives the impression of being motivated entirely by money but it’s fairly clear that he genuinely dislikes official bullying. It’s interesting that both Mason and Wolfe are quite openly avaricious. In both cases it acts as a useful safeguard against self-righteousness.

Black Orchids serves as a pretty good illustration of Wolfe’s approach to the duties of a private investigator. The key is to tell the police as little as possible. He ends up with several key witnesses stashed away in his own house so that the cops can’t find them. A private investigator acts in his client’s interests which does not necessarily involve solving crimes and delivering the guilty to punishment. That’s the job of the police. If acting in the client’s interests means identifying the guilty than that’s fine (and almost invariably Wolfe’s cases do require him to do this because otherwise there wouldn’t really be a mystery story). Wolfe doesn’t lie to the police (that would be foolish) but he tells them only what suits him for them to know, and he doesn’t actively obstruct police investigations (although he may do so passively).

Black Orchids is also a good example of Wolfe’s methods of dealing with witnesses. Information has to be extracted from witnesses. He can’t use all the methods available to the police but he can use all kinds of psychological manipulation, he can threaten to turn them over to the cops if they don’t tell him what he wants to know, he can mislead them and tempt them and cajole them. Maybe its not much more honourable that the methods used but the cops but we get the impression that Stout sees these methods as being more dangerous when used by the police with the powers of the state behind them.

It’s mostly the complete absence of self-righteousness on the part of Nero Wolfe (and Archie Goodwin too) that makes the Wolfe stories so appealing. He’s not an anti-hero but he is an unheroic hero. It’s his unheroic nature that, oddly enough, makes him a hero.

Black Orchids is splendid entertainment. Highly recommended.

Rex Stout’s Some Buried Caesar

Some Buried Caesar was Rex Stout’s sixth Nero Wolfe mystery and appeared in 1939. It’s notable for being one of the fairly rare Wolfe books in which the gargantuan private detective leaves his beloved brownstone on West 35th Street. He not only leaves New York - he spends the entire book in the countryside, probably Wolfe’s least preferred environment.

What could possibly have induced Wolfe to venture into rural surroundings? If you guessed it had something to do with orchids you’d be right. He has entered some of his prized plants in competition at the North Atlantic Exposition held in Crowfield in upstate New York. He fully expects his plants to win and he does not intend to miss the pleasure of witnessing the discomfiture of his arch-rival orchid fancier Mr Shanks.

The trip almost proves fatal. His indefatigable assistant Archie Goodwin loses control of the sedan after a tyre blows out. A car crash is bad enough (Wolfe abhors motor vehicles at the best of times) but worse is to follow as Wolfe finds himself marooned on a large boulder being menaced by a very large and very enraged bull. 

The sedan being temporarily hors de combat Wolfe and Archie are stuck for several days at the home of Thomas Pratt, the owner of a chain of cut-price restaurants (known as pratterias).

The bull proves to be the means of introducing Wolfe to a strange bucolic drama. The centrepiece of the drama is the bull, Hickory Caesar Grindon. Hickory Caesar Grindon is not just any bull. He is a National Grand Champion. As Guernsey bulls go he is the ace of aces, the finest example of the breed in the country. And Hickory Caesar Grindon is about to be turned into beefsteaks. He has been purchased by Thomas Pratt. Having paid a record price for the bull ($45,000 which was an immense fortune in 1939 dollars) he thinks it would be a splendid publicity stunt for his pratterias to have Hickory Caesar Grindon butchered and served up to a hundred invited guests (including as many celebrities as he can rustle up). That works out at $450 per diner, a ludicrous amount but Pratt is convinced the publicity will be well worth the price.

The idea of a National Grand Champion being converted into hamburger has sent shock waves throughout the local community and in fact throughout the entire Guernsey cattle establishment nationwide. Pratt finds himself a very unpopular figure among cattlemen some of whom will stop at nothing to prevent his stunt from coming off.

In this tense atmosphere it’s perhaps no surprise that murder soon follows, but the victim is not the obvious one. And the chief suspect is none other than Hickory Caesar Grindon.

Nero Wolfe knows quite well that Hickory Caesar Grindon is innocent. Somebody committed murder but it was not the bull. However it’s none of Wolfe’s business. By the following day it has become Nero Wolfe’s business. The difficulty is that this is a murder that will be particularly difficult to prove.

Along the way Archie Goodwin risks ruin at the hands of a femme fatale and organises a trade union among prisoners in the county jail. The North Atlantic Exposition proves to be not only the place to be if you love orchids or Guernsey cows but also the scene for murder.

Stout has not always been admired for his plotting but in this novel he really knocks one out of the park. The solution is not merely satisfactory, it is pleasingly elegant in its simplicity and plausible. Wolfe can see a number of possible solutions to a puzzle that seems on the surface to be fiendishly complicated. All the solutions have the disadvantage of being distressingly complex and far-fetched. All except one. That solution is obvious, but it is only obvious once Wolfe explains it. Of course if you’re a writer of detective stories then the ability to make the simple seem complicated, and the complicated seem simple, is obviously a considerable asset.

Everything else is as you expect in a Nero Wolfe mystery - plenty of amusing byplay between Wolfe and Archie, sparkling dialogue and plenty of beer drinking.

It was not at all uncommon in detective fiction of this era to have a vital clue provided by an animal. Erle Stanley Gardner was particularly fond of the idea. The great thing about animals is that they themselves cannot lie but the evidence they provide can be misinterpreted. Having an animal as a suspect rather than just a witness was more unusual. In this case it works extremely well. Nero Wolfe knows nothing about cattle but he knows all about murder and he knows all about evidence and the way it can be manipulated.

There are those who consider Some Buried Caesar to be the best of all the Nero Wolfe novels. Since I haven’t read them all I can’t offer a specific opinion on that but I can say that this is an exceptionally fine detective tale. Very highly recommended.

Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks

Too Many Cooks was the fifth of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, appearing in 1938. The most unusual feature of this novel is that none of it occurs in New York City. Considering that Nero Wolfe hates the idea of even leaving his house, much less the city, that is certainly rather startling.

What could have tempted the gargantuan detective away from his familiar West 35th Street brownstone? Only one thing - a meeting of Les Quinze Maîtres, a club comprising the world’s fifteen greatest chefs. They meet every five years and this year Wolfe, whose fame as a gourmet approaches his fame as a detective, is their guest of honour. Their 1937 meeting is to take place as Kanawha Spa in West Virginia, and it turns out that murder is likely to be on the menu! Philip Laszio is the most famous of the chefs, and the most hated. His fame has been based on the theft of recipes, the poaching of talented assistants and various other forms of chicanery. Virtually every member of Les Quinze Maîtres has a motive for murdering Philip Laszio.

Murder does indeed take place. Wolfe is not especially interested. He is offered very generous fees by several interested parties but to undertake the investigation might entail his having to stay in West Virginia for a few days, something Wolfe regards as a fate worse than death.

Fate will however (naturally) conspire to involve him in the case despite his best attempts to avoid it.

Archie Goodwin has of course accompanied Wolfe to Kanawha Spa. Which is just as well since the best thing about the Nero Wolfe books is the verbal sparring between Archie and Woolfe.

The presence of fifteen of the greatest living chefs, drawn from all parts of the civilised gastronomic world, adds a good deal of colour and also gives Wolfe the opportunity to instruct Archie in the proper appreciation of the culinary arts (which Wolfe regards as being far more important than such trivialities as literature, architecture of painting).

Rex Stout was a man of very decided political opinions. Thankfully these opinions did not intrude to any significant degree in the first four Nero Wolfe books but alas in this story he does become quite preachy at times. It’s not enough to wreck the novel but it is a little heavy-handed at times.

A theme that recurs constantly in 20th century American popular culture is the conflict between urban America and rural America. This generally takes the form of a contempt mixed with fear, almost to the point of paranoia, on the part of urban protagonists towards their country cousins. This theme plays a major role in Too Many Cooks. The inhabitants of West Virginia are almost without exception portrayed as stupid knuckle-dragging rednecks.  Stout was not himself city-bred but he certainly seemed to pick up an extraordinary animosity towards rural America. Or perhaps he simply loathed West Virginians!

Despite these authorial quirks this is an entertaining enough mystery and like all the Nero Wolfe tales it has plenty of amusing moments. 

While it seems to be very highly thought of I confess to preferring the earlier Nero Wolfe books such as The Red Box, The Rubber Band and The League of Frightened Men. While it’s fun seeing Wolfe taken out of his natural habitat the fact remains that New York, Wolfe’s brownstone and his orchid rooms are part of the package (in fact they are almost characters in themselves) that makes these books so delightful and their absence from this book is a slight weakness.

Recommended.

Rex Stout’s The Red Box

The Red Box was the fourth of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe murder mysteries. It was published in 1937. While they are fine examples of golden age detective fiction the biggest attraction of the Nero Wolfe books is quite definitely Nero Wolfe himself - he is one of the most deliriously outrageous of all fictional detectives. He is so outrageous that he is in danger of self-parody but this is a danger that Stout manages to avoid.

The Red Box includes one element of which I’m extremely fond and that is found in quite a few golden age detective tales - a bizarre and outlandish murder method. There are actually three murders in the book and all three are somewhat outlandish but it’s the third that really delighted me. I’m certainly not going to spoil it but I will mention that it involves adhesive tape and as Wolfe points out it’s a remarkably economical murder method, involving an outlay of around fifteen cents.

The first of the three murders involves a box of candy. Boxes of chocolate were quite a popular way of murdering people in golden age detective stories. In this case it is fortunate  that the candy selection involved did not include caramels. Had it included caramels Nero Wolfe’s task might have been made even more difficult.

Stout throws in plenty of standard crime fiction ingredients. There’s an eccentric will. There’s a mystery with its roots in the past. There’s more than one suspect with a secret to hide. The ingredients are expertly blended and the results are delicious.

Nero Wolfe is at his idiosyncratic best. This case begins with an event that is not quite unprecedented but certainly very unusual - Wolfe actually leaves his West 35th Street brownstone to visit the scene of the crime. In a nice piece of symmetry a later scene of the crime will come to visit West 35th Street. 

As usual Wolfe and his indefatigable assistant Archie Goodwin will spend a good deal of time trying to avoid offering too much cooperation to the police. 

Archie will also have to deal with a relapse by Wolfe, although in this case he manages to head it off before too much harm is done and too much time is lost. A great deal of beer will be consumed by Nero Wolfe. Of course we never doubt that Wolfe will solve the mystery but in order to get the necessary proof he will have to take a considerable chance, relying on an elaborate and risky bluff.

I’ve been reading the Nero Wolfe novels in sequence (in other words in publication order). I’m not sure that there’s any real necessity to read them that way. It’s more of a personal whim.

The Red Box is a treat for golden age detective fans. Highly recommended.

Rex Stout’s The Rubber Band

The Rubber Band, published in 1936) was the third of of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mystery novels.

Rex Stout (1886-1975) had already had nine novels published when he began the Nero Wolfe series with Fer-de-Lance in 1934.

The Rubber Band sees our gargantuan detective taking on a case with roots that go back to 1895. In that year in the rather wild Silver City a group of young men involved in gambling and other similar pursuits had earned the name the Rubber Band. Their leader was a man known as Rubber Coleman, hence the name of his followers. One member of this band had gone a little too far and had found himself facing the hangman’s noose. His escape from this unpleasant fate was a close-run thing and in the process of escaping he had incurred a debt. This debt must now be paid.

The connection between the events of 1895 and an accusation of robbery against an attractive young woman employed by the Seaboard Products Corporation is far from obvious but if this had been a straightforward case it would hardly have fallen within the ambit of Nero Wolfe.

The range of possible suspects is considerable and things are complicated by the apparent absence of any motive and by a murder that seems to confuse things even further. Wolfe is not investigating the murder as such; he has been retained in relation to the recovery of a debt. While the difficulties involved suggest that success is unlikely the fee is more than generous. In fact Nero Wolfe’s cupidity is at this point in time less pressing than usual owing to the fact that his bank balance is in a very healthy condition indeed. But a hundred thousand dollars is a hundred thousand dollars. You can buy a lot of orchids with that amount of money.

The police are taking a keen interest in the case due to the involvement of a senior British diplomat, an involvement that could cause considerable inconvenience to the US government.

As usual the story is related by Wolfe’s trusted lieutenant Archie Goodwin. Wolfe’s usual assistants, Saul Panzer and so on, are all at hand.

Wolfe’s eccentricities were well-established by this time. The pursuit of justice (or the earning of a very fat fee if you prefer) is not going to be allowed to interfere with Wolfe’s attention to his plant rooms. His domestic arrangement are however somewhat dislocated, even to the rather shocking extent of having a woman under the roof of the brownstone on West 35th Street. Even more alarming is the appalling prospect of possible interruptions to Wolfe’s dining habits.

The character of Nero Wolfe is of course one of the chief attractions of this series. Rather unusually Wolfe’s Dr Watson, Archie Goodwin, is almost as entertaining as Wolfe himself. This novel is populated with a colourful cast of supporting characters.

With Stout’s lively and amusing style and skillful plotting it all adds up to sparkling fun. A great entertainment from an era when murder could be both civilised and enjoyable.

Rex Stout’s The League of Frightened Men

The League of Frightened Men was Rex Stout’s second Nero Wolfe mystery novel, published in 1935. And it has a few features that make it slightly unusual for a golden age detective tale.

Nero Wolfe is engaged by a Dr Hibbard, a prominent psychologist who fears he is about to be murdered. He has no doubt whatsoever of the identity of his would-assassin. In fact two of his friends have already been murdered by the same man.

Twenty-five years earlier a tragic accident had occurred at Harvard University. A hazing prank went badly wrong and a freshman was badly injured. Dr Hibbard had been one of a considerable number of more senior students who had been involved. The victim of the accident, Paul Chapin, had been left severely crippled. It is strongly implied that Chapin’s injuries left him more than just a physical cripple, that as a result of the accident (whether for actual physical reasons or for psychological reasons) Chapin has never been able to have normal sexual relations with women.

The students who had been involved were filled with remorse, naturally enough. They had been practising what they believed was a harmless prank and they had ruined a man’s life. They formed what they referred to as a League of Atonement. Since that time they have been supporting Paul Chapin financially.

Recently Chapin has achieved unexpected success as a novelist. He no longer needs their financial assistance. And now it appears that he has set in train a belated campaign of vengeance. A few months earlier one of the members of this League of Atonement, a judge, had been killed in a fall from a cliff. The similarity with Paul Chapin’s accident (his injuries had been sustained in a fall from a fourth-floor college window) was initially slightly disturbing but then the members of the league were sent a poem. The poem strongly suggested that Paul Chapin claimed responsibility for the judge’s death and that he intended to kill each and every one of them.

The members of the league were somewhat shaken by this, but they were much more seriously shaken when a second member of the league died suddenly in mysterious circumstances, and they each received a second poem. It now seemed almost certain that every member of the league was marked for death.

Nero Wolfe makes the members of the league an offer they can scarcely refuse. In exchange for a very large sum of money he will guarantee to remove the threat that Paul Chapin poses to their safety. Each member of the league will contribute an amount dependent upon his ability to pay, ranging from $8,000 in the case of the league’s richest member down to $5 in the case of the poorest. The total amount is just over $56,000. It is a great deal of money (an astronomical amount in today’s money) but Wolfe has no doubt they will accept his offer, and events prove that he is correct.

The members of the league have varying responses to this situation. Some are so badly frightened they just want to see Chapin dead while others, still tortured by remorse, almost seem to feel that they deserve to be killed by Chapin. They also have varying attitudes towards Chapin himself. Some hate him while others still feel sorry for him.

Chapin regards the entire situation with amused contempt. When he calls on Nero Wolfe the great detective recognises that here he has a worthy adversary, a clever but determined man who seems quite capable of carrying out his threats. He certainly appears to be, as Hibbard had suggested, to be a dangerously twisted and dangerous individual, quite possibly a psychopath.

Wolfe is fascinated enough by him to immediately buy and read all his novels. He is motivated by more than curiosity - he believes that Chapin’s books provide the answers he needs.

This interest in abnormal psychology and in the psychological responses of the intended murder victims is certainly unusual in a golden age detective novel. Wolfe’s solution of the problem posed by this situation also depends very much on his psychological assessment of those involve. In this case it’s not just a matter of solving a puzzle (although all the normal puzzle-solving attributes of a typical golden age mystery are present in this story) it is also a matter of solving a psychological conundrum.

Of course it also has the ingenious plotting you expect in a golden age mystery. It goes without saying that the situation is not quite what it appears to be on the surface and Stout has plenty of plot twists up his sleeve.

As usual much of the interest is provided by the character of Nero Wolfe himself. He is one of the most bizarre and colourful of all fictional detectives.

A bit of an oddity and a very ambitious story, especially given that it was only Stout’s second detective novel, but Stout knows what he’s about and the results should satisfy any lover of this type of mystery. Highly recommended.

Fer-de-Lance, by Rex Stout

Fer-de-Lance was the first of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, and it also marks my first acquaintance with this famous fictional detective.

I’ve always had a soft spot for colourful, larger-than-life eccentric fictional detectives, and Nero Wolfe certainly qualifies on all three counts. And in his partner (or to be more precise his employee) Archie Goodwin he has the perfect foil. As Loren D. Estleman points out in the introduction to this novel the combination of these two characters rather neatly brings together the classic golden age detective story with its emphasis on puzzle-solving (represented by Wolfe) and the hardboiled school (represented by Goodwin).

With the Depression in full swing (the book was written in 1934) money is rather tight in Nero Wolfe’s West 35th Street brownstone. He has had to cut back on his staff although so far he is still able to indulge his passion for growing exotic orchids. He badly needs a lucrative case. The disappearance of Carlo Maffei seems unpromising at first but when it transpires that his vanishing act is connected with the mysterious death of Peter Oliver Barstow, the president of Holland College, Wolfe’s interest becomes considerably keener.

Barstow had suddenly collapsed on the golf course, apparently the result of a stroke. The coroner and the DA were certainly satisfied. Wolfe really puts the cat among the pigeons when he boldly announces that Barstow was murdered, poisoned in fact. Poisoned by means of a golf club.

Plotting isn’t really this novel’s great strength. The character of Nero Wolfe himself is the main interest of the book, and luckily he’s more than sufficiently interesting to carry the novel. The sparkling and witty style of Stout’s writing is also a considerable help.

This is a highly entertaining romp of a book. Definitely recommended.