Steve Amsel called after him, “Too many detectives, Hyatt!”
IX
Yesterday afternoon I was in the office with Wolfe, discussing a little job we had taken on, when the phone rang and I answered it.
“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”
“This is Dol Bonner. How are you?”
“Better than ever.”
“Good. May I speak to Mr. Wolfe?”
“Hold it, I’ll see.” I covered the transmitter and turned and told Wolfe. He made a face, hesitated, and reached for his phone. I kept mine to my ear, since I was supposed to unless he told me otherwise.
“Yes, Miss Bonner? Nero Wolfe.”
“How are you?”
“Well, thank you.”
“I’m glad I got you. Of course you’ve heard the news?”
“I don’t know. What news?”
“The jury reached a verdict at noon. They found Hyatt guilty of first-degree murder.”
“So. I hadn’t heard. To be expected, surely.”
“Of course. Why I called, Harland Ide phoned me an hour ago. He thinks it would be a little barbarous to celebrate a man’s conviction for murder, and I agree, so that’s not the idea, but he suggested that we should show our appreciation to you somehow. Anyway, the secretary of state has reported the results of the hearing and we’re all going to keep our licenses, so we could celebrate that. Mr. Ide thought we might have a little dinner for you, just the seven of us, and wanted to know if I approved, and I said I did. Just now he called again and said that Mr. Kerr and Mr. Amsel liked the idea, and he asked me to propose it to you. Any evening you choose next week—or as for that, any other week. We hope you will, and of course Mr. Goodwin. And of course Miss Colt.”
Silence. I was watching Wolfe’s face. His lips were pressed tight.
“Are you on, Mr. Wolfe?”
“Yes, I’m on. I rarely accept invitations to meals.”
“I know. This isn’t a meal, it’s a tribute.”
“Which it would be churlish to decline. Mr. Goodwin thinks I am churlish, but I don’t. I am merely self-indulgent. I offer a counter-suggestion. I too feel appreciation, for the efficient and effective co-operation I received. I suggest that instead of dining at some restaurant, which I suppose is intended, you people come to my house for dinner. Any evening next week except Thursday.”
“But that would be turning it wrong side up!”
“Not at all. I said I feel appreciation too.”
“Well … shall I ask Mr. Ide? And the others?”
“I wish you would.”
“All right. I’ll let you know.”
And she did. In less than an hour. It’s all set for next Wednesday evening. I’m looking forward to it. It will be a treat to see Fritz’s face when he sees Dol Bonner, seated at Wolfe’s right, aim her caramel-colored eyes at him under her long dark lashes.
As for the fifty-fifty split on the blame for our wiretap, that’s still under discussion off and on. And as for my being left off the program that day in the City of Albany, that needed no discussion. Since all the work had to be done by the 48 operatives in New York and there was nothing I could contribute, why deal me in? Especially since I could be useful as a diversion for Groom and the DA.
The World of
Rex Stout
Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout’s own archives, here are rarely seen, never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in “The Rex Stout Library” will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.
Three for the Chair
Reviewers disagreed over the merits of Rex Stout’s Three for the Chair. Anthony Boucher, in The New York Times, found it “one of the best of Stout’s threesomes.” But Julian Symons, in London’s Sunday Times, made the suggestion—blasphemous to most devotees of Nero Wolfe—that it was time for Stout to kill off the great detective! Both reviews are reproduced here.
Extract from
THE SUNDAY TIMES
LONDON
CRIME STORIES
By JULIAN SYMONS
Like some vestigial limb, the Great Detective lingers on, although the social conditions that encouraged his omniscient amateurism have long since vanished.
Consider, for example, Mr. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, that Gilbert Harding of detection who entered the ring as heavyweight contestant for criminal honours some thirty years ago equipped with a fine set of prejudices, including a particular one against moving out of his old brownstone house on West 35th Street. In those days every new Nero Wolfe story was a delight. A fresh exercise of Mr. Stout’s ingenuity in providing clues that would enable Nero to solve problems without moving further than the plant rooms on the roof.
That was long ago. The three longish short stories in “Three for the Chair” find Wolfe making a trip to the Adirondacks to cook trout for an ambassador, and tamely allowing himself to be taken the 160 miles from New York to Albany for an investigation into wire-tapping. “Three for the Chair” offers one murder method that is new to me, but is otherwise a sad comment on past glories. A peripapetic Nero Wolfe has really no reason for existence. Could not Mr. Stout arrange for him to pass away after an excess of salmon mousse and blueberry pie?
Criminals
At Large
By ANTHONY BOUCHER
THOSE who, like me, firmly believe that most mystery novels of 50 to 70,000 words could be more effective as novelettes of 20 to 30,000 can normally find the proper concise length (at least in book form) only once a year, in the annual “Nero Wolfe Threesome.” But so far this year (the gods of terseness be praised) we’ve had an earlier novelette collection by Henry Kane, and this week volumes by Rex Stout and Richard S. Prather.
THREE FOR THE CHAIR (Viking, $2.95) is one of the best of Stout’s threesomes, marred indeed by hardly anything save its inaccurate title (the whole point of one story is that its killer is not for the chair). The situations and solutions are unusually good ones; and the stories are rich in unexpected Wolfiana: Wolfe preparing brook trout Montbarry (his own invention), Wolfe under arrest for the first time, Wolfe calling once upon the Secretary of State and ones upon a band of four dozen operatives to pull out his chestnuts for him, Wolfe even going so far as to make a sort of professional sheep’s eyes at private detective Dol Bonner.… As I’ve often said before, it’s hard to find three novels as satisfying as these treble groups of novelettes.
The Rex Stout Library
Fer-de-Lance
The League of Frightened Men
The Rubber Band
The Red Box
Too Many Cooks
Some Buried Caesar
Over My Dead Body
Where There’s a Will
Black Orchids
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Silent Speaker
Too Many Women
And Be a Villain
The Second Confession
Trouble in Triplicate
In the Best Families
Three Doors to Death
Murder by the Book
Curtains for Three
Prisoner’s Base
Triple Jeopardy
The Golden Spiders
The Black Mountain
Three Men Out
Before Midnight
Might As Well Be Dead
Three Witnesses
If Death Ever Slept
Three for the Chair
Champagne for One
And Four to Go
Plot It Yourself
Too Many Clients
Three at Wolfe’s Door
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Homicide Trinity
The Mother Hunt
A Right to Die
Trio for Blunt Instruments
The Doorbell Rang
Death of a Doxy
The Father Hunt
Death
of a Dude
Please Pass the Guilt
A Family Affair
Death Times Three
The Hand in the Glove
Double for Death
Bad for Business
The Broken Vase
The Sound of Murder
Red Threads
The Mountain Cat Murders
Rex Stout
Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds from his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.
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