Mount TBR #30

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Curtains For Three - Rex Stout

This book contains Nero Wolfe novelettes first published in The American Magazine (1905 – 1956). The Gun with Wings appeared in June 1949; Bullet for One in July 1948; and Disguise for Murder in September 1950 as The Twisted Scarf.

In The Gun with Wings, PI Nero Wolfe and his trusty sidekick Archie Goodwin are hired to show that a death ruled suicide was in fact murder and to track down the perp. In tried and true fashion, at the climax all the suspects are gathered into a room, in this case, Wolfe’s office with the red leather chair. The dialogue in this one is particularly good, setting up some very fine scenes indeed.

In Bullet for One Stout returns to the world of industrial designers, which he knew through his wife who worked in textiles. Industrial espionage of trade secrets provides the backdrop. The murder has occurred on a riding trail in the wilds of Manhattan. Three principals who can’t stand each other hire Wolfe to find the killer, but for the sake of reputation in the fishbowl of the The Big Apple they need to be cleared.

Disguise For Murder, the best of the three, starts with member of a Garden Club prowling about Wolfe’s plant rooms, looking at orchids. The killing of a young con-girl murder takes place in Wolfe’s office, which has to be a first and only in the canon. Again, the dialogue makes it well-worth reading.

Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novelettes featuring Wolfe and Archie. You’d think reading them would get old after a half-dozen or so. But they never do: Wolfe’s agoraphobia, the unwavering schedule in the plant rooms, the gourmandizing, Archie’s brash humor, the same supporting cast like Saul and Fritz, the savvy city gals, crabby copper Kramer, and gathering the persons of interest in the office. Granted, the better stories are the fish out of water stories when Wolfe has to leave the brownstone, but the familiar touchstones are as comforting as snug in their rooms with a fire Holmes says to John, “Good old Watson.”

Real life is about flux, with the stark choice being get used to new people, places, and things, or yell at clouds. Reading stories have their appeal in their timelessness, their fixity. Readers that like this kind of genre writing – that would be me – like to go back to Manhattan after WWII or Victorian London and find the characters doing what they always do.