The Nero & Archie Show

Three Men Out – Rex Stout

The main characters in Rex Stout's detective stories are the genius misogynistic rotund detective Nero Wolfe who grows orchids, likes gourmet food and refuses to go outside and his assistant Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories. Together they look for perpetrators of crimes. While the stories are ingenious, the pleasure in reading a Nero Wolfe detective story is mainly due to the dynamics between brash Archie Goodwin and his grumpy employer. The novelettes in particular make me laugh out loud.

This book has three longish stories that first appeared in the early Fifties in a weekly called The American Magazine. In the first story, Invitation to Murder, a client wants to hire Wolfe because he thinks one of the three women employed by his brother-in-law poisoned his sister. But at the same time Archie is doing interviews in the brother-in-law’s house, the client is murdered with a blunt object. The highlight is Archie tricking agoraphobic Wolfe out of the brownstone to inspect the scene of the crime, which is a lot funnier, I admit, if you are already veteran reader of the stories.

In the second story, The Zero Clue, a math whiz uses advanced statistical methods to tell fortunes. He is afraid that a client is planning or already committed a serious crime. Archie goes to his office to talk but can’t find the potential client. The cops later contact Wolfe and Archie because the math whiz has been found killed completely, having left on his desk a mysterious message coded in the geometric arrangement of eight pencils, which look like the initials N.W. There’s not much action in the story, but a whole lot of Wolfe talking to people, with Archie appearing at the wrong place at the wrong time (as is his wont), and a clever twist that would be more frustrating to us ignoramuses were it handled by a lesser writer than Stout. The extended red herring throughout (especially the way it builds and builds upon itself as we become more aware of it) was an enjoyable misdirection.

A plot to fix a Giants and Red Sox world series is featured in the third story, This Won’t Kill You. Wolfe has old-world notions of hospitality so he feels he must accompany a French guest to visit his greatest desire: the deciding game of a World Series at the Polo Grounds. The corpulent Wolfe in an old-style stadium seat – when only 10% of adult Americans were obese – is pretty hilarious, despite our more broad-minded attitudes about body shape, size, and appearance these days. The stadium is an unusual setting in a series that usually ended with all the suspects collected in Wolfe’s office with the red chair.

I think tightly written novelettes like these are the greatest whodunnits since Christie wrote short stories with Poirot. So, this was a very fine mix of unusual stories that impressed me. Other Stout fans prefer the novels because they give more room for characters development – especially the 35^th Street brownstone characters - and funny set pieces between Wolfe and citizens of the world who seem to have been born to get on his nerves.

Keep in mind the books were written a long time ago. So one hand we have about the coolest place on Earth, New York City, in the middle of the 20^th century. On the other, the reader might get annoyed by the stereotypical way in which women in general and the relationship between Archie Goodwin and women are described.