Rex Stout wrote 33 novels featuring his master-sleuth Nero Wolfe and sidekick-narrator Archie Goodwin and this is the very first. Later Nero Wolfe novels include The Doorbell Rang, listed as 66th in the 100 best crime novels by the Mystery Writers of America, and The Father Hunt which won the 1969 silver dagger award from the British Crime Writers' Association.
It is a sort of hybrid between the classic English whodunnits of Conan Doyle (in which narrator Dr Watson is the sidekick to mastersleuth Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (whose first Hercule Poirot mysteries are narrated by sidekick Captain Hastings) and the more hardboiled American thriller-crime novels. There are one or two lines, such as “I don't know what kind of a career she had mapped out, but I could have worn her not to try the stage.” (Ch 8) or “The corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to.” (Ch 11) that reminded me of the work of Raymond Chandler, although The Big Sleep was published in 1939, 5 years after FdL.
The gimmick is that Nero Wolfe is an enormously fat man dedicated to orchids who never leaves his New York apartment so Archie Goodwin, as well as being the narrator, must be the investigator who does all the ground work, enabling him also to be involved in the action.
I was disappointed. The elimination of the suspects one by one rested mostly on their alibis and was pedestrian. The killer's identity was obvious with at least 20% of the novel still to go; the remainder depended on extracting sufficient evidence. More thriller than whodunnit, then, and by no means as stylish as the Philip Marlowe novels. Given how much classic work I have yet to discover, I'm not tempted to read any more.
One neat trick I noticed was the way he inserted references to previous cases (even though this is the first of the corpus), thus adding verisimilitude.
- “All lawyers look alike. It's a sort of mixture of a scared look at a satisfied look, as if they were crossing a traffic-filled street where they expect to get run over any minute but they know exactly the kind of paper to hand the driver if they get killed.” (Ch 4)
- “To have you with me like this is always refreshing because it constantly reminds me how distressing it would be to have someone present - a wife, for - whom I could not dismiss at will.” (Ch 5)
- “Though it used all the facts without any stretching. anyone could have said that much a thousand years ago when they thought the sun went round the Earth. That didn't stretch any of the facts they knew, but what about the ones they didn't know?” (Ch 5)
- “Anyone may make a mistake, but ... when a man sits himself up as cocksure as Wolfe did, he had always got to be right.” (Ch 5)
- “A yawn that would have held a tennis ball.” (Ch 8)
- “We were putting the soup before the cocktail.” (Ch 13)
- “Saul looked in the kitchen to make a face at me, as if his ugly mug wasn't good enough without any embroidery.” (Ch 16)
May 2026; 285 pages
First published in the USA in 1934
My paperback edition was issued by Bantam in 2008
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