Sun 4 Dec 2016
REX STOUT – Too Many Clients. Viking Press, hardcover, October 1960. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, March 1962. Reprinted by Bantam many times. TV adaptation: Season 2, episodes 9 and 10, of A Nero Wolfe Mystery (A&E, June 2 and 9, 2002).
The title says it all. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin go from a bank account that’s discouragingly low, with an IRS payment coming up soon, to a case that walks in the door and before it’s over, ends up with four different clients having paid Wolfe a retainer for his services.
It begins with an executive for a plastics company hiring Archie to see if he’s being followed when he visits a certain address, a task so simple that Wolfe need not be involved. Archie agrees, but the arrangement falls through when the client is a no-show. Then the client is found dead outside the building that was his destination, but the death occurred the day before, and it isn’t the man who hired Archie.
It also turns out that the dead man had an elaborate (and duly well-decorated) love nest in the apartment building he was found murdered outside of, and keeping the place a secret while solving the murder is the job Wolfe takes on, hoping that one of the clients will come through with a very large payment for the work he’s done.
Rex Stout was hitting on all cylinders when he wrote this one. Both the rapport and the repartee between Wolfe and Archie are terrific, the case is quirky enough to be interesting throughout, and all of the usual secondary characters in the Wolfe saga show up and have their individual roles to play. If I could complain about anything, it would be the fact that Stout doesn’t exactly play fair with the reader, in that a short time before the end of the book Wolfe gives Saul Panzer and Orrie Cather a job to do without telling Archie about it, nor us, therefore, the reader.
That small quibble aside, this one was a lot of fun to read.
December 4th, 2016 at 11:09 am
I don’t know what year that uppermost paperback came out, but that pictorial rendition of Nero Wolfe’s face on that cover matches my idea of what he looks like very very closely. Perhaps because of that cover image!
December 4th, 2016 at 11:38 am
I see from my notes that I liked this a lot when I read it back in January 1977:
“This is Stout near his top form. Sort of risque in that sex plays a bigger role than usual. Murderer is cleverly hidden and Archie is in good form. Some nice humor.”
Though I read this in 1977, I remember many of the Nero Wolfe books helped me get through my two years in the army. In 1966-1967 I was hospitalized 5 times with fevers and severe coughing but these books were great for reading in a hospital bed during Basic and Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Dix.
December 4th, 2016 at 12:52 pm
Based on that note you wrote to yourself back in 1977, we are in full agreement on the merits of this one, Walker.
December 4th, 2016 at 4:20 pm
One funny thing about the thousands of notes that I’ve written about books, stories, etc, it gives me a glimpse of myself at different ages throughout my life. Facts that I’ve forgotten spring up and slap me like the book I was reading as a kid and I noted that my dad had just died of cancer. When my son was born I was reading Raymond Chandler’s Letters. When my daughter was born I was reading Agatha Christie. Funny coincidence, my son’s middle name is Chandler and my daughter’s first name is Christie.
Sometimes the notes will mention problems I’m having at work or at home, etc. I’ve been doing it since the 1950’s, so there are a lot of notes to myself about my reading and life in general.
December 4th, 2016 at 8:14 pm
Your whole house is a library, Walker, or most of it, and your library is a diary of your life!
December 5th, 2016 at 8:51 pm
That portrait of Wolfe on the Bantam covers was my idea of what Wolfe looked like as well, bearing a strong resembalence to actor Francis Sullivan.
I’m in agreement on this entry in the series as well. Wolfe and Archie near their considerable best.
December 6th, 2016 at 2:36 am
I might be remembering …
That Wolfe portrait might have originated in the Saturday Evening Post, which had first serial rights to the Wolfe novellas at that time.
After I typed this, I went to my Wolfe collection and found a Bantam paperback from this period.
(The Final Deduction, 1965 edition.)
On the copyright page:
Nero Wolfe portrait on cover
(c) The Curtis Publishing Company, June 10th, 1961
So that makes it the SatEvePost for certain.
This comes to you as a public service.
December 6th, 2016 at 9:33 am
You have me convinced, Mike. My parents didn’t read the Post, but my grandparents, who lived next door, did. I would have been in my late teens then, and I’ll bet that that’s where I saw the stories, in the Post, and that’s why the image as stuck with me as being the “real” Wolfe ever since.