BANACEK. “Let’s Hear It for a Living Legend.” NBC, September 13, 1972 (Season 1, Episode 1.) George Peppard, Stefanie Powers, Madlyn Rhue, Robert Webber, John Brodie. Director: Jack Smight. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   This was not the first time that Banacek, the well known Boston-based insurance investigator, appeared on the country’s TV screens. There was a pilot made-for-TV movie entitled “Banacek: Detour to Nowhere” that was shown on March 20, 1972. It did well enough for NBC to pick the show up as part of their rotating Wednesday Mystery Movie series, sharing the time slot with other shows.

   If anyone of a certain age remembers the show, it is almost guaranteed they will remember the gimmick in this one. At one point during a televised football game, a runner for one team is stopped and buried in a pile of players for the other team. As those players peel off the pile, the audience both at the stadium and viewing at home is stunned to discover that the runner at the bottom of the pile has … disappeared. Vanished into thin air.

   Impossible crimes such as this one were Banacek’s forte, and as a result, the series was on for sixteen episodes over two seasons. Banacek himself appears to be modestly well-to-do, but that may be due to his continued success in his crime solving abilities.

   The premise in this one is fascinating, but the show is at least partially let down by the writers trying to fill a 90 minute time slot with lots and lots of not especially interesting questioning. And even though the pace is slow, I don’t think that anyone watching could very easily take what they see going on and put a solution together.

   Which is both clever and, alas, not very likely to have come off as perfectly as it does here. George Peppard does his best to make his brashly bold but not quite arrogant  character interesting, but the allure here is the “impossible crime,” and unfortunately it takes only five minutes to explain.

   The show seems to have done well, though. so you might want to take my comments with a grain of salt. It’s fine. It really is.  I liked this one.
   

   In the last of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels adapted for U.S. television, Death of a Doxy (1966), Archie finds a rude surprise on a personal errand: ex-showgirl Isabel Kerr with a marble ashtray that presumably dented her skull. Orrie, returning from a tail job for Del Bascom’s agency—last mentioned in, I believe, Might as Well Be Dead (1956)—says he didn’t do it, so Archie agrees to keep silent; the body is found by her sister, Stella, whose husband, Barry Fleming, teaches math at Henry Hudson High School. Held as a material witness, Orrie calls attorney Nathaniel Parker, letting Archie decide how to handle it, and a summons from Wolfe extricates him from a poetry reading at Lily Rowan’s penthouse.

   Per Archie’s report, Isabel was “rescued” from showbiz by Avery Ballou, president of the Federal Holding Corporation, now paying her rent, but has set her sights on Orrie, whose baby she claims to be carrying. To derail his engagement to airline stewardess Jill Hardy, she threatens to reveal pictures, letters…and his license, lifted from his pocket, hence said errand. Wolfe says that if he did it, he’s Parker’s problem; other ’teers Saul and Fred are uncertain, but the four vote that he didn’t, and Wolfe is “constrained not only by his long association with me but also by my self-esteem. You must know that I have no affection for him; he has frequently vexed me…But if he didn’t kill [her], I intend to deliver him.”

   Archie invites a disbelieving Jill to the brownstone, putting her in the front room, whence she exits, when Cramer comes to get Wolfe’s stance and hint darkly about Isabel’s diary; Jill denied knowing of her, so Archie visits and jars Stella with the titular term for Isabel, hotly disavowed, learning only that she lived another life with her “circle.” Archie visits Orrie, not yet charged, at the City Prison, and learns of her best friend, Julie Jaquette (née Amy Jackson), a singer at the Ten Little Indians club. A business card inscribed, “There was a diary in the pink bedroom and the police have it” brings Ballou to the brownstone, where Wolfe points out that helping identify the killer might obviate divulging his name.

   He seems to have nothing to offer, except money declined by Wolfe. Julie agrees to tell all about Isabel if shown the orchids, claiming she neither knows the identity of the man paying the rent nor has met Orrie, but told the police he killed her, although she believes Stella “thought Isabel would be better off dead” and says the family physician, Theodore Gamm, was fixated on her. “I wish you well. I have the impression that your opinion of our fellow beings and their qualities is somewhat similar to mine,” Wolfe says, actually standing as she leaves, yet a list of mutual “friends” Julie supplies is hopeless, so Archie contrives to see Minna Ballou (née Minerva Chadwick), who has the only known motive.

   With a pretext of getting advice for Lily on acquiring an Irish wolfhound, on which she is an expert, he writes off the languid, forgetful Minna. They are visited by Gamm, to state that the strain endangers Stella’s life, and Ballou, to admit being blackmailed by “Milton Thales,” i.e., Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus, pointing to Barry, who presumably learned of Ballou from Stella, and killed Isabel for threatening to tell her sister what he’d done. Withholding Ballou’s name, Archie has Julie write to Barry, revealing knowledge of “Thales” and the blackmail, and guarantees full-time protection; with Archie present at the meeting, Barry agrees to return the money in two days, begging Julie not to tell Stella.

   Shots are fired, one hitting Fred’s leg, as they transport her to her hotel from the club, so Archie puts her in the South Room, above Wolfe’s, where she spins a tale in response to Cramer’s questions. Ballou had offered $50,000 to keep him out of it and—hidden from Julie—stops by, agreeing to pay her the same if she can help them do so. They summon Stella, who wants to protect Isabel’s name even more than he does his own, so on arrival, Archie takes a gun from her handbag and, as Wolfe listens in, shows her a copy of Julie’s letter; then it’s Julie’s turn in the alcove as Cramer reports that Barry has shot himself and left a note confessing to Isabel’s murder, with a falsified motive that totally omits Ballou.

   One of three episodes of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series directed by Edward Abroms, “What Happened to April” (3/20/81) was scripted by Stephen Downing, as was “Death on the Doorstep” (1/23/81). He replaces Orrie with Saul (George Wyner), nabbed seeking his effects in the titular “floater’s” apartment after Cramer (Allan Miller) calls in midtown Det. Barney Cross (Gavin Mooney); he doesn’t recognize her, but Saul—riding along on a job—does, telling Wolfe (William Conrad) she was just a friend with whom he stayed occasionally. Downing renames Ballou (as Chester Winslow; Richard Anderson), Julie (now Keen; Deborah Fallender), and Stella (as Donna MacKenzie; Laurie Heineman).

   Math professor Donna is happy to accept drowning as the tentative cause of death and close the case, but M.E. Andy Davis (Mario Roccuzzo) wants tests to explain the pupil dilation. Julie tells Archie (Lee Horsley) that Donna was ashamed of her lack of success as a singer, despite efforts by Julie’s manager, Paul Cummings (Thaao Penghlis), to find her a gig; engaged to department head John Stewart (Bob Carraway), Donna says April’s lifestyle killed their father. Next into the river is Andy, his sample missing, but colleague Dr. Lydia Proctor (Julie Carmen) took it to continue his work, and after Winslow makes his offer, revealing the blackmail, she proves that April had died from insulin poisoning.

   After making Cramer wait while he and Fritz (George Voskovec) prepare a 200-year-old recipe for yak veal—complete with yak milk flown in from the Himalayas—to be served in a week for the first time in North America, Wolfe asks him to identify the man tailing Archie and fingers Donna as “Thales.” Archie enlists Julie, who survives being injected by a masked man at the stage door before going on at Chez Petite, yet Cramer’s men not only were watching Donna, but also saw her inject herself as a ruse. Archie’s tail (Mark Russell) confirms that Paul, his employer, blackmailed Winslow to pay gambling debts, and out of love for Paul, Julie helped with the scheme to deflect suspicion toward Donna.

   Directed by co-executive producer/star Timothy Hutton, “Death of a Doxy” (4/14/02) was the two-part second-season premiere of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery, adapted by consulting producer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. Hutton, playing Archie, sets the effective initial confrontation in Orrie’s (Trent McMullen) apartment in almost total darkness, an apt visual metaphor for his inevitable suspicion. First seen in her recurring role of Lily, as she hosts the dreaded Poet (Julian Richings)—several passages of whose hours-long “epithon” Doyle gamely supplies—Kari Matchett then assumes the part of Julie; fellow frequent repertory player George Plimpton makes his first of two appearances as Parker.

   Well and faithfully staged, the confab that Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) convenes with Saul (Conrad Dunn) and Fred (Fulvio Cecere) is an interesting character study, with none of them leaping unhesitatingly to Orrie’s defense, yet voting to help. After the visits by Jill (Janine Theriault) and Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Archie sits outside the Flemings’ door, suspiciously asked, “Are you waiting for someone?” by a hefty, broad-shouldered woman (Araxi Arslanian), then admitted by the arriving Barry (Carlo Rota), to Stella’s (Christine Brubaker) dismay. Ballou (James Tolkan) says that non-physical contact with Isabel was restricted to reading her the poems of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, and Jack London.

   One of the most interesting women in the canon, Julie serenades the unimpressed Wolfe with her flamboyant rendition of “Big Man Go-go” (lyrics presumably original to Stout), and we are treated to her number with the Little Indians. Doyle eliminates a superfluous Gamm, while Mrs. Ballou (Nicky Guadagni) is portrayed with maximum eccentricity, as she strokes one of the huge wolfhounds only alluded to on the page. We briefly glimpse Isabel (Hayley Verlyn) in a flashback as Wolfe reads Barry’s confession; as in the novel, after Cramer leaves, Archie flips a coin, telling Julie, “I am deciding something that can’t be decided any other way. Tails. Stella killed her husband herself,” and Orrie weds Jill.

   After 1967, the first year since Stout’s wartime hiatus in 1945 during which no new Nero Wolfe book was published, he produced four more novels, starting with The Father Hunt (1968), a natural bookend to The Mother Hunt (1963). Hired to help Lily research a book on the father who’d “made a pile building sewers and other items and had left her enough boodle to keep a dozen penthouses,” Amy Denovo now hires Wolfe to find her own—but discreetly, aided by the grateful Ballou. As cover, he claims to be investigating the death of her mother, Elinor (a presumed alias), a three-month-old hit-and-run in which Cramer seems to have an unusual interest…especially when he learns that Wolfe has one as well.

   Echoing Death of a Doxy and “Death of a Demon” (1961), Death of a Dude (1969) is set in and around Lame Horse, Montana; back from “The Rodeo Murder” (1960) are Harvey Greve, now the boss of Lily’s Bar JR Ranch, and Mel Fox, filling in when he is jailed for shooting daughter Alma’s impregnator, St. Louis newspaper scion Philip Brodell. Wade Worthy is outlining A Stripe of the Tiger: the Life and Work of James Gilmore Rowan, and fellow guest Archie is certain but unable to prove Harvey is innocent. So, per Lily, “The mountain comes to Mohammed,” with Wolfe pulling some strings to get himself and Archie credentialed as special investigators by county attorney Thomas R. Jessup.

   Following a record four-year gap, in Please Pass the Guilt (1973), Wolfe does Vollmer a favor for his friend, crisis-intervention psychiatrist Irwin Ostrow, seeking to learn if there is any basis to a pseudonymous patient’s Lady Macbeth syndrome. Quickly identified as Kenneth Meer, he is chief assistant to Amory Browning of the Continental Air Network; fellow VP Peter J. Odell, Browning’s rival to succeed retiring president Cass R. Abbott, was blown to bits while opening a drawer in Browning’s office. The obvious question is whether Meer really does have metaphoric blood on his hands…but was the bomb meant for Browning, reputedly dallying with secretary Helen Lugos, or truly targeted at Ordell?

   Guilt and A Family Affair (1975) feature both developments with recurring characters and Stout’s customary carelessness about names; the former’s climax reveals that a suspect’s sister is married to Wolfe’s bête noire, Lt. J.M. (hitherto George) Rowcliff. In the latter, Rusterman’s waiter Pierre Ducos arrives, afraid for his life and insisting on seeing Wolfe, so Archie stashes him for the night in the South Room, where he is killed by a bomb in an aluminum cigar tube he’d presumably discovered in his coat pocket. The last name of the maítre d’hôtel who ran Rusterman’s under Wolfe’s trusteeship, Felix, is variously Martin in The Black Mountain (1954), Courbet in “Poison à la Carte” (1960), and finally Mauer.

   Pierre served at the dinner hosted by Harvey H. Bassett, president of National Electronics Industries—shot shortly afterward—to address how Watergate “debased…the equipment for electronic recording.” We learn that Wolfe has “hankered…to have an effective hand in the disclosure of the malfeasance of Richard Nixon,” yet per the title (“since there was no client and no prospect of a fee, this was all in the family”), the truth is closer to home. This time, Orrie is guilty of killing Pierre and his daughter, who attempted blackmail, and Bassett, whom he cuckolded; the jig up, he uses a bomb on himself on Wolfe’s doorstep.

   A month after that was published, Rex Stout passed away at the age of 88 on October 27, 1975, in Danbury, Connecticut, where my lovely bride and I first set up housekeeping in 1988. That brings us to the end of the long road down which I’d started some two years ago with my post (2/13/23)—the first of 24, by my count—on Fer-de-Lance (1934) and its screen incarnation, Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). I’ve hugely enjoyed revisiting the series, my memories of first devouring the books in 1981 back in high school (where I also met said lovely bride) totally undiminished, and hope you’ve enjoyed getting (re)acquainted with what rank among the greatest characters and partnerships in all of detective fiction.

      Editions cited:

Death of a Doxy: Bantam (1967)
The Father Hunt: Bantam (1969)
Death of a Dude: Bantam (1970)
Please Pass the Guilt, A Family Affair, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)

      Online sources:

      [link above mislabeled “Might as Well Be Dead”]

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel A Right to Die (1964) reaches back decades to revisit Paul Whipple, a Howard University anthropology student and waiter at the Kanawha Spa who provided vital information in Phillip Laszio’s murder in Too Many Cooks (1938). Now an assistant professor at Columbia, Paul named his son after black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Wolfe had impressed him by quoting. Dunbar works for the Rights of Citizens Committee (ROCC), to which Wolfe contributes, and intends to marry a white woman, Susan Brooke; convinced there must be something wrong with her to invite the attendant difficulties, Paul wants Wolfe—who feels indebted to him—to find out what.

   Sent to Racine, Wisconsin, where he learns that rejected suitor Richard Ault shot himself on her porch when Susan got home from Radcliffe in 1959, Archie is recalled: Dunbar is charged after finding her bludgeoned to death in her Harlem apartment, and Wolfe offers Paul his services without fee. Finally exposed, Richard’s vengeful and incognito mother says, “She was always talking about civil rights, all she cared about was civil rights, and now she was going to marry a n*gg*r. Then she had…a right to die, so I decided to kill her.” One victim’s father, Sam Vaughn, sells Wolfe his new Heron sedan every year, and Lon’s job is, for once, specified as “confidential assistant to the publisher of the Gazette.”

   One of the most memorable in its own right, The Doorbell Rang (1965) is unique among the novels in having been mined no fewer than three times for U.S. television. Filmed in 1977, writer-director Frank D. Gilroy’s would-be ABC pilot, Nero Wolfe (12/19/79), was shelved until after star Thayer David’s death in 1978; directed by George McCowan and scripted by Stephen Downing, the second episode of the NBC Nero Wolfe, “Death on the Doorstep” (1/23/81), also drew on the book. Following a pilot film, The Golden Spiders (3/5/00), it then became the source for the double-length first-season premiere of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery (4/22/01), directed by co-executive producer/star Timothy Hutton.

   Despite Stout’s anticommunism in The Second Confession (1949) and “Home to Roost” (1952)—in the latter, Wolfe calls Communists “enemies of this country…[but] I deplore the current tendency to accuse people of pro-communism irresponsibly and unjustly”—he was closely watched by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, especially as the president of the Authors League (now Guild). Doorbell unsurprisingly cinched him on the “not to contact list” of those “hostile to the Bureau,” cited by the Church Committee in 1976 as “Political Abuse of Intelligence Information.” He and Wolfe read investigative journalist Fred J. Cook’s exposé The FBI Nobody Knows (1964), which Stout told Cook had “prim[ed] his pump.”

   Wealthy widow Rachel Bruner also read it, and was sufficiently impressed to buy 10,000 copies and send them to influential people nationwide; she now offers Wolfe a $100,000 retainer to “compel the FBI to stop annoying [her]” by questioning, surveilling, and wire-tapping her entire circle. While calling the job “preposterous,” Wolfe vows, “I will not return that check…because I am afraid of a bully. My self-esteem won’t let me.” With her house presumably bugged, Archie gives Mrs. Bruner code phrases and a cutout for confidential communications: William Coffey, the Churchill Hotel’s “house dick…an assistant security officer” (and apparent successor to the long-unmentioned Tim Evarts).

   She asserts that the FBI is not close to anything she doesn’t want dug up, while dinner—and 50-year-old cognac—for Lon buys not-for-print material about questionable cases in and around New York. Archie’s opening sortie (asking Adrian Evers if a security check on his senior VP, which sank a government electronics contract, was “a raw deal”) fails, and while leaving he bumps into G-man Morrison. When Doc Vollmer brings a message to meet an unknown man at the Westside Hotel, Archie is shocked to find Cramer, who is being pressured to help lift their licenses, but instead reveals that Morris Althaus, victim of an unsolved murder, had been collecting material for Tick-Tock magazine on the FBI.

   It was not found, nor was a gun or the bullet that passed through him, and Richard Wragg (“Top G-man in New York. Special agent in charge”) rejected Cramer’s request for aid: “I’d give a year’s pay to hook [the three Feds seen leaving] and make it stick. This isn’t their town, it’s mine. Ours. The New York Police Department.” Agreeing with Archie that proving they’d killed Althaus, keeping silent in exchange for laying off Mrs. Bruner, would suit neither him nor Cramer, Wolfe proposes establishing that they didn’t. As the FBI professes no interest in the murder, Wolfe tells Archie he need not worry about tails; they are visited by Morris’s father, David, a Seventh Avenue clothier, and mother, Ivana.

   Joining the parents are his fiancée, Tick-Tock researcher Marian Hinckley; their lawyer, Bernard Fromm; and senior editors Timothy Quayle—a romantic rival who cites realtor Frank Odell, jailed after Morris exposed him—and Vincent Yarmack. Absent any other lead, Wolfe elicits an invitation from fellow orchid fancier Lewis Hewitt, driven by Saul to Long Island as Archie seeks paroled Odell, formerly of Bruner Realty, who claims he was framed and saw Morris chez Bruner. Over lunch at Rusterman’s, where Wolfe is no longer the trustee, Mrs. Bruner says that her secretary, Sarah Dacos, had lived just below Morris and, on the night he was killed, saw three men leaving who looked like “the type.”

   Ivana says Morris never mentioned Sarah, who joins them later at Rusterman’s (avoiding audio surveillance), stating that she’d occasionally dined with him after they met in Mrs. Bruner’s office and—inviting Archie’s skepticism—only said what her employer wanted to hear about the men. Wolfe has arranged a do-over five days hence, with Fritz cooking for Hewitt’s gourmet group, the Ten for Aristology, as fatally interrupted in “Poison à la Carte” (1960). In his apartment, Archie finds a naked photo of Morris with a fragment of familiar poetry on the back and, with samples from Mrs. Bruner, confirms the writing as Sarah’s, despite her insistence that their relationship had never “progressed to intimacy.”

   Lily identifies it as “a take-off of the last four lines of the second stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’” and at Sarah’s, Archie finds an S & W .38, presumably the one that had been registered to Morris, relocating it elsewhere within her apartment. A delivery of “orchids” smuggles in Ashley Jarvis and Dale Kirby (impersonating Wolfe and Archie, respectively, en route to the “blowout”) and ’teers Saul, Fred, and Orrie, leaving the five waiting in the darkened brownstone for an expected FBI “bag job”—if Wragg believes a G-man killed Morris. Caught red-handed, the agents Archie dubs Handsome and Skinny give their credentials to Wolfe, who holds onto them as evidence of a felony by the FBI.

   In the morning, Archie stashes them in the safe-deposit box and summons Mrs. Bruner to observe via the alcove peephole as Wragg, in exchange for leaving them there, says he’ll end all surveillance and consider surrendering the bullet—both unconceded—to clear his men of murder. Wolfe tells his satisfied client he’ll spare her the embarrassment of Sarah being arrested in her home; Archie gives Cramer the photo (obtained legally, with Ivana’s consent), suggests he comb her apartment, and watches from Morris’s as Purley arrives to find it and bring her in. Wragg gives the bullet to Cramer, in Wolfe’s presence, and after Sarah confesses, they are visited in person by the “big fish,” leaving him on the doorstep.

   Gilroy, whose Edgar Award-nominated Nero Wolfe teleplay was intended to star Orson Welles, won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his 1964 stageplay The Subject Was Roses, which he also filmed in 1968. Perhaps best known for essaying multiple roles on the long-running soap opera Dark Shadows, the well-cast Thayer David had played the memorable villain Count Arne Saknussemm in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). The main-title theme by the prolific Leonard Rosenman, who won Oscars for adapting the scores of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976), has a whimsical flavor similar to that of John Addison for the ensuing NBC series.

   Archie (Tom Mason) disturbs Wolfe and Theodore (John O’Leary) in the plant rooms as Mrs. Bruner (Anne Baxter) arrives, mentioning rumors that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes; his portrait hangs in the office, and Gilroy incorporates such exposition from the canon into his dialogue, quite close to Stout’s. Gazette editor Lon (John Randolph) leads Archie to Evers (Ivor Francis), who ejects him after Mrs. Bruner signs an agreement and he meets Sarah (Brooke Adams), using cabbie friend Al (identified as Goller by Stout) to ditch his tail. He also strikes out with Ernst Muller and Julia Fenster, but Vollmer (John Gerstad) summons him to Cramer (Biff McGuire), giving Wolfe “a nut with meat in it.”

   Gilroy omits Fromm at the meeting with the parents (Sarah Cunningham, David Lewis), Marian (Katharine Charles), Yarmack (Robert Phalen), and Quayle (Sam Weisman); as Saul (Lewis Charles) drives Wolfe to Hewitt (John Hoyt), Lon—promised an interview—directs Archie to O’Dell (sic; Joe George), working in a bowling alley. The script takes liberties as Wolfe invites Mrs. Bruner to dinner at Rusterman’s, initiating an unthinkably romantic rapport, and joins Archie at Morris’s apartment to interrogate Sarah. There, he espouses the theory first voiced by Archie in the novel: learning he was to wed Marian, Sarah shot him just before the Feds arrived, fingering them anonymously when they left.

   Taking the gun from her fishtank, Sarah is about to throw it into the river when a “thief” (Charles Horvath) takes her purse, giving it to Wolfe as Fritz (David Hurst) departs with the ringers, and Saul slips in with Fred (Frank Campanella) and Orrie, bagging the agents (Rod Browning, Richard Ford Grayling). Gilroy cuts right to Cramer personally finding the gun Archie has replaced, Wolfe being tipped off by the fishy smell, and conflates the two visits by Rugby (né Wragg; Allen Case) into one. He ends with an unlikely smiling photo to accompany Lon’s interview, and does no better than Stout at shedding any light on Mrs. Bruner’s acknowledged but unspecified secret, possibly involving O’Dell’s case.

   Crediting only Stout’s characters, “Death on the Doorstep” finds Archie’s (Lee Horsley) college pal Barney Sullivan—in the hospital supply business, and unspecified trouble—shot by sniper Dominic (Joe Lowry); with his appetite affected, to Fritz’s dismay (George Voskovec), Wolfe (William Conrad) offers Archie aid sans fee. Widow Mandy Sullivan (Irene Miracle) swears Barn had no enemies, but Brian Stoner (Tim Thomerson) reminds Archie that their wedding “damn near killed” classmate Paul Hendricks (Stephen Parr). Like Wragg, Cramer (Allan Miller) comes to believe that rogue elements within his own organization—including Inspector Vance Allison (Arlen Dean Snyder)—are responsible.

   Wolfe tells Archie that Saul (George Wyner) discovered a $250,000 double-indemnity policy with Mandy as the beneficiary, and Paul’s vending-machine industry is “known for its cash-flow attraction to the bent-nose types.” Paul insists that he desires only her happiness, but heading out to lunch, he, Archie, and Brian duck machine-gun fire…aimed at whom? Theodore (Robert Coote) directs Archie to the Westside; Cramer (with milk, per Stout) believes that Archie was the target, that Barney was hit by organized crime for reasons unknown, and that their intelligence officer is on the take, identifying Archie’s tail—shaken by Al (Frank Coppola)—as Allison’s Detective McNab (Walter Mathews).

   The same rifle killed a Harlem numbers man, Brooklyn jukebox operator, and Brooklyn labor organizer using cyanide bullets, suggesting “Mob talent keeping Mob discipline.” Confirming that the brownstone is bugged, Archie visits Barney’s office, where Brian is helping Mandy learn the ropes, and he finds evidence implicating Dominic’s contact, ex-con Aaron Keller (Alan Bergmann), who may be siphoning off their liquid assets. Wolfe baits the trap for McNab, “allowing” him to overhear a discussion with Archie about faux evidence, and holds onto his badge while confronting Allison, who claims that he sought to curry favor within the department by solving the murders, and is not the leak’s source.

   Wolfe suggests a plan whereby Allison can clean house by arresting Keller, then advises Cramer to tap Sullivan’s phone, on which he hears Allison’s driver, Marty Thomas (Nick Angotti), warn Keller to split. Duped by Saul and Orrie into thinking the Mob is gunning for him, Keller is caught by Archie at a seedy motel; Barney, indebted to loan sharks, had been forced to hire the “experienced company takeover specialist.” Wolfe intuits that the shooting outside Paul’s office was a charade to deflect suspicion from Brian, who denies having Barney killed, also compelled by the same loan sharks, but Keller—produced by Cramer—believes Brian set him up and admits to everything, even identifying Dominic.

   Hutton starred as Archie in the A&E series, with Maury Chaykin as Wolfe, while fellow executive producer Michael Jaffe adapted “Doorbell.” Saul Rubinek, who’d played Saul (now Conrad Dunn) in the pilot, was recast as Lon, and other repertory players debuted in recurring roles: Wragg (James Tolkan), whom Jaffe retconned into “The Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/02); Vollmer (Ken Kramer); and Hewitt (David Hemblen). Typically faithful, it dramatizes Mrs. Bruner’s (Debra Monk) visit, dinner with Lon, Archie’s meeting Sara (sic; Francie Swift) at Mrs. Bruner’s, and his encountering Morison (sic; Wayne Best) as Evers (David Shurmann [sic]) and Miss Bailey (Michelle Nolden) have him thrown out.

   Of the three, this version of the clandestine meeting at the Westside Hotel has the greatest retroactive resonance, since over the course of the show, as in the books, viewers savored many a match among Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Archie and/or Wolfe; his fury is palpable as he relates the Althaus case and Wragg’s brush-off. Jaffe eliminates David but includes Fromm (Aron Tager) at the confab with Ivana (Nicky Guadagni), Marian (Gretchan [sic] Egolf), Quayle (Robert Bockstael)—whom Archie drags out by the ankles during his first visit—and Yarmack (Hrant Alianak). Here, Marian cites Odell (Steve Cumyn) to Wolfe, who hatches his plan while evading surveillance in Fritz’s (Colin Fox) basement quarters.

   Director Hutton fulfills the comic possibilities as Saul, Fred (Fulvio Cecere), Orrie (Trent McMullen), Kirby (B.J. McQueen), and especially corpulent Wolfe-clone Jarvis (Mathew Sharp) are extricated in near-silence from their coffin-like orchid crates. The trap sprung for Handsome (Howard Hoover) and Skinny (Boyd Banks), Wolfe has his fiery skirmish with Wragg, but Mrs. Bruner’s delight turns to disbelief when she learns of Sarah’s guilt. Archie merely watches from outside the building while Purley (R.D. Reid) has her taken away, and when Wolfe recounts the scene of the G-men held at gunpoint, as Archie says, “I saw something I’d never seen before—a broad smile on the face of Inspector Cramer.”

Up next (and last): Death of a Doxy

      Editions cited —

A Right to Die: Bantam (1965)
The Doorbell Rang: Bantam (1971)

      Online sources —

https://archive.org/details/nero-wolfe-1979

THE GREEN HORNET “The Silent Gun.” ABC, 09 Sep 1966 (Season One, Episode One.) Van Williams (Britt Reid / The Green Hornet), Bruce Lee (Kato), Wende Wagner (Lenore Case), Lloyd Gough (Mike Axford), Walter Brooke (D.A. Frank Scanlon). Based on the long-running radio series created by George W. Trendle. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson.

   I remember waiting for a long time with a lot of anticipation for this series to begin, so I’m rather sure I was among those in the viewing audience with it finally came on the air. (It finally came to fruition by the tremendous success the Batman series had at the time.)

   I was disappointed then, and now. Before watching this first episode again after spotting it on YouTube earlier this month, I never turned it on again and did my best to forget it. (Without going into details, may I say I succeeded rather well at that, as I remembered none of the details.)

   For those of you younger than I, and perhaps totally unfamiliar with the show, here’s the opening bit of narration for the TV series:

   
   This first episode does all right in introducing the characters, but the story itself, is well, to put it bluntly, is pure dreck. It has to do with a new gun in town, one the works silently and without a flash. Two opposing gangs of mobsters in town want their hands on it, and it’s up to The Green Hornet and Kato to act as would-be go-betweens to foil the aspirations of each.

   And that’s it. They succeed, thanks to the smash-’em-up contributions of the Black Beauty (see the narration segment above), with nary a twist or interesting point to be made of any kind. I kid you not.

STUMPTOWN. “Forget It Dex, It’s Stumptown.” ABC, 25 September 2019. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Cobie Smulders (Dex Parios), Jake Johnson, Tantoo Cardinal, Cole Sibus. Based on a series of comic books by Greg Rucka (story) & Matthew Southworth (art). Director: James Griffiths. Currently streaming on Amazon and Apple TV.

   First thought: What an ugly title for a TV show. I didn’t find out until quite a while later that the TV show was preceded by a series of comic books later  collected in graphic novel format. I also later discovered that “Stumptown” is a nickname for the city of Portland OR. (This may be the only time that Portland OR is the home of a (non-licensed) PI.)

   Said PI is female, a former Marine in Afghanistan named Dex Parios. She is now suffering from PTSD, gambling debts, and caring for a younger brother with Down’s Syndrome. Offered a job to find a missing granddaughter, she hesitates at first, then decides to take it. She can use the money.

   The plot suffers a bit from trying to tell a story along with filling us in with all of the people in her life, most of whom will show up again over the course of  the rest of the season. Stumptown was successful enough in its first season to be renewed for a second season only to be cancelled when Covid comes along.

   Cobie Smulders is an actress new to me, but she’s been around for a while, including long stints on the CBS series How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014) and as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill in the Marvel movies. (I’ve never watched either.) I also haven’t watched any of the other shows in the TV series to see which way the wind blew after this one, but based on this one, its future success, if any, would of course depend almost totally on her performance.

   Which, to coin a phrase, better than satisfactory. Smulders does, I thought, overdo it at time in terms of portraying a woman living a lousy life and being sour and witty and clever about it, but otherwise she is just fine. The young lady, at the end of this first episode, sort of decides she likes the job she has just done, and it is clear that, when offered another, she is almost assuredly going to take it.

   Rex Stout’s 13th Nero Wolfe collection, Trio for Blunt Instruments (1964), contains the previously unpublished novella “Murder Is Corny”; both were the last to appear during his lifetime. “Kill Now—Pay Later” had been serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (December 9-23, 1961), while “Blood Will Tell” was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (December 1963). In “Kill,” Wolfe must clear the name of his Greek immigrant bootblack, Pete Vassos — not to be confused with Pete Drossos of The Golden Spiders (1953) — who was found at the bottom of a cliff, an apparent suicide, after being implicated by circumstantial evidence when Dennis Ashby plunged from a high window.

   Like “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo” (1962), “Blood” involves a necktie, if neither the murder weapon nor owned by Wolfe; it was mailed to Archie with the stationery of musicologist James Neville Vance, who ostensibly calls later asking him to burn it, yet when visited by Archie, he denies any knowledge of the incident, although confirming that the tie was his. It bears a stain that may be human blood, and when Vance’s tenant, Bonny Kirk, is found bludgeoned to death, Archie gets confirmation from Hirsh Laboratories, also seen in The Mother Hunt (1963). Her estranged husband, architect Martin Kirk, is the prime suspect, but Wolfe accepts him as his client: “That wasn’t only unheard of, it was unbelievable.”

   “Corny” opens with the arrival of Cramer, unexpectedly bearing the weekly carton of 16 ears from Putnam County farmer Duncan McLeod; freelance cartoonist and delivery man Kenneth Faber was found bludgeoned in the alley behind Rusterman’s restaurant, where Wolfe’s trusteeship under Marko Vukcic’s will ends the next year. In his notebook were the names of Archie, Carl Heydt (a couturier to Lily Rowan), fashion photographer Max Maslow, and ad man Peter Jay. All three were rivals with Ken for McLeod’s daughter, Susan — who’d gotten him the job, while Lily, in turn, got her one modeling for Heydt —  giving them a motive, but Cramer arrests Archie, believing that Ken had supplanted him.

   After being gone over by Cramer, Lieut. Rowcliff, and A.D.A. Mandel, and bailed out by Nathaniel Parker for $20,000, Archie learns why: Sue, who’d arranged to meet Ken there and found him dead, explained her presence by stating they were to be joined by Archie, confident that he could prove he was elsewhere. She believes Ken told all four men that she thought she was pregnant by him, so she wanted to kill him herself, stating that she is a virgin and regrets agreeing to marry him in a few years if he could support a family. To clear her and Archie, Wolfe must identify the perp, but before he can see the three suitors he gets a pre-emptive visit from McLeod, asserting that Ken picked the substandard corn.

   Convened at Sue’s request, the suitors say they have no desire to help identify the killer, although Wolfe warns that, if need be, he will focus suspicion on her to help Archie, and has Lila Pinelli notarize an affidavit of their conversation with her, which he must give to Cramer to forestall Archie’s re-arrest. Refused entry by Wolfe when they return, the trio agrees to Archie’s questioning at Jay’s apartment, but all they can agree on is a dislike for him, so he foils their joint attack and leaves. Predictably, the corn turns out to be pivotal, and after Delbert Palmer brings a new batch, picked and packed by McLeod, Wolfe asks Cramer to send the bomb squad — which confirms that it is booby-trapped with dynamite.

   Wolfe reveals having sent Saul to McLeod’s with a list of questions to which he should have acceptable answers ready, based on the “reasoned conclusion” that, also told Ken’s lies, he had killed him and was seen leaving the alley by Sue, who thus was certain that none of the suitors did it, but unwilling to name him. “It must have been something more urgent than [purportedly dynamiting] stumps and rocks that led him to risk losing such desirable customers” as Wolfe and Rusterman’s by having Faber pick the corn. Cramer asks Sgt. Purley Stebbins to have the Carmel sheriff’s office pick up McLeod, then learns that he “sat or stood or lay on a pile of dynamite and it went off,” blowing him to pieces.

   As with “Poison à la Carte” (5/26/02) — another second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery — “Murder Is Corny” (5/5/02) was directed by George Bloomfield and adapted by the team of William Rabkin & Lee Goldberg, with repertory player George Plimpton in his second of two appearances as Parker. The tone is admirably set with the petulance of Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) at the overdue corn, forcing Fritz Brenner (Colin Fox) to stuff some eggplant instead, and his lecture to Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) about how it should be roasted in the husk, not boiled. Sometimes seen as Lily, Kari Matchett essays Susan with her usual aplomb, explaining to Archie (Timothy Hutton) why she’s put him on the hook.

   Flashbacks show Faber (Troy Skog) pestering Sue with his attentions, the real reason he wanted the job with McLeod (Bruce McFee, briefly seen in “The Silent Speaker” [7/14 & 21/02]), his lies an attempt to force the wedding. Sharing McLeod’s disinclination to nail his killer, Heydt (David Calderisi), Maslow (Robert Bockstael), and Jay (Julian Richings) resort to fisticuffs both among themselves and against Archie — who fends them off in the hall while still holding his coffee cup. The Bomb Squad Leader (Marvin Hinz) examines the carton brought by Palmer (Angelo Tsarouchas) in Wolfe’s office, rather than taking it away, and the scenarists omit a coda between Archie and Sue at a dancing party at Lily’s.

            — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: The Doorbell Rang

Edition cited:

      Trio for Blunt Instruments: Bantam (1974)

Online source:

   Following Gambit (1962), covered in my post on “Booby Trap” (1944), Rex Stout’s The Mother Hunt (1963) finds Nero Wolfe hired by the widow of drowned novelist Richard Valdon, whose later book His Own Image he had preferred to the million-copy bestseller Never Dream Again. Somebody has left a baby in Lucy’s vestibule with a note reading, “THIS BABY IS FOR YOU BECAUSE A BOY SHOULD LIVE IN HIS FATHERS [sic] HOUSE.” She is understandably eager to learn the mother’s identity, hoping that will be “close enough” to proving that the baby—whom she smilingly says she might name Moses if she decides to keep him, “because no one knew for sure who Moses’ father was”—really is Dick’s son.

   His overalls yield a clue, handmade horsehair buttons that baffle “button fiend” Nicholas Losseff of the Exclusive Novelty Button Co.; a Times ad nets a reward for Beatrice Epps, whose temporary colleague at realtor Quinn and Collins, secretary Anne Tenzer, said hers were made by her aunt. Archie is directed by Anne to Ellen Tenzer in Mahopac, and gets the bum’s rush, but when he spots the Times open to that page, he knows she knows more than she’s telling. She leaves while he’s phoning in, and in her absence he enters through an open window to find evidence—later confirmed—that, while obviously not the mother of the child, whom she called Buster, she did have the boy there until three weeks earlier.

   Watching the house, Orrie reports seeing Purley arrive with the local law and Lon reveals that Ellen was found in her car in Manhattan, strangled with a piece of cord; Archie feels responsible, and knows it won’t be long before Cramer learns of his visit. Alerting Lucy, he is hauled in and gives A.D.A. Mandel et al. an edited version of the truth—not naming her—before Parker bails him out. Confident that his remit will encompass identifying the killer, Wolfe leaves Ellen to the police and starts at the other end, asking Lucy to convene Parthenon Press president Julian Haft, agent Willis Krug, TV producer Leo Bingham, and Distaff editor Manuel Upton, who knew most about Dick’s broad circle of acquaintances.

   Lucy and all but Upton provide lists totaling 148 women, fruitlessly investigated over 26 days at the cost of $8,674.30 to the client, suddenly confronted by Purley with knowledge of both the baby and Wolfe’s hiring, but staying clammed up. Stage three of this mother hunt entails having Lon trumpet the fact that a “nurse”—actually Dol Bonner’s employee Sally Corbett, last seen in Plot It Yourself (1959)—wheels Buster around in Washington Square twice a day. The carriage is rigged with cameras, so that Sally can snap candids of anyone who takes a look, as it is presumed the mother would do; Saul sees a woman take a taxi there, pegged by Lucy as Distaff fiction editor Carol Mardus…Krug’s ex-wife.

   Saul verifies that in January, “Clara Waldron” bore a baby boy in Sarasota, Florida, but before Wolfe, risking charges of withholding evidence or conspiring to obstruct justice, can plan his next move, she comes to him. Determined to ask and not answer questions, she admits merely that neither Haft, Krug nor Bingham—all of whom denied recognizing her photo, even her ex—is the father, then decamps, only to be found strangled like Ellen.

   Learning of this, a piqued Wolfe actually throws his suit jacket at Archie, who fortunately survives this assault with a deadly garment; also unusually, he gets romantically involved with someone besides Lily, and the client to boot, mixing personal and business relations.

   After Wolfe questions the Three Stooges about Carol’s history, including earlier liaisons with Dick—reportedly first among equals—Upton, and many others, he and Archie duck out the back, dodging Cramer. Having providentially obtained a key from Lucy, Archie hides them in her house while she is at her Long Island beach cottage, getting provisions from a deli en route; when she returns, he explains that Krug and Bingham have satisfied them as to Dick’s paternity. Wolfe has Lucy summon Upton, held by force, followed by Cramer and the others, and Saul brings Anne, whose temporary positions included one as Haft’s private secretary, in the course of which she mentioned that Ellen boarded babies.

   The inexplicably retitled “Motherhunt” (5/12 & 19/02), a two-part second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, bears the credit “Alan Smithee,” the generic Directors Guild of America pseudonym. It here conceals the sole directorial effort of Charles B. Wessler, a prolific producer of lowbrow comedies such as the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998). Adapted by that season’s consulting producer, Sharon Elizabeth Doyle, it features several name guest-stars—Carrie Fisher (as Ellen), Griffin Dunne (Lossoff [sic]), and Penelope Ann Miller (Lucy)—and two newbies making their sole series appearances: Brooke Burns (Beatrice) and Erinn Bartlett (Anne).

   Doyle gives Lucy a secretary, Miss Mimm (Shannon Jobe); a pet cause, killer fog (caused by coal smoke, and claiming 4,000 Londoners in 1952), on which she is shown delivering a lecture; and a varied musical proficiency. Fisher’s close friend, Dunne makes Lossoff suitably colorful, the first link in a chain that leads Archie (Timothy Hutton) to the sultry Beatrice and Anne and—via directions from a “local sage,” i.e., a Garage Attendant (Jim Davis)—the ill-fated Ellen. Her cottage is covered in shifts by Saul (Conrad Dunn), Fred (Fulvio Cecere), and Orrie (Trent McMullen), who sees the arrival of Purley (R.D. Reid), and her murder is outlined to Archie and Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) by Lon (Saul Rubinek).

   In a typically heated confrontation, Wolfe tells Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), “I would sleep under a bridge and eat scraps before I would submit a client to official harassment,” said client directing Wolfe to Bingham (James Tolkan)—now in radio—Haft (Steve Cumyn), Krug (Boyd Banks), and sole holdout Upton (Richard Waugh). A nice montage intercuts the ’teers eliminating potential mothers from Arizona to the Riviera and Fritz (Colin Fox) crossing off their names on a huge chart. Warned that she might wind up at headquarters, Lucy tells Purley, “I’ve always wanted to see them. My grandfather’s company poured the foundations”; Archie deems her a good enough dancer to take to the Flamingo Club.

   Doyle adds a flirtatious quality to Archie’s relationship with Sally (Manon von Gerkan), “who had made it necessary to revise my prejudice against female ops,” and is portrayed as a smoldering blonde before being deglamorized in her role as nurse. Rounding out this profusion of pulchritude, Carol (Kathryn Zenna) learns that Wolfe has inquired about her, seeking to find out why; Lucy displays undue interest in her visit, and the jacket-thrower calls Theodore—invoked but unseen on Chaykin’s series—on the house phone to cancel their 9:00 session with the orchids. Wolfe repays Lucy’s hospitality by scrambling eggs for them all, a process that according to him requires 40 minutes to be done to perfection.

            — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Murder Is Corny”

Edition cited:  The Mother Hunt: Bantam (1964)

Online source:

   The Final Deduction (1961) sees the return of Ben Dykes, head of the Westchester County detectives in the Zeck trilogy, and introduces their D.A. du jour, Clark Hobart, and Captain Saunders of the State Police; Ben earns a “Competent and admirable” from Wolfe, whose weight is given as 285 pounds. Stout is inconsistent about Archie’s weekly poker game with Lon and the ’teers, now held on Wednesday, not Saturday as in “The Next Witness” (1955), with Saul as rotating, not regular, host. Ditto Archie’s Ohio birthplace, given in Too Many Women (1947) as Canton and in “The Cop-Killer” (1951) as Chillicothe, invoked here when he recalls his Aunt Anna’s chicken pie.

   Wolfe pledges temporary silence to his client, Althea Vail, whose husband, Jimmy, and secretary, Dinah Utley, are murdered after conspiring to fake his kidnapping and commit tax fraud … the titular deduction being that she killed them. To keep his promise, he flees the brownstone with Archie—avoiding Cramer by taking overnight refuge in the home of Doc Vollmer while his son, Bill, is away at school — and, in appreciation, sends orchids to Vollmer and his assistant, Helen Gillard. Archie hands Lon his “fattest scoop” ever, plus a “second hot exclusive” within three days, while oft-mentioned A.D.A. Mandelbaum has suddenly become “Mandel,” and will apparently remain so in all subsequent appearances.

   Two of the novellas in Homicide Trinity (1962) were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post — “Counterfeit for Murder” (as “The Counterfeiter’s Knife,” January 14-28, 1961) and “Death of a Demon” (June 10-24, 1961); “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo” bowed in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine #220 (March 1962). Although Stout rarely revised his work, “Assault on a Brownstone,” a radically different early draft of “Counterfeit,” appeared in the posthumous collection Death Times Three (1985). The “Demon,” Barry Hazen, uses his p.r. business as a front for blackmail until one of the victims he tortures puts a hole in him, and tries to frame Mrs. Hazen with the very gun he used to kill her father years ago.

   “Counterfeit” opens with back-to-back visits by showbiz landlady Hattie Annis — told to return when Wolfe descends from the plant rooms, entrusting Archie with a package for which a hit-and-run driver wings her — and aspiring actress Tamiris Baxter, a concerned tenant to whom he admits nothing. Discovered in Hattie’s parlor, the package contains c. $10,000 in new $20 bills; after stonewalling Albert Leach of the Treasury Department’s Secret Service Division, asking about both women, Archie confirms it as phony. But on arrival at the house with Hattie, who hates cops and hopes to split a newspaper’s reward for finding a counterfeiter, he spots Tammy on the parlor’s floor with a knife in her chest.

   Turns out she was an undercover T-woman, the counterfeiter/killer presumed to be one of Hattie’s other four tenants, who come to the brownstone en masse at her behest when her intransigence gets her arrested. After a turf battle over confiscation of the bills, Leach’s Federal court order trumping Cramer’s, Archie talks with D.A. Macklin. This took a hard left seven pages into “Assault,” in which the hit and run is fatal, Tammy lives — and even has romantic potential, and Leach’s titular search for the package Archie cached in Grand Central piques Wolfe into action; Stout’s biographer, John McAleer, observes that Hattie 2.0 engages them in “some of the liveliest dialogue to be found anywhere in the corpus.”

   In “Eeny,” Bertha Aaron comes seeking aid: the private secretary to Lamont Otis saw an unidentified younger partner of Otis, Edey, Heydecker, and Jett meeting secretly with the opposing client, Rita Sorell. Not surprisingly, Wolfe — up in the plant rooms — refuses to touch a case even tangentially involving Rita and Morton’s divorce, so he tells Archie to get rid of her, but on returning to the office, he finds somebody has beaten him to it. She has been strangled with Wolfe’s own necktie, left on his desk after he got a spot on it, and is presumed, while alone in the office, to have intercepted a call from said partner, who’d followed her, offered to explain … and opportunistically killed her once she admitted him.

   Otis arrives with associate Ann Paige, who is asked to wait in — and decamps through the window of — the front room while he reads the statement Archie gave Cramer. He agrees to help with background on Frank Edey (drafted the Sorrells’ marriage agreement), Miles Heydecker (represented gold-digger/ex-actress Rita, née Ramsey, when sued by a former agent), and Gregory Jett (a spendthrift, rumored to be interested in Ann). Archie writes a card claiming that Rita was seen in the lunchroom, hoping that she can be smoked out of the Churchill and followed by the ’teers; he returns home to find Jett, who was tipped off by Ann, his alleged fiancée, and thinks Bertha might have known of a dalliance with Rita.

   Just after Edey and Heydecker arrive to complete the set, Rita calls and “admits” she was with Jett, so Wolfe tells them she named the man, although “not satisfied of her veracity,” if not who. “We knew that one of three men had committed murder, and how and when. Okay, which one? Eeny meeny murder mo”; Cramer and Purley arrive with warrants for them both, leaving in defeat after Wolfe calls Parker and their bluff. He then arranges for the other interested parties to be listening in from the front room as he confronts Rita with the truth — it was Heydecker, not Jett, who met with her, followed Bertha to Wolfe’s, and phoned Rita to warn her of possible exposure, while Rita herself committed the murder…

   “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (sic; 6/3/01) and the subsequent episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) — both directed by John L’Ecuyer, here making his series debut, and adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle — were attached for international broadcast and DVD in a faux telefilm, Wolfe Stays In. As with “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), yoked as Wolfe Goes Out, the novellas were spaced years apart. Doyle links these two with original material about those poker games, now played on Thursday with Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), and Saul (Conrad Dunn), over which Archie (Timothy Hutton) explains Wolfe’s (Maury Chaykin) sparerib mishap.

   Bertha (Christine Brubaker) says she fears the news might kill Otis (George Plimpton), who is 75 and has a bad heart, and that when she’d confronted the “traitor,” his reaction precluded an innocent explanation, hence her visit. Of course, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) is convinced that he withheld the name she refused to provide until or unless Wolfe took the case, while Archie insists that, even absent a client or a fee, “this aggression will not stand,” per the Dude. With Angela (Janine Theriault) sequestered, Wolfe tells Otis, “My self-esteem has been severely injured,” warning him against an attempt at damage control by shielding the killer, but Otis insists he will not put the firm’s interests ahead of justice.

   Invoked but never onstage in the novella, Morton (Howard Hoover) is briefly shown here in flashbacks with Rita (Kari Matchett); she “wanted more than half, and … had carefully collected evidence of certain enterprises” of his, which any of the partners could provide. Chaykin beautifully depicts how, due to his rancor at the killer, “I can’t think clearly. My brain-processes are muddled,” and he even declines Fritz’s (Colin Fox) offer of food. Jett (Robert Bockstael), Edey (Wayne Best), and Hydecker (sic; David Schurmann) all come to the brownstone after grilling by the authorities, but Wolfe considers their alibis for the time of the lunchroom meeting worthless, and they were in conference during the murder.

   Up next: The Mother Hunt

   Editions cited–

The Final Deduction: Bantam (1963)
Homicide Trinity: Bantam (1970)
Death Times Three: Bantam (1985)

   Online source —

   Completing the titular motif of Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks (1938), Too Many Women (1947), and “Too Many Detectives” (1956), Too Many Clients (1960) opens as Thomas G. Yeager, the executive VP of Continental Plastic Products, arrives unannounced at the brownstone. Hired to confirm that he will be followed from his house on East 68th Street to 156 W. 82nd Street that evening, and ascertain by whom, Archie enlists the services of trusted cabbies Albert Goller and Mike Collins. The client is a no-show, and after Purley answers Archie’s phone call with a tell-tale “Mrs. [emphasis mine] Yeager’s residence,” Lon Cohen at the Gazette reveals that his body was found in an excavation on West 82nd.

   Lord knows, I’ve made little attempt to enumerate pop-culture references in books dating back 90 years, but Lon is jokingly told he will receive a Christmas card from “Archie and Mehitabel and the children,” alluding to the respective cockroach (Archy) and cat created by Don Marquis in his New York Evening Sun column in 1916, whose exploits — beloved of my father, IIRC — were often illustrated by George (Krazy Kat) Herriman. The photos in Lon’s file prove that the “client” was not Yeager…who was already dead, so with their bank balance perilously low, Archie seeks one. From superintendent Cesar Perez and his daughter, Maria, he learns that Yeager, referred to as “Mr. House,” owned 156 W. 82nd.

   After Archie intuits that Cesar found Yeager’s body in his well-used love nest, per Wolfe a “preposterous bower of carnality” — belying the ratty address — and hid it in the Con Ed site, Mrs. Felita Perez offers a $100 fee. They are interrupted by stage star Meg Duncan, whom Archie had recently seen in The Back Door to Heaven, and came for her cigarette case, offering $1,000 to find and keep it for her, “but too many clients can be worse than too few.”

   With Saul Panzer unavailable, he summons Fred Durkin to hold down the fort and restrain any visitors, presumably female, at gunpoint if needed while he returns to the brownstone, where he has arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Perez and (separately) Meg to come.

   Meg concedes “awareness that she had — uh — colleagues. Or rivals,” but either can’t or won’t provide any information regarding them or pay Wolfe $50,000 to suppress possible evidence in a murder. Questioned in Spanish, “one of his six languages,” the Perezes say Yeager paid them $50 a week, letting them live for free in the basement and keep the rent for the rooms on the first four floors; convinced that Felita killed him for “debauch[ing]” Maria, Wolfe refuses their fee, upped to $250. Fred summons Archie, having “caught a fish” who scratched his face: Julia McGee, Yeager’s secretary, sent to seek anything to connect him to the house by Continental prexy Benedict Aiken, joining her chez Wolfe.

   Aiken corroborates Julia and hires Wolfe for an unspecified fee to investigate, if possible protecting the corporation; then, Ellen Yeager arrives and hires him to find her husband’s killer, with a proviso that he will terminate his arrangement with Continental in the event of a conflict. They are interrupted by Cramer, aware that Archie asked Lon about Yeager two hours before he was found but seemingly not of the notorious room, when Fred calls to report another fish, so Archie departs on a pretext. On arrival, Felita shows him a deed sent them by attorney John Morton Seymour, conveying the house to them in the event of Yeager’s death, “so nobody could know he owned [it] and we must not say he owned it.”

   Upstairs, he finds Dinah Hough, who has admired his dancing at the Flamingo and left an umbrella while allegedly avoiding Yeager’s advances; learning that hubby Austin teaches English lit at NYU, Archie pegs him as “Yeager,” who’d quoted Elizabethans and Robert Browning. Brought to Wolfe, he explains his idea that the revelation to Yeager — thought to be alive — of an unidentified impostor would let her know that he knew of their affair. That night, Felita awakens Archie to report that Maria was shot after seeing a movie with friends, and hidden in her drawer, he locates a cache of information on Yeager, including multiple sketches of some eleven women, one dated the night he was killed, resembling Julia.

   Archie requests Felita’s $1 fee to investigate her murder and calls off Fred, summoned by Wolfe along with Julia, who arrives with Aiken and is tricked into admitting she had been there, purportedly to take dictation, finding Yeager dead. Excluded as Wolfe instructs the ’teers, Archie visits Meg, who admits paying Maria $5 in monthly “hush money”; Austin, who has clearly beaten Dinah to a pulp; and Ellen, who insists on seeing the room despite the risk of surveillance.

   They meet Purley on the way out, forcing Archie to lie like mad, backed up by the quick-on-the-uptake Ellen and Felita, but Stebbins is no fool, and all the supposed coincidences get Archie a trip downtown, compartmentalizing two sets of facts.

   Wolfe asks Aiken to bring Julia, and Saul to bring a certain Arthur Wenger, who through the trick picture of the waterfall looking into the office i.d.’s Aiken as the man for whom he duplicated Julia’s highly unusual Rabson keys. Knowing that Yeager would be alone while awaiting her arrival, Aiken eliminated the growing threat to his leadership; he then writes and signs a confession — drafted by and mailed to Wolfe — that conceals the room’s existence before killing himself. Cramer knows damn well from the wording that Wolfe wrote it, but with Aiken dead he is not obliged to reveal his evidence, and the Continental directors agree to pay a $50,000 fee, while Archie returns the cigarette case and umbrella.

   A two-part second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Too Many Clients” (June 2 & June 9, 2002) was one of director John L’Ecuyer’s four collaborations with screenwriter Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. It boasted an unusually large number of typos in the opening or closing credits, misidentifying the regulars and repertory players cast as Orrie (Trent MacMullen [sic]), Cesar (Alec [sic] Poch-Goldin), Director #2 (David Schurman [sic]) and Woman in Bathroom (Shanon [sic] Jobe) and Kitchen (Hayley Vernon [sic]), respectively. Michael Sarrazin appears in flashbacks, uncredited, as Yeager; sometimes seen as the dreaded Lt. Rowcliff, Bill MacDonald plays Austin, the faux Yeager hiring Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   Covered with a tarp by Cesar out of simple decency, Yeager is found by boys retrieving a ball — which conveniently lands in his open palm — as Archie ponders his absence with Al (Marty Moreau), and after hanging up on Purley (R.D. Reid) he seeks further information from Lon (Saul Rubinek). Well-cast Jeanette Sousa makes her only appearance as Maria, described in the book as “one of the three most beautiful females I have ever seen”; while addressed by name, Felita (Lucy Filippone) says they “were paid not to know” Meg (Kari Matchett). Fred’s (Fulvio Cecere) tedium is well depicted, as is his tussle with Julie (sic; Christine Brubaker), wrapped up in a coverlet, who later calls for Aiken (James Tolkan).

   In his pique over being stymied, Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) even wrangles with Fritz (Colin Fox); as he is being hired by Ellen (Debra Monk), Dinah (Dina Barrington) awakens Fred in the bathtub, and Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) drops in. Called “Mike” in the novel, Meg’s “square-jawed female” employee is now Matilda (Lorca Moore). Found by Saul (Conrad Dunn), Wenger (Robert Bockstael) fingers Aiken, and after his suicide, Doyle eliminates the parting shot with Cramer, jumping ahead to the meeting with the directors — including Richard Waugh and Steve Cumyn — and a new denouement, in which Archie watches the Perezes, whose daughter’s murder must remain officially unsolved, mournfully dancing…

Up next: “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo”

Edition cited:

         Too Many Clients: Bantam (1971)

Online source:

THE ADVENTURES OF THE FALCON. “Kiss Me Not.” Syndicated / Federal Telefilms, 01 October 1954 (Season 1, Episode 15). Charles McGraw. Guest Cast: Nancy Gates, John Dehner, Herb Vigran, Betty Ball. Writer: Herbert Purdom. Director: Derwin Abrahams … (as Derwin Abbe).

   For a quick recap of the long, involved and confusing history, the fellow who does the Spy Guys and Gals website does the best job I’ve ever seen. Here’s the link: spyguysandgals.com/sgShowChar.aspx?id=2662

   He covers the books, the short stories, the movies, the radio (nearly 500 episodes), but it’s an episode of the TV series that this review is about. It begins with a gangland killing in a two-bit hashery, then continues with Michael Waring in Washington DC as an overall troubleshooter for an unnamed agency as he volunteers to help a war widow whose teen-age daughter has gone off with a hired killer.

   The connection between this and the prologue? The killer in the hashery and the gun man the woman’s daughter has taken off with are one and the same. How, also, you may ask, does the government get involved? Simple. The girl has taken her mother’s monthly assistance check with her.

   Charles McGraw suffers from a screenplay that makes him a one-dimensional PI, tough and gruff, but little more. John Dehner (the gunman) was always a dapper fellow, but not one you might thing would have not one, but two beautiful women fall head over heels in love with him.

   But overall, not a bad story, one that makes the most of limited amount of time it has to work with (less than 30 minutes). I was happy not to have to sit through wasted time watching cars do nothing but drive from one place to another.