Rex Stout’s 13th Nero Wolfe collection, Trio for Blunt Instruments (1964), contains the previously unpublished novella “Murder Is Corny”; both were the last to appear during his lifetime.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.
   

   I reviewed the book, by Robert Thorogood, here:

A Mystery Review: ROBERT THOROGOOD – The Marlow Murder Club.

so when I learned that they were doing a TV series of it, I was naturally curious.

   To me, it seems that the cast the lead characters perfectly. I remember not a lot about the story itself, but the little I do and the little I see in the snippets below, the synchronization seems well within very close range. Given who the author is (Death in Paradise, obviously), adapting the book to TV I’d say was a project that was meant to be done.

PRESS RELEASE:

   MASTERPIECE Mystery! today announced that The Marlow Murder Club, adapted by author Robert Thorogood from his best-selling novels, premieres on PBS Sunday, October 27th at 9/8c. Along with the airdate, MASTERPIECE also announced that the cast and crew are already in production on Season 2.

JONATHAN CREEK. “The The Wrestler’s Tomb.” BBC, 1997 (Series 1, Episode 1). Alan Davies (Jonathan Creek), Caroline Quentin (Madeline Magellan), Anthony Head (Adam Klaus). Teleplay: David Renwick. Director: Marcus Mortimer. Currently streaming on Britbox (available via Amazon Prime).

   Jonathan Creek is a young lad with more hair than I have, and he seems to be getting by, but probably not lavishly, as a magician’s assistant – no, that’s misleading. He’s not the beautiful girl in net stockings whose primary job is to distract the audience away from seeing what the magician is really doing. What he is is the fellow who comes up with and designs the stage props for the fakery that goes on there while the audience is watching the girl get closed up as a mummy in a sarcophagus covered with the sharpest spikes pointing inward that you will ever see.

   In the BBC series that bears his name he also becomes the solver of “impossible” crimes, and in this the pilot episode for the series, it is that of a philandering artist who is killed in an upstairs room of his home by what is thought by the police to be a burglar, while the model he is supposed to be philandering with is taped up and gagged in the same room.

   If it is not a burglar, the most obvious suspect is his wife, but she was at the time known to be in her sequestered office. If she really did it, the key question is, how? Investigative reporter Madeline Magellan wants to know, and co-opts Jonathan’s assistance, using her own charming ways.

   Having to date watched this one twice, I can tell you that this one is a good one, and mean it. The clues are well set up, even the false ones, there is a lot of humor to go with the mystery, and I’m willing to wager you’ll have no more idea who did it – and how – than I did.

   Here are some things I liked. Jonathan meeting Maddy for lunch for the first time shows her a bit of sleight of hand that I thought wouldn’t be explained (magicians never tell), but wrong. It is, and quite satisfactorily so.

   Then about half way through, Jonathan shows Maddie a 3-D doll house replica of the wife’s office (see above) to explain (and quite cleverly) how she could have left the office unseen and gone off to commit the deed.

   Ha! Not so. It almost would have worked, and the reason why it doesn’t occurred to me just before it does to the two TV stars. (I also knew that they wouldn’t “explain all” at a point in the episode only halfway through, so there is that.)

   And believe it or not, the real solution, while admittedly somewhat far-fetched, really *could* have happened, making for a quite satisfying ending to the first of several seasons of adventures of one young Jonathan Creek. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

   As with Murder by the Book (1951), the Nero Wolfe novel Plot It Yourself (1959) gets a metafictional spin from Rex Stout, who’d served as the president of Vanguard Press; the Authors Guild, lobbying for copyright-law reform; and the Mystery Writers of America, receiving their Grand Master Award that year. The National Association of Authors and Dramatists (NAAD) and Book Publishers of America (BPA) hire Wolfe due to a rash of “plagiarism upside down,” with successful works alleged to be copied from unpublished material planted ex post facto. The ’teers are reinforced by Dol Bonner and her assistant, Sally Colt (inexplicably renamed Corbett, with Stout’s typical disregard for consistency).

   We learn that Wolfe’s letter-opener “was a knife with a horn handle that had been thrown at him in [The Black Mountain (1954)], in the cellar of an old border fort in Albania, by a man named Bua.” Three at Wolfe’s Door (1960) is unique, since only “Method Three for Murder” was previously published (serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, January 30-February 13, 1960); “Poison à la Carte” and “The Rodeo Murder” debut there. “Method” opens as Archie leaves the brownstone on one of the 30 or 40 times he has been fired or, as he has here, quit over the years, and on the steps meets his first solo client, Mira Holt, who found a woman stabbed to death in the borrowed taxicab she was driving…illegally.

   Per Archie, the methods for answering police questions are to “Button your lip….Tell the truth straight through….[or] Tell a simple basic lie with no trimmings, and stick to it.” A sensible Wolfe offers to split Mira’s $50 fee: “You have helped me with many problems; surely I can help you with one. I am not being quixotic. I do not accept your headstrong decision that our long association has ended, but even if it has, your repute is inextricably involved with mine. [She] is in a pickle. I have never tried to do a job without your help; why should you try to do one without mine?” In “Rodeo,” they investigate a murder that is perpetrated during a party and roping contest at Lily Rowan’s Park Avenue penthouse.

   “Poison” finds Fritz asked by millionaire orchid fancier Lewis Hewitt to cook the annual dinner for the Ten for Aristology, his group “pursuing the ideal of perfection in food and drink,” to be served (unknown to Wolfe) by “twelve young women, one for each guest,” at the home of shipping magnate Benjamin Schriver. With Rusterman’s maítre d’hôtel, Felix Courbet—aka Felix Martin from The Black Mountain?—and chef Zoltan Mahany lending a hand, Archie busies himself trying to get the phone numbers of the “Hebes.” He meets Nora Jaret, Carol Annis, Fern Faber, Peggy Choate, and Helen Iacono before the dinner, spoiled when theatrical angel Vincent Pyle’s blinis are doctored with arsenic.

   A complex set of circumstances muddled the serving, with Fern returning from the “can” to find no plate, and the other four plus Lucy Morgan serving guests different from those to whom they had been assigned, while nobody seems able—or willing—to identify who gave Pyle the fatal dish. After the usual tirade from Cramer, Helen visits Wolfe to admit stabbing Pyle in self-defense several months earlier; to keep this from coming out, to the detriment of her career, she offers to expedite the investigation and seek a motive among the others. Wolfe suggests doing so en masse with Archie present, so they convene at the apartment shared by Peggy and Nora, a gathering eavesdropped upon by Purley Stebbins.

   Arrested for obstructing justice on the verge of relocating the party to the brownstone, he tells Purley—tipped off by Nora—that Fritz is Wolfe’s client, and is grilled by Rowcliff. The next day, Fritz joins Felix and Zoltan in offering to hire him formally for the good of the restaurant’s reputation, an appeal met with an astonished “Pfui….I am solely to blame for this mess, but you offer to pay me to clean it up.” He has Zoltan call each of the five, claiming to have withheld the fact that he saw her go back for a second plate, and asking to meet at a table with a mike hidden in a bowl of artificial flowers in Piotti’s restaurant, also used for precisely the same purpose in Gambit (1962), as Archie and Purley listen in.

   As with the Grand Central rendezvous in “Christmas Party” (1957), it’s largely a question of who accepts, in this case Carol, who responds to Zoltan’s “admiration” by stating that the master of the casting couch had promised to marry her…and trying to poison Zoltan’s spaghetti anchovy. Brought in by Cramer en route to jail, she admits nothing; per Wolfe, “You took such prodigious risks that it is hard to believe in your sanity…if you are mad you are also ruthless and malevolent.” Given a novella’s constraints, Stout identifies all twelve of neither the guests—including actor Adrian Dart, corporation lawyer Harvey M. Leacraft, and Emil Kreis, Chairman of the Board of Codex Press—nor the actress servers.

   A second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Poison à la Carte” (5/26/02) was the fourth and final series adaptation by William Rabkin and Lee Goldberg; also broadcast in a double-length international version, it was directed by George Bloomfield, the uncle of Maury Chaykin, who starred as Wolfe. Cast members Michelle Nolden (as Helen) and Lindy Booth (Peggy) were also seen in, respectively, Season 1’s “The Doorbell Rang” (4/22/01) and Season 2’s “Before I Die” (6/16/02). The Server Girls include repertory players Shannon Jobe and Lorca Moore, as well as an early appearance by Stockholm-born Malin Akerman, whose breakthrough role was Silk Spectre II in Watchmen (2009).

   Pyle (Domenic Cuzzocrea) ruffles feathers by dismissing a centerpiece of pricey orchids donated by Wolfe and praised by Hewitt (David Hemblen in his recurring role): “I don’t care for flowers with spots and streaks. They’re messy.” The courses provided by Fritz (Colin Fox), Zoltan (Hrant Alianak), and Felix (Carlo Rota) are lovingly depicted, while Rabkin and Goldberg create dialogue to flesh out such characters as Dart (James Tolkan). Now the host instead of Shriver (sic; Jack Newman), Hewitt tells Wolfe that a dying Pyle keeps repeating “Jack in the Pulpit,” the title of a flop he had backed; Peggy insists that, finding her assigned guest already served, she instead gave his blinis and caviar to Wolfe.

   Assigned to Hewitt, already served by Lucy (Dina Barrington), Fern (Hayley Verlyn) lost the game of musical chairs after fixing her hair and delivered none, meaning that she is in the clear and someone else—clearly the murderer—had double-dipped. Wolfe asks Kreis (David Schurmann), Leacroft (sic; Gary Reineke), and the others to envision the scene, in the hope of recalling who had served Pyle, but to no avail. Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) says a paper spill was found bearing traces of arsenic and the fingerprints of Zoltan, who states that he saw it on the floor and put it in the trash; returning with Archie (Timothy Hutton) from their all-nighter, Wolfe does the unthinkable and skips his 9:00 A.M. orchid session.

   Helen had been seeking a role in Jack in the Pulpit when Pyle tried to have his way with her, and is quite happy, once they have a nominee, to tell the police she saw her go back for a second plate. At the “party” with Carol (Emily Hampshire), Nora (Sarain Boylan), et alia, broken up by Purley (R.D. Reid), Archie uses the seating chart and twelve slips of paper to go through the various permutations. Wolfe wisely warns Cramer of the planned unmasking—with him and Rusterman’s respectively replacing Purley and Piotti’s—since Helen calls the D.A. right after hanging up on Zoltan; Fritz forgives the injury Carol did to him, and the episode adds a nice coda of him and Wolfe silently sharing wine and beer.

         — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Too Many Clients- –

Editions cited —

         Plot It Yourself: Bantam (1960)
         3 [sic] at Wolfe’s Door in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)

Online source:

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Champagne for One (1958) finds Austin “Dinky” Byne asking Archie a favor: to sub for him at the annual dinner party his aunt, ex-client Louise (Mrs. Robert) Robilotti, throws on the birth date of her late first husband, philanthropist Albert Grantham. At table will be Albert’s twins, Celia and Cecil; unwed mothers Helen Yarmis, Ethel Varr, Faith Usher, and Rose Tuttle; and fellow “chevaliers” Paul Schuster, Beverly Kent, and Edwin Laidlaw. The mothers are “graduates” of Grantham House in Dutchess County, “financed until they got jobs or husbands,” invited to Fifth Avenue to keep in touch…if not necessarily to find said husbands among the upper crust of society.

   Forewarned by second-timer Rose that Faith has long kept a bottle of cyanide on her, and might choose that night to use it, Archie watches her carefully until she takes a fatal drink of champagne, and knows she did not administer it herself. Cramer visits Wolfe, making clear in his presence that he thinks Archie is mistaken or lying, but will not rule homicide out; hard on his heels, Laidlaw tries to hire Wolfe to learn why. Believing it was suicide, he fears being arrested for murder if the police uncover the fact that, under a false name, he had a liaison in Canada with Faith, then a clerk at Cordoni’s flower shop, her presence at Grantham House reported to Laidlaw by Byne—apparently unaware he was the father.

   Wolfe agrees either to prove suicide or to expose the killer, but mistrusts the “remarkable coincidence” that neither Laidlaw nor Faith knew the other would be there. In return for not revealing that Dinky faked a cold to get out of the party, Archie gets an audience with Mrs. Blanche Irwin at Grantham House, who also doubts suicide and says Byne chose the mothers from the list she gave him. Archie returns home, where Orrie has brought them, and corroborating his statement earns a “quite satisfactory” (“He gave me a satisfactory only when I hatched a masterpiece”) for Ethel; Mrs. James Robbins, a Grantham House director, had gotten Faith a job at Barwick’s furniture store and an apartment with Helen.

   Helen recalls that Faith once reported meeting her mother on the street and running away after a scene, but later regretted telling Helen she wished her dead. Two days after hiring Wolfe, with no progress, Laidlaw covers by visiting with the other chevaliers and Cece to accuse him of doing them an injury by linking them with a spurious murder investigation, but the two parties are at an impasse. Archie receives an urgent summons from Laidlaw, dogged by the D.A., as Wolfe is siccing the ’teers on the mother, Elaine, who—per Lon at the Gazette—lammed after authorizing Marjorie Betz to claim the body for cremation; prefiguring the title of a 1963 entry, “I wished the trio luck in their mother hunt and left.”

   Somebody mails the D.A. (now Ed Bowen again—I give up) a note outing Laidlaw as the father, yet while he is livid, having admitted nothing, Wolfe is gratified at having goaded the killer into action: “Now he is doomed.” Cramer interrupts the interrogation into who could have known, forcing his quarry to slip out the back and bearding Wolfe in the plant rooms to no avail. Just as Wolfe tells Archie to see Celia, who gave a flippant reason for rejecting Laidlaw’s proposal but may have known about Faith, she calls asking him to the house; on arrival, she admits to being a decoy for her mother, who wants to see him along with the Police Commissioner (now Bob Skinner again—whatever), because of said note.

   Asked once again to walk back his statement, Archie tactfully withdraws and, frustrated while waiting for Saul to flush Elaine from her Hotel Christie hideout, blows up at Wolfe. Replying that “You are headstrong and I am magisterial. Our tolerance of each other is a constantly recurring miracle,” Wolfe suggests Byne deserves closer scrutiny; tailing him to Tom’s Joint, Archie finds Saul tailing her there as well, and threatened with the police, they agree to see Wolfe. Separated, Dinky asserts that he’d been intimate years ago with Elaine, who requested the meet to ask about Faith’s death, while she volunteers only the second fact, and during the interview, Orrie arrives bearing a leather case from her room.

   This contains a letter from Albert revealing that he had been her lover; supported her and Faith, if not acknowledging paternity due to Elaine’s promiscuity; and arranged for Byne to share with her the annual $55,000 tax-exempt income from a $2 million portfolio. One of the provisions, Elaine confirms, halved her payments if Faith died, and Byne, who now clearly had a motive if not necessarily opportunity, admits he typed the note to deflect the investigation away from him, but got cold feet after mischievously arranging for Laidlaw and Faith to be at the party. Then, as Wolfe leans back, closes his eyes, and start pushing his lips in and out, Archie opines, “I really should have a sign made, genius at work…”

   To determine how the crime was committed, Wolfe has Cramer and Stebbins gather the suspects to restage it in his office; Purley voices Wolfe’s observation that the distinctive way Cecil carries the glasses would enable an onlooker to know which of the pair picked up he would proffer to Faith. Waiting in the wings, Elaine is introduced to Louise, who slaps her face, having learned from Byne of Faith’s paternity, and invited her there to kill her. Standing at the bar as Hackett, the butler, poured, Louise dropped the poison into the glass, making her own son an unwitting delivery system, and it is later learned that, aware of the cyanide Faith carried, she procured some, knowing that suicide would be assumed.

   Directed by co-executive producer Timothy Hutton, who played Archie, “Champagne for One” (4/29 & 5/6/01), a two-part first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, was the first of four written by William Rabkin & Lee Goldberg; the latter related his experience in a Mystery Scene article reprinted here by Steve. Two of the guest-stars, Marian Seldes (as Louise) and Michael Rhoades (as Kent), made their only other appearances in “Door to Death” (6/4/01), while David Hemblen is credited with one of three as orchid fancier Lewis Hewitt, mentioned in the novella. As in “Prisoner’s Base” (5/13 & 20/01), Aron Tager is billed as “Commissioner Skinn,” although correctly referred to in the dialogue.

   Louise’s dislike for Archie, dating to when he and Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) recovered her jewelry, is obvious the moment he arrives at the shindig for Helen (Kathryn Zenna), Ethel (Janine Theriault), Faith (Patricia Zentilli), and Rose (Christine Brubaker). They freshen up after dinner as Archie gets better acquainted with Louise’s son, Cecil (Steve Cumyn); her fortune-hunting second husband, Robert (David Schurmann); and chevaliers Schuster (Robert Bockstael), Laidlaw (Alex Poch-Goldin), and Kent. Then it’s dancing time, with Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No. 2: VI. Waltz 2, and Kari Matchett, later seen in a recurring role as Lily Rowan, aptly portraying Celia, who also danced with Archie at the Flamingo.

   After a fez-wearing Hackett (James Tolkan) pours the soon-to-be-deadly champagne, and Faith collapses, Archie stays by the body while having the band leader (Ken Kramer) call the police. Later, when told why Byne (Boyd Banks) gave Archie an entrée to Mrs. Irwin (Nancy Beatty), Wolfe scoffs, “Nothing is as pitiable as a man afraid of a woman”; Part 2 opens as Saul (Conrad Dunn), Fred (Fulvio Cecere), and Orrie (Trent McMullen) receive their orders. Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) and Wolfe are equally apoplectic during the plant-room confrontation, with Archie recalling the Clara Fox incident from The Rubber Band (1936), while Seldes, again ill-served by her participation in the show, chews the scenery.

   When Wolfe confronts her with Albert’s letter, Elaine (Nicky Guadagni) launches herself across the desk at him, and we are treated to the delicious spectacle of Wolfe rearing back to kick her in the chin. Chaykin also beautifully portrays his unprecedented, “unqualified admiration” (“You not only have eyes but know what they’re for”) of the attentive Purley (R.D. Reid), who exchanges glances with a proud Cramer. Despite Hemblen’s inclusion in the credits, I detected no sign of Hewitt whatsoever; since several of the episodes exist in multiple versions for domestic and international broadcast and/or home video, he may appear in one of those, or simply be credited despite ending up on the cutting-room floor.

   Goldberg observed that A Nero Wolfe Mystery “was, as far as I know, the first TV series without a single original script—each and every episode was based on a Rex Stout novel, novella, or short story. That’s not to say there wasn’t original writing involved, but it was Stout who did all the hard work…. The mandate from [the] executive producers…was to ‘do the books,’ even if that meant violating some…rules of screenwriting…. More often than not, that meant loyalty to the dialogue rather than to the structure of the plot or the order, locations, or choreography of the scenes.” He and Rabkin adapted Prisoner’s Base (1952), “Poison à la Carte” (1960)—our next post—and “Murder Is Corny” (1964).

         — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Poison à la Carte”

Edition cited —

      Champagne for One: Bantam (1960)

Online sources:

MANNIX. “Skid Marks on a Dry Run.” CBS/Desilu Productions. 23 September 1967 (Season 1, Episode 2). Mike Connors (Joe Mannix), Joseph Campanella. Guest Cast: Charles Drake, Marian Moses, Wende Wagner, Vincent Gardenia, Vic Perrin, Herbie Faye. Written & directed by John Meredyth Lucas. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   I don’t think this happens often, but here we are only two episodes into the first season, and this one’s a dud. Or at least I think so. Let me tell you about it.

   It begins promisingly enough. A client comes to Intertect (the computer-oriented PI agency Mannix works for) with a strange request: he wants to be investigated himself. He’s running for office, he says, and he wants to be sure that no dirt can be dug up about him that the opposition can use to smear both him and his campaign.

   Well, OK, but between you and me, there’s more to it than that. Mannix is assigned the case. And even though the people he talks to from the client’s past know nothing and tell him nothing, they all seem to end up dead. It makes no sense, nor (as it turns out) neither does the basic premise. I don’t suppose I need tell you why, and I wouldn’t think of doing so anyway, but when the wheels are as wobbly on the car as it is on this one, you can bet your last fifty bucks it won’t go very far, and it doesn’t.

   But, and it is a big but, the show is still fun to watch anyway. I like the title, too.