In Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Prisoner’s Base (1952), Archie Goodwin describes his employer as weighing “four thousand ounces” (a possible post-Zeck low of 250 pounds); they reach an impasse over a young woman who refuses to identify herself and offers $50 a day to hide out in the brownstone until June 30.

   This is broken by the arrival of lawyer Perry Helmar, who offers Wolfe $5,000 to find Priscilla Eads, of whom he is the guardian and trustee of her father’s estate, and $10,000 if he produces her by…you guessed it, June 30, when she takes possession on her 25th birthday. One complication is doubt within “a large and successful corporation” about Pris’s inheriting 90% of the stock to take control.

   Another is ex-husband Eric Hagh, who has a document she’d signed granting him half of the property, and Helmar thinks she might be going to Venezuela to see him, so Wolfe — tipped that Archie recognized her photo — says he’ll sleep on it.

   Pris can either match his offer or leave so that Wolfe can accept, giving her a head start; she opts for the latter, and when she is murdered, Cramer comes calling, because Archie’s prints are on her luggage. After Wolfe directs him to “unload,” Cramer reveals that her maid, Margart Fomos, was strangled near her tenement, as was Pris in her apartment, but Wolfe refuses to take it on, absent a paying client and notwithstanding his self-esteem, so Archie undertakes to do so.

   Lon Cohen of the Gazette explains that the stock will now be divided among personnel of the Softdown, Inc. towel and textile business (plus Helmar), where Archie, mistaken for a cop, finds them in conference with stylist Daphne O’Neil. President Jay Luther Brucker; Viola Duday, the former assistant to Nathan Eads; VP/sales manager Bernard Quest; and secretary/treasurer Oliver Pitkin all benefit from the murder, and while Daphne was hired in the decade since Nate’s death, Vi says Pris planned to oust her. As Archie grills them on their alibis, Lt. Rowcliff arrests him for impersonating a cop and takes him downtown, where Skinner has apparently become Commisioner, and replaced as D.A. by Ed Bowen.

   Himself hauled in by the despised Rowcliff as a material witness, Wolfe says he now has a client — Archie — because of his “humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable [quest], and your callous and churlish treatment of him…”

   Over dinner, Lon says the remaining 10% is owned by Sarah Jaffee, a Korean War widow and friend of Pris whose father had been a Softdown associate; male journalists favor Ollie as a suspect, and females Vi, with at least half certain that Daphne is involved. Sarah tells Archie she declined to help Pris elect a female board of directors, including them and Margaret with Vi as president, and she also refuses to seek an injunction restraining the fivesome from assuming ownership.

   Archie has no better luck with the bereaved Andreas Fomos, but then Attorney Albert M. Irby arrives, representing Hagh and seeking affidavits that Pris had acknowledged signing the document, which Helmar contests.

   Offered 5% of any settlement, Wolfe refuses until he meets Eric, en route from Caracas, which he suggests take place at “a meeting of those concerned.” Grateful to Archie for helping her get past her husband’s death, Sarah does a 180, so Nathaniel Parker takes a $1 retainer until a court is satisfied that the stock was not acquired via murder; this compels an outraged Helmar to convene the suspects at Wolfe’s office, where it is stipulated in advance that Hagh and Irby should be seen, but not heard.

   Deciding that Pris must have owed Margaret something big, which he wants, Andy also reconsiders and joins the party; there, Vi identifies Miss Drescher, a superintendent at the factory, as the last proposed director, and Bernie claims that he and Sarah’s father, Arthur Gilliam, were responsible for Softdown’s success.

   They disperse without resolution, but an alarm bell rings in Archie’s head when Sarah calls after dancing at the Flamingo Club with Parker to report her keys missing, and he hastens over, arriving too late. Even more guilt-ridden than before, he puts himself at Cramer’s disposal, since the keys were stolen at the meeting, sitting in on interrogations and even buying Purley fried clams at Louie’s.

   On a brownstone pit stop in between visits to Leonard Street, Archie is surprised to learn that Wolfe has hired Saul, and finally, “flumped,” Skinner suggests replaying the meeting to spot the key-thief and/or deduce a motive, with Saul standing in for Sarah.

   Wolfe flips the script, noting that Margaret was not killed only to obtain the keys to Pris’s apartment, and Sarah, having seen his photo, knew “Hagh” was an impostor and had somehow made him aware of it in the office. In South America, Saul identified him as Siegfried Muecke; having impersonated Hagh — killed in a snow slide — and unaware of the provisions of the will regarding the stock, Muecke strangled each of them because they could expose him…

   A two-part first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, the only entry directed by Neill Fearnley, “Prisoner’s Base” (5/13 & 20/01) was adapted by Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin, who shared an Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination for Part 2, and were second only to Sharon Elizabeth Doyle as scenarists.

   It marked Hrant Alianak’s sole appearance as Parker (embodied twice by fellow repertory player George Plimpton in Season 2), and Bill MacDonald’s first in his recurring role of Rowcliff. The closing credits list alternate spellings for several character names (Jaffe, Eades, O’Neill), and Aron Tager, previously seen as Commissioner Bernard Fromm, is amusingly credited as “Commissioner Skinn.”

   The show customarily capitalizes on the comedic potential as Archie (Timothy Hutton), stung by sarcasm regarding a low bank account, retaliates by tearing up his salary check, annoying Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) by disrupting the accounting but sweetening the offer made by Pris (Shauna Black).

   Ron Rifkin, later of “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01), guests as Helmar, with the usual suspects — literally — as the Softdown contingent: Bernie (James Tolkan), Vi (Nicky Guadagni), Daphne (Dina Barrington), Ollie (Gary Reineke), and Brucker (David Schurmann). Although appreciative that Archie was so forthcoming about Pris’s visit, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) can’t resist gloating over their lack of a client.

   This is surpassed by Rowcliff’s glee when arresting Archie, whose insistence that he had only identified himself as “Goodwin. Detective,” and flashed his license, “which no one took the trouble to examine,” triggers his foe’s tell-tale stutter.

   The colloquy with Bowen (Robert Bockstael) — whose door bears the first initial “T.” —  is delicious as Wolfe names his client, excoriates the squirming Rowcliff, and enumerates his hatred of leaving home, being touched, or riding in any kind of vehicle. The dismay of Fritz (Colin Fox), told he must unexpectedly stretch dinner to include Lon (Saul Rubinek), and the badinage over who is in whose debt, as they haggle over the terms of the quid pro quo, are equally droll.

   A self-described “nut,” Sarah (Kari Matchett) never put away her late husband’s hat and coat when he went to war, and couldn’t bring herself to do so once he was reported dead, also keeping a place set for him at the table, so Archie occupies it, and touchingly agrees to take his things to the Salvation Army. Fomos is eliminated, but Part 2 brings onstage Irby (Wayne Best), noting that Eric (Steve Cumyn) rejected a $100,000 settlement, and Parker, with Wolfe listening in as Helmar calls him a “murderer” for sending Pris to her doom. Fearnley generates suspense in Sarah’s darkened apartment, where Archie finds she has lost the titular game, with the phone one base and the elevator outside the other.

   A montage depicts Archie’s efforts as — per Stout — “an informal adjunct of the NYPD,” initially arrested again after he is seen forcing the night man (Jody Racicot) to admit him at gunpoint. At Skinner’s behest, the suspects are gathered for the playback, pre-empted by Wolfe’s “remarks” fingering Muecke, with Saul (Conrad Dunn) confirming that while signing the paper had been Pris’s idea, Hagh himself “was too proud a man to sponge off a woman…”

   Goldberg and Rabkin amend Stout’s ending as Archie’s punch forestalls an attack by Muecke on Wolfe, rather than by Andy on Muecke; they close with him poised to tear up his payment for Wolfe’s services, not Wolfe doing so himself, as in the novel.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: The Golden Spiders

Edition cited: Prisoner’s Base: Bantam (1963)

    The final chapter, omitted from most Bantam editions, is thoughtfully provided by the Wolfe Pack, “the official Nero Wolfe literary society,” here.

Online sources:

   As usual, the three novellas in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe collection Triple Jeopardy (1952) had all first appeared in The American Magazine: “Home to Roost” (as “Nero Wolfe and the Communist Killer,” January 1952), “The Cop-Killer” (as “The Cop Killer,” February 1951), and “The Squirt and the Monkey” (as “See No Evil,” August 1951).

   In “Home to Roost,” Wolfe investigates the murder of Arthur Rackell, whose aunt, Pauline, states that he “was acting for the FBI when he joined the Communist party,” which Archie’s former G2 colleague Agent Wengert neither confirms nor denies. He immediately alerts Cramer, and Purley tells Archie, “this one has got stingers. Lay off”…so Wolfe takes on the case.

   Pauline is revealed as a secret Communist herself, who believed Arthur’s lie — intended to satisfy her façade of criticism for his leftist behavior — and killed him as an imminent threat. Wolfe calls Communists “enemies of this country,” yet adds here, “I deplore the current tendency to accuse people of pro-communism irresponsibly and unjustly…”

   As Stout’s biographer, John J. McAleer, noted, “By this time McCarthyism had brewed such tensions that even [critic and editor] Anthony Boucher said aloud he wished Wolfe would find another adversary. Boucher’s protest confirmed Rex’s belief that McCarthy helped Communism by making anti-Communism seem reactionary” (as quoted on Wikipedia).

   â€œThe Squirt and the Monkey” is set in the comic-strip milieu with the syndicated Dazzle Dan, created by Harry Koven and drawn by Pete Jordan and Byram Hildebrand. All are suspects — along with Harry’s wife, Marcelle, and agent/manager, Patricia Lowell — when his friend Adrian Getz (aka the Squirt) is killed; the only witness is Adrian’s pet monkey, Rookaloo, found in his cage clutching the murder weapon… Archie’s stolen pistol! Stout, with characteristic insouciance, conflates the names of Henry H. Barber and his successor as Wolfe’s lawyer, Nathaniel Parker, into Henry George Parker, who is asked to bring an action against Koven for $1 million after his lies lead Cramer to suspend Wolfe’s license.

   Carl and Tina Vardas, from Joel Fickler’s Goldenrod Barber Shop, entered this country illegally after escaping a Russian concentration camp, and have since feared detection; it seems to be at hand as plainclothes Det. Jacob Wallen questions the staff about the night before.

   They make a beeline for advice from favored customer Archie (who says he was born in Chillicothe, Ohio), but when he makes a recon, Purley Stebbins tells him Wallen was stabbed there with scissors, so one of them is “The Cop-Killer.” What led him to the shop from a stolen car that killed two women in a hit and run is not known, and all he had with him was that day’s early News, while the fugitives swear they never learned to drive.

   Suspects include barbers Ed Graboff (Archie’s), Jimmie Kirk (Wolfe’s), Philip Toracco, and Tom Yerkes, manicurist Janet Stahl, and Fickler; Archie and Wolfe tell, respectively, Purley and — when his curiosity compels him to stop by — Cramer that the Vardases are in their front room, knowing the truth will be dismissed as a joke.

   After learning that Janet has been hurt, Archie is summoned back, locking them in for their own safety, in spite of Carl’s impulsive attack in an effort to escape. Knocked out under the noses of the police, Janet will talk only to Archie, claiming improbably that Purley struck her, but he thinks she knows something, if unaware of its significance, and the killer sought to silence her.

   Wolfe arrives, ostensibly for a haircut, proposing to Cramer that “we see if we can settle this business” as he sits in the chair with the suspects assembled; he posits that whatever Wallen found in the car was folded in the paper, and is still there somewhere. As it turns out, Wolfe will need a new barber because the incriminating object, a two-week-old Time magazine hidden in plain sight after the murder, bears the shop’s subscription address. In Jimmie’s pocket when the chronic car-thief committed his crime while drunk, it was left behind unnoticed, which sent Waller to the shop, and with the Vardases cleared, Archie suggests calling in a favor from General Carpenter to work out their immigration status.

   A second-season episode of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Cop Killer” (8/11/02) was the first of two directed by John R. Pepper, and the only entry adapted by Jennifer Salt. The daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt, an Oscar-winner for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Coming Home (1978), she had been an actress in the former and in Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972), and as Eunice Tate on Soap. After an opening montage of frantic activity at the shop, cleverly scored with the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville, 1816), we see Wallen (Doug Lennox) arrive, then segue to Tina (Nicky Guadagni) and Carl (Hrant Alianak) petitioning Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   With Fritz (Colin Fox) away from the house, Archie instructs Tina to bring beer — but not open it — if Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) should buzz while he is at the shop, assuring Purley (R.D. Reid) that he is only there for a shave. John Berrie (who succeeded Derek Rogers as cinematographer that season) often tilts his camera off-kilter, which along with quick cuts and high-angle shots produces a vertiginous effect, while the flashbacks are stylized with desaturated colors. In the chair, Archie reflects on Philip (Robbie Rox), who’d lost two sons in the war; Fickler (Ken Kramer), once attacked by his ex-wife; Jimmie (Boyd Banks), whom he accuses of stealing supplies; and race-track debtor Ed (James Tolkan).

   The over-dramatic Janet (Kari Matchett) seeks a show-business career, and Archie wisely writes off her initial story of stabbing Wallen after an attempted rape as, well, flummery. He returns as the Vardases dine with Wolfe, who “must have felt the distant rumblings of human sympathy” due to crimes by “Stalin’s puppets in Yugoslavia,” interpolated by Salt from The Black Mountain (1954). Bill Smitrovich beautifully plays Cramer’s indecision as he is challenged by Wolfe to look in the kitchen, used “to keep the murderers in,” but decides not to risk looking silly; Hitler and Stalin “told barefaced lies to have it taken for the truth, and we tell barefaced truth to have them take it for a lie,” Archie assures them.

   Janet, we learn in the climax, had seen Jimmie with a hot towel and the magazine, which she joked that he had been steaming when he tossed it on the table, prompting his earlier assault on her and a frantic dive in the novella that is foiled by Cramer, Purley, et alia. In the episode, Wolfe orders Jimmie to stop cutting his hair and give him a shave, seemingly playing cat and mouse and goading Jimmie into an abortive attempt to cut his throat. Salt has Archie make his suggestion not privately but at a dinner with the overjoyed Vardases, where we hear Wolfe’s side of the conversation as he commends “two exemplary people, who would make very significant additions to the citizenry of this country” to Carpenter.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Prisoner’s Base

Edition cited: Triple Jeopardy: Bantam (1957)

Online source:

BARNABY JONES “To Catch a Dead Man.” CBS. 04 February 1973. (Season One, Episode Two.) Buddy Ebsen , Lee Meriwether. Guest cast: Janice Rule, Darleen Carr, Victoria Shaw, William Shatner. A Quinn Martin Production. Directed by William Hale. Currently streaming on Amazon and (for free), on YouTube. [See below.]

   It’s almost a given that everyone of a certain age reading this will know the basic premise of this vintage almost geriatric PI series from the mid-1970s. (Buddy Ebsen was 65 when the show started, and it lasted for most of eight years.) In the first episode (this is the second) Barnaby Jones care out of retirement as a PI to find the man who murdered his son Hal. Teaming up with him is another private eye, a man by the name of Frank Cannon, also of some TV fame, who was a friend of his son.

   By the end of the episode Barnaby has decided to go back into the PI business again, assisted by his son’s widow, Betty (Lee Meriwether), as his devoted secretary.

   In “To Catch a Dead Man” Barnaby is hired by a young girl whose boy friend has disappeared. I don’t consider it giving away anything to tell you that the boy friend is dead, killed in a boat explosion caused by a millionaire (William Shatner) who would like the world to believe the man in the boat was him. In the meantime, he has hunkered down in a fishing resort area with his current girl friend.

   What follows is, well, we the viewers following along with Barnaby as he painstakingly puts the clues together to solve the case, with a continual twinkle in his eye and a knowing grin. I only watched the show on and off over the years when it was on, but until someone can tell me otherwise, I assume that this was the pattern for all of Barnaby’s investigations from this point on.

   As enjoyable as this episode is, and in all honesty, based only on this episode, it seems unlikely that Buddy Ebsen’s folksy charm as an actor would be able to carry the series for as long as it did, but on the other hand, it certainly seems to have done.

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Murder by the Book (1951) marks Archie’s first reference that I’ve noted — insert fallibility disclaimer—to his weighing a “seventh of a ton” (285.7 pounds). I’ll continue to monitor the situation, but I think this became the standard after, e.g., “two hundred and sixty-some pounds” (“Help Wanted, Male,” 1945), a quarter of a ton (i.e., 500 pounds, perhaps figurative; “Instead of Evidence,” 1946), close to 340 (Too Many Women, 1947), and an even 300 (“Door to Death,” 1949). With its metafictional publishing theme, it is set in motion when Wolfe is hired by the father of Joan Wellman, an editor at Scholl and Hanna who died in an apparent hit and run in Van Cortlandt Park.

   Peoria grocer John R. Wellman believes otherwise, due to her appointment that day with Baird Archer to discuss a novel she’d rejected; no trace is found, but Wolfe recalls seeing the name on a list of tentative aliases among the effects of Leonard Dykes, whose murder led Cramer to consult him six weeks earlier. He had been a law clerk at Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin and Briggs, formerly O’Malley, Corrigan and Phelps until O’Malley’s disbarment. Conjecturing that Joan was killed because she’d read the manuscript, Wolfe has the ’teers canvass typing services and sends Archie to Scholl and Hanna, where he merely confirms that she’d read, rejected, and returned Put Not Your Trust to Archer via General Delivery.

   Joining the hunt, Archie arrives at the office of typist Rachel Abrams just after her plunge from the window, pocketing the notebook recording Archer’s payment on his way out the door; reaching Rachel’s mother before the news, he gets the names of her friends William Butterfield, Hulda Greenberg, and Cynthia Free, on whom he sics the ’teers. Shifting his focus, Wolfe has Archie cultivate the law firm’s female staff of 16, with ten accepting his invitation to dinner when he sends them orchids. Archie produces Mr. Wellman and Mrs. Abrams to stir sentiment, eliciting steno Helen Troy’s controversial assertion that Conroy O’Malley killed Dykes for getting him disbarred because he bribed the foreman of a jury.

   She notes that others believe her uncle, new partner Frederick Briggs, ratted Con out, and killed Dykes to prevent his revealing that fact; Eleanor Gruber, secretary to Con and now Louis Kustin, posits that his death was unrelated to the others, and as the party breaks up, Archie takes Sue Dondero, Emmett Phelps’s secretary, dancing. Senior partner James A. Corrigan brings his current and former colleagues to Wolfe’s office, where they submit to fruitless questioning, and he requests samples of Dykes’s writing. On a resignation letter, offered due to gossip (but declined), is a scribbled notation directing them to Psalm 146, verse 3: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

   Switchboard operator Blanche Duke identifies the handwriting (via a ruse by Archie) as Corrigan’s, and says that writing a book was one way she’d suggested the smitten Dykes might attract Sue’s attention. Regarding the notation as a trick, Wolfe sends Archie out to California to have Dykes’s sister and heir, Peggy Potter, search his letters to confirm that he wrote the novel, and solicit the firm’s advice about having literary agent “Walter Finch” sell the film rights on her behalf, hoping to panic the killer. Archie hires Nathan Harris from Ferdinand Dolman’s Southwest Agency to pose as Finch, and another man to hide within earshot when Peggy meets with Corrigan, who immediately flies out to L.A.

   Archie himself hides in Finch’s closet when she sends Corrigan to the South Seas Hotel, where he tries to insist on a look at the (nonexistent) manuscript, saying he has reason to believe it is libelous, and leaves after an altercation. Stymied again chez Potter by Finch, then left on guard, Corrigan infiltrates his room, only to find Archie, who puts Southwest man Phil Buratti on his tail; when he calls from the airport, Archie asks Phil to get him a seat on Corrigan’s flight back east. The fivesome revisits Wolfe, demanding to know the contents of the manuscript or offering to buy it, but Wolfe merely says he is not yet ready to act, while Kustin correctly thinks that “it’s a ten-cent bluff,” and he has no knowledge.

   That night they get a call, ostensibly from Corrigan, who says he has sent Wolfe a letter, followed by an apparent gunshot; after they alert the police, Archie gets there in time to witness the discovery of his body, consistent with suicide. The unsigned letter confesses to blowing the whistle anonymously on Con without identifying the information’s source, and to stumbling on the “Modern Novel of a Lawyer’s Frailty,” which made it clear that Dykes knew he had done so. Claiming to have destroyed all copies of the roman à clef, he admits killing Dykes after a blackmail attempt and the others to cover his tracks, but while the details are obviously accurate, Wolfe believes that the killer framed Corrigan.

   The D.A. is satisfied that it was suicide, yet after an undisclosed report from Saul, Wolfe has Cramer and Purley Stebbins assemble the ten women and four surviving partners for a “risky but resolute effort to expose a murderer,” to which Archie invites Wellman. Wolfe deduced the truth because the “confession” asserted that Corrigan knew the manuscript’s contents, when his behavior in L.A. clearly indicated that he did not. He had informed on O’Malley, who targeted him for murder to avenge that fact and “killed three people so he could safely kill a fourth,” and made the notation in Corrigan’s handwriting — assumed by Cramer et alia to have been a trick by Wolfe or Archie — as the first step in framing him.

   An episode of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series starring William Conrad, “Murder by the Book” (3/13/81) was directed by Bob Kelljan, best known for Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and its 1971 sequel, and written by David Karp, an Emmy-winner for a two-part 1964 episode of The Defenders, using his “Wallace Ware” byline. Jean Wellman (Delta Burke) refuses to believe that her sister Claire — a reader for Wainwright Press — committed suicide with alcohol and sleeping pills, which she did not use, and the hunt is on for the elusive Blake Ritchie. Karp also renames the lawyers Phillip Corrigan (David Hedison), Robert Phelps (Edmund Gilbert), George Briggs (Walter Brooke), and Ryan O’Malley (John Randolph).

   The episode opens as Cramer (Allan Miller) reports that an unknown man killed in a hit-and-run a block from the brownstone bore a slip of paper with Wolfe’s name and address and the mysterious list, which includes “Ritchie”; by the time this ties him in to Claire, he has been identified as Leonard Dart, a member of the firm. When Jean takes Archie (Lee Horsley) to her apartment to retrieve a contact number that may have been Ritchie’s, his instincts save her from a booby-trapped door with minor injury, so Saul (George Wyner) guards her at the hospital. Wolfe suspects that she was targeted because, per Archie, “she knows something she doesn’t know she knows,” a sentiment worthy of Donald Rumsfeld.

   The editor who turned down the first novel supplies the title, and Jean recalls being told it was about the members of a law firm. At O’Malley, Phelps, Corrigan and Briggs, Archie tells Dart’s secretary, Elizabeth Marsh (Jennifer Leak), that he was murdered, which Miss Johnson (Elizabeth Halliday) quickly reports to Briggs — who gives him the bum’s rush — and Phelps, yet retiree O’Malley wants to protect the reputation of the firm he made, and Wolfe finally gets a well-heeled client. For safety, Jean is moved to the brownstone, and a visit by Corrigan leads Wolfe to invite the three active partners to dinner, before which Liz, whose information suggested that Ritchie and Dart were the same man, is strangled.

   Wolfe learns of a prior scandal, the embezzlement of $2 million — unproven and repaid — from an estate the firm represented, which he theorizes may have been the subject of Put Not Your Trust. Liz was found in the computer room, suggesting that Dart kept the book there; it is unlocked with the code “146 P 3,” and the list of names were for characters, to protect him from libel. Wolfe had suspected since being hired by him that the embezzler and killer was O’Malley, who asks before Cramer takes him away to make a summation: his theft, which they concealed, gave his partners “the shock of righteous men, meaning those who haven’t been caught yet with their hands in the till…[and so] they retired me.”

   Kelljan was blessed with a strong guest cast, including Burke, known for the CBS sitcom Designing Women, and Randolph, one of the former blacklistees — along with Will Geer, Jeff Corey, and Nedrick Young — cast by John Frankenheimer in Seconds (1966). David Hedison, who starred in The Fly (1958) and Irwin Allen’s series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, became the first actor to play James Bond’s CIA buddy, Felix Leiter, in multiple movies, Live and Let Die (1973) and Licence to Kill (1989). Giving ammunition to those who disapprove of Conrad’s casting, the episode ends with the jaw-dropping sight of the grinning Wolfe returning Archie’s thumbs-up, which Stout fortunately did not live to see.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “The Cop-Killer”

Edition cited:

      Murder by the Book: Bantam (1954)

Online source:

THE OUTSIDER “Periwinkle Blue.” NBC, 02 April 1969 (Season One, Episode 24). Darren McGavin (PI David Ross). Guest cast: Lois Nettleton, Ellen Corby, Douglas Dick, Bill Quinn, Richard Benedict. Series created by Roy Huggins (as John Thomas James). Teleplay by Edward J. Lakso, based on a story by Gene Levitt. Directed by Richard Benedict. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   For beginners, if you’ve never read Michael Shonk’s overview of the series, or you haven’t in a while, let me steer you there first before you read on back here.

   This, however, is an excerpt from his first two paragraphs:

   The shooting death of Bobby Kennedy is what had happened between the showing of the pilot episode, which Michael reviewed here, and the TV networks were under fire for showing too much violence in their offerings, and The Outsider, once picked up as a series, took the brunt of it.

   Here’s Michael’s opening statement on the pilot film:

   
   In reviewing the series, Michael went into detail about the episodes that were available to him at the time, but “Periwinkle Blue.” was not one of them. Filling in the gap, Mike Doran left a comment talking about it as an episode he still remembered, but no more than that.

   At the beginning of this episode Ross turns down a client who thinks his wife is trying to kill him, thinking that the man was exaggerating several incidents that had recently occurred. Later on, discovering from a newspaper that the man had been killed in a hit-and-run accident, he decides to take the death as a sign that perhaps he was wrong.

   Attending the man’s funeral, he meets the wife (the wholly delightful Lois Nettleton), as obvious a suspect in a case of murder as there could ever be, but yet, over the next few weeks, he is not quite sure. He is attracted to her and her flirty but quietly quirky ways, but there is no way he can dispel the suspicions he has of her. He is puzzled and perplexed, in a role that only a completely bewildered Darren McGavin could play.

   This is, as you can plainly see, not your usual TV PI drama, and to tell you the truth, I think this episode, at least, is all the better for it. If I’ve intrigued you at all, do watch this one.
   

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe collection Curtains for Three (1951) contains the now-standard three novellas published in The American Magazine: “The Gun with Wings” (December 1949), “Bullet for One” (July 1948), and “Disguise for Murder” (as “The Twisted Scarf,” September 1950).

   â€œThe Gun with Wings” was not near the body of opera singer Alberto Mion — or so say his wife, Peggy, and would-be successor, Fred Weppler, who didn’t tell the police it only appeared later beside the supposed suicide. They want Wolfe to dispel the shadow of murder over their intended union; Archie has “occasionally let Lily Rowan share her pair of opera seats with me” so he recognizes a suspect, baritone Gifford James.

   Continuing the ballistics theme, the “Bullet for One” knocks industrial designer Sigmund Keyes out of his saddle in Central Park; five of the suspects collectively hire Wolfe, some of them hoping he’ll nail the sixth, yet before long, all but one of the sextet is arrested for one reason or another.

   In “Disguise for Murder,” the brownstone hosts “no such throng as that within [Archie’s] memory”: at the suggestion of Bill McNab, garden editor of the Gazette, Wolfe has invited the Manhattan Flower Club to see his orchids. Fritz and Saul are manning the door while Archie — who regrets having agreed to help mingle — is taking a breather in the office, where he is joined by a panicked young woman, Cynthia Brown.

   Con artists Cynthia and her “brother,” Col. Percy Brown, were brought by Mimi Orwin, their prospective mark, a wealthy widow hooked in Florida and accompanied by her son, Eugene. Cynthia was terrified when upstairs she recognized, and was recognized by, the unidentified man she’d seen entering Doris Hatten’s apartment, whom she believed was “keeping” her friend there — and strangled her with her own scarf immediately afterward, a crime that has baffled Cramer for five months.

   Promising to bring Wolfe down to hear her out, Archie returns to the plant rooms to keep a special eye on the men, including one who grabs a flower pot in an oddly menacing way, revealed as an actor, Malcolm Vedder.

   The crowd has thinned to a trickle when the wife of Homer N. Carlisle, executive VP of the North American Foods Co., peeks into the office for a look at Wolfe’s famous three-foot-wide globe and finds Cynthia, strangled with, per Doc Vollmer, something like…a scarf.

   Cramer grills the remaining visitors, held there by Fritz and Saul, but both he and Wolfe decline psychiatrist Nicholson Morley’s offer to question all men among the 219 guests, dutifully recorded by Saul, and try to identify the killer. In a spiteful, ill-advised move, Cramer insists on sealing the office as a crime scene; otherwise “Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as [he] saw it himself,” saving a lot of trouble.

   Gleaned from Archie’s report but overlooked by him and Cramer, that fact leads Wolfe to a dangerous test of his theory: he sends a blackmail note to one suspect, who calls with an unfamiliar voice to make an appointment with Archie via an elaborate runaround and two cut-outs. Tied to a chair by those he dubs W-J (wrestler-jockey, for his mismatched torso and legs) and Skinny, he is at the mercy of the killer, at first unrecognizable.

   But bribery turns the flunkies, and “he” is revealed as the cross-dressing wife of Doris’s sugar daddy, Carlisle; in the plant rooms, the men had all doffed their hats, yet Cynthia recognized the killer specifically because of the hat, assuming it to be a man, as she had at the apartment.

   A first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) was one of four collaborations between director John L’Ecuyer and writer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. As with the following consecutive pair, “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), this and “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (6/3/01), while based on widely spaced novellas, were linked by Doyle with original material for international broadcast and DVD as the respective faux telefilms Wolfe Goes Out and Wolfe Stays In. Here, her connective tissue is the often-invoked Thursday-night poker game played by Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), Saul (Conrad Dunn), and Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   When Archie relates a postscript to “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe,” Fritz (Colin Fox) asks them to quit early to prepare for the onslaught, during which Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and Archie struggle to keep smiling. The body of Doris (Tramara Burford) is seen briefly in flashback, and after Archie encounters Percy (Nicholas Campbell), Mimi (Nancy Beatty), Eugene (Phillip [sic] Craig), and Vedder (Beau Starr), that of Cynthia (Kathryn Zenna) is found by Mrs. Carlisle (Debra Monk). Repertory player Ken Kramer makes a second and final appearance as Vollmer — later played by Joe Flaherty in “The Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/02) — summoned as Homer (Aron Tager) blusters at the indignity of being detained.

   As usual, the regulars are superb, e.g, Fritz bringing down Percy as he attempts to leave; Wolfe bellowing, “The police shall receive no sandwiches!”; Saul coolly standing by his legendary memory; Cramer’s (Bill Smitrovich) glee as he has Lt. Rowcliff (an uncredited Bill MacDonald) seal Wolfe’s office.

   The interrogations are intercut into a montage à la “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01). A burgundy jacket and long hair visualize the odd persona of Morley (Richard Waugh), while the need for viewers to see and hear what had been simply described on the page causes the phone call to telegraph the killer’s gender a little more clearly before Skinny (Boyd Banks) and W.J. (James Tolkan) confront Archie.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Murder by the Book

Edition cited —

      Curtains for Three: Bantam (1970)

Online source —

PETER GUNN “The Kill.” NBC, 22 September 1958 (Season One, Episode One). Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Lola Albright (Edie Hart), Hope Emerson (Mother), Herschel Bernardi (Lieutenant Jacoby). Guest Cast: Gavin MacLeod, Jack Weston. Music by Henry Mancini. Written and directed by Blake Edwards.

   As opposed to my recent encounter with the first episode of Surfside 6, this is, wow, the way to start off a brand new private eye TV series. Introduce the characters: a tough but suave PI; his girl friend, singer in the night club where he spends a lot of his time; the tough lady owner of said night club; and the cop who’s actually a good friend of the aforementioned PI.

   Then explain who they are naturally, and show the relationships between them by seeing them in their usual haunts and as they interact with each other in the every day (or night) course of business.

   And have a story that’s wrapped up in 30 minutes (although certainly rushed a little at the end), and still have time for the PI and the girl take a break outside the club between sets talking about life, love and maybe, the future. All in the realm of totally cool, but when Mother is seriously injured in an explosion in the club, Mr. Peter Gunn (the PI) gets to show how tough he is too, and the thugs responsible for the explosion will back me up on that statement, you can count on that.

   Although several others of the same overall genre came before it, Peter Gunn the TV show was a breath of fresh air in the business, what with the noirish atmosphere throughout the show, and the music – by Henry Mancini – that took the genre to new heights. This is a TV show that all private eye aficionados can’t afford not to know about, nor miss. (Unfortunately if you don’t have it on DVD (all three seasons, two on NBC, one on ABC), right now the bad news is that you’ll have settle for watching it on FreeVee, with dreadfully awful commercials.)

   Just as Holmes had his Moriarty, and the 87th Precinct had its Deaf Man, so Nero Wolfe had… Arnold Zeck, who figured in three consecutive Rex Stout novels: And Be a Villain (1948), The Second Confession (1949), and In the Best Families (1950). Beginning with Full House (1955), Viking Press — his publisher for the last three decades of his life, and my future employer — assembled three books apiece into eight omnibus editions, five of which contained two novels and one of his collections (themselves generally comprising three novellas, occasionally two or four). All but one had poker-themed titles, the books seemingly selected at random, but the last bore the delicious moniker Triple Zeck (1974).

   A little history: my high-school geometry teacher, whom I will forbear to name, did not excel at her job, but I owe her an incalculable debt, for it was she who — knowing I loved mysteries — lent me her Triple Zeck (I now have my own copy). So entranced was I with Wolfe and Archie that I proceeded to devour all 46 books, plus the spin-off Red Threads (1939), that year. Mind you, in 1981, I was also amidst other series: Lord Peter Wimsey (7 books), Tarzan (4), Barsoom (1), George Smiley (4), Horatio Hornblower (1), Mike Hammer (the only one not to stick; 1), and Len Deighton’s anonymous spy (1); hard to believe that at 18, I had so much time for reading …  while falling in love with my wife!

   Backtracking a bit, the trilogy follows Too Many Women (1947), in which a disharmonic convergence of two virtually unthinkable events occurs the night the second victim, Kerr Naylor, is killed. First, Naylor loses Saul when he abruptly ducks into a taxi, and second, after Naylor takes it to Wolfe’s brownstone and, without leaving a name, asks for Archie, who is out for the evening, Fritz forgets to tell Archie upon his return.

   â€œThat Saul Panzer is the best tailer in New York. I don’t for a minute believe he lost Naylor! He don’t lose ’em! Even if he did, when Naylor came here, wouldn’t you have had him tailed when he left, since you were interested in him?,” bellows the understandably incredulous Cramer.

   The curtain goes up on And Be a Villain (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V) as Wolfe — goaded into action by IRS payments — suggests that radio star Madeline Fraser hire him to investigate the poisoning of horse-race tipster Cyril Orchard on her show, in a sponsor’s product, yet.

   Lina would pay only expenses, plus a deductible $20,000 if he nails the killer, to stop the bad publicity, although Tully Strong, secretary of the Sponsors’ Council, says the makers of Hi-Spot, the doctored beverage, might wish to do the hiring. It is decided that said fee will be split unequally among Hi-Spot; the network, the Federal Broadcasting Co. (FBC); Fraser; and other sponsors White Birch Soap and Sweeties: cue assembling the suspects.

   Refusing to work for Sweeties, Wolfe reassigns their 2% to the FBC and hosts Lina; her “stooge and feeder,” Bill Meadows, and manager, Deborah Koppel; script writer Elinor Vance; Nathan Traub, ad exec for the agency handling three sponsors; and Strong. Gate-crashing are Hi-Spot’s president and p.r. man, respectively Walter B. Anderson and Fred Owen, and FBC veep Beech.

   Absent are Columbia mathematician F.O. Savarese, the ill-fated broadcast’s surviving guest, otherwise engaged, and Nancylee Shepherd, the “nosy little chatterbox” and “pain in the neck” who organized the country’s largest Fraser Girls’ Club, kept at arm’s length as much as possible, while being tolerated by Lina to a degree.

   All deny remembering who’d uncapped the bottles, one containing cyanide — with which Fraser’s husband, Debby’s brother, allegedly killed himself six years earlier — and placed it in front of Orchard; it is unclear if he was a deliberate target. With Nan and her mother shipped off to the Ambassador in Atlantic City, impervious to Saul’s charms, Wolfe grills Savarese, an expert on probability who knew Orchard, and asked to join him on the show, to no end. Archie’s faked telegram from Al Shepherd lures his family to the brownstone, where Wolfe catches Nan lying, forcing her to admit that nearly a year ago, clear glasses were switched to opaque blue … and Lina’s bottles were always marked with Scotch tape.

   The inference is clear: Lina hasn’t been drinking Hi-Top, which gave her indigestion, a ruinous fact if revealed, and Bill says that Traub — naturally unaware of the substitution — unwittingly gave Orchard Lina’s poisoned coffee. Wolfe tells Cramer enough to have his army of men investigate who might have it in for Lina, and if his fact is deemed essential to catching the killer, he will collect that fee.

   Even this seems fruitless until Beula Poole is shot dead in her office; she and Orchard published, for the unheard-of weekly price of $10, sheets giving, respectively, “inside advance information on political and economic affairs” and race-track tips, and Cramer reveals that both their offices were cleaned out.

   Then, it happens: answering Wolfe’s ad seeking subscribers to What to Expect or Track Almanac is a voice “hard, slow, precise, and cold as last week’s corpse”; he has heard it before, with advice on a job for General Carpenter, and to advise him to limit his “efforts in behalf of a Mrs. Tremont,” which he did, but only “because no extension of them was required to finish the job I was hired for.”

   Zeck, who has a place in Westchester, is not pleased to learn that Wolfe knows his name — ascertained by Del Bascom’s agency with no word to Archie, whom he did not want to involve — and warns him to drop the matter. Cautioning Archie to forget his name and stay away from him, Wolfe drops a bombshell.

   â€œI’ll tell you this. If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work — and sleep and eat if there is time for it — and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I’ll never have to.”

   Then it’s back to the matter at hand, and he learns that said sheets were an ingenious blackmail racket. A disobedient Archie calls Lon Cohen at the Gazette — introduced in The Silent Speaker (1946) — to ask about Zeck, whom Lon has heard “owns twenty Assemblymen and six district leaders … if you print something about him that he resents your body is washed ashore at Montauk Point…”

   Comparing notes with Cramer, Wolfe posits that the éminence grise behind the sheets has “units” nationwide, ensuring success both with modest payments and by rigidly adhering to one-year “subscriptions” sans renewals. He suggests focusing on subscriber Vance — whose namesake is “Eleanor” in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) — and says one of Zeck’s cutouts may know the murderer’s identity.

      He refuses a unilateral attempted firing by Anderson, who is enraged at associations with blackmail after Archie gives Lon the story (naming no names, natch) and withdraws his sponsorship; Wolfe also stirs the pot by faking an “anonymous” letter that implicates Elinor in a suspicious death.

   At least that’s the plan, but as Archie waits for the interested parties to wind up a summit meeting to select the replacement for Hi-Top, Debby eats a sample of Meltettes candy, to disprove Nan’s assertion that “It’s dangerous!,” and promptly drops dead.

   Unfortunately, when Archie refuses to be frisked like the others, Deputy Commissioner O’Hara (invoked yet unseen in Too Many Women) has him hauled downtown, where the forgery is found. He is sprung to forestall the release of an announcement sent to Fraser’s station, WPIT, that Wolfe “has solved the murder cases, all three of them, with no assistance from the police,” and can soon tell the D.A., so Cramer and Stebbins start rounding up suspects…

   The blackmailers cleverly implied knowledge of fabricated dirty laundry but, by the law of averages, inevitably put the bite on someone who really had a deadly secret they would kill to protect. Lina faked Lawrence’s suicide and made herself seem to be the target, not Orchard; Anderson was scared off by Strong, who showed her the accusatory letters and deduced her guilt.

   When Zeck calls to “congratulate you on keeping your investigation within the limits I prescribed,” and Wolfe responds, “I permit prescription of limits only by the requirements of the job. If that job had taken me across your path you would have found me there,” he says, “Then that is either my good fortune — or yours,” and hangs up.

   Act II, The Second Confession, opens as James U. Sperling, chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corp., tries to hire Wolfe to do what Bascom has not: prove there is, and if possible get, evidence that layer Louis Rony is a Communist. He wants to prevent Rony, a “champion of the weak and downtrodden,” from marrying his younger daughter, Gwenn; Wolfe and Archie agree with her that communism is “intellectually contemptible and morally unsound.”

   Wolfe says, “Why not hire me to reach your objective, no matter how — of course within the bounds permitted to civilized man?,” but Del’s reports reveal that Rony was seen at Bischoff’s Pet Shop, “a branch of Zeck’s far-flung shenanigans…”

   â€œAndrew” Goodwin infiltrates to photograph Stony Acres, Sperling’s country home near Chappaqua, for a corporation portfolio and steal shots of Rony, at whom Connie Emerson is making a pass, while Archie fears that war widow Madeline may do so at him, tangling a possible diversionary run at sis Gwenn.

   Also present are James, Jr., economist Webster Kane, and Connie’s husband, Continental-sponsored WPIT newscaster Paul, despised by Wolfe as a veritable fascist. Fiercely protective of Gwenn, Madeline recognizes “Andy” from a news photo and intuits that his object is Rony; offering him a ride back to the city, Archie plots for him to be knocked out in an ambush, simulated by Ruth Brady and Saul.

   Rony carries an American Communist Party membership card for a “William Reynolds,” which Archie photographs, and eight keys, of which he takes impressions, giving Saul his cash to maintain the fiction. On his return, Wolfe is reporting a warning from Zeck to let Rony alone when the plant rooms are blasted with gunfire, leaving Theodore traumatized but unhurt.

   Enlisting Andy Krasicki, Lewis Hewitt, and G.M. Hoag to salvage what they can, Wolfe is driven — literally and figuratively — to Westchester, where he enlightens the Sperlings regarding “X,” leaving Gwenn to decide if she insists on proof regarding Rony, whatever the cost; stalling for time, she makes a rendezvous to tell Rony they’re through.

   The victim of an apparent hit and run, he’s found behind a bush by Archie, and Wolfe has Sperling, who rehires him to solve it, report the death, bringing local law Dykes, Noonan, and Archer — introduced, like Andy, in “Door to Death” (1949).

   Archie deflects Archer’s interested in the faux holdup as best he can, while the antagonistic Noonan is thrilled that Wolfe’s car is found to have killed Rony, which Kane confesses he did by accident while borrowing it to mail some letters in Mount Kisco. Archer is satisfied, but not Wolfe, who refuses to consider Sperling’s $50,000 pay-off (including orchid-damage) final and, back home, receives the same amount in an anonymous package, obviously on behalf of Zeck.

   He calls wishing luck to Wolfe, who asks Doc Vollmer to seek any sign on Rony of being knocked out before he was run over, with inconclusive results. He sends Archie and Saul with duplicate keys to his apartment, fruitlessly searched just when Jimmy and his mother turn up, looking ostensibly for letters from Gwenn, but presumably for a threat Rony held over them.

   Telling the ’teers that any information will be used — or not used — at his sole discretion, he asks Saul and Orrie Cather to learn the hold, and Fred Durkin to probe their servants in an effort to glean who doped a drink meant for Rony yet consumed by Archie, who had done the very same thing, and switched them in the hope of searching his room.

   Connie suspiciously materializes just as Archie locates a stone that — per Weinbach of the Fisher Laboratories, introduced in “Cordially Invited to Meet Death” (1942) — hit a man’s head. Saul learns that Jimmy contributed to the Committee of Progressive Business Men, a “funny front” for former Vice President, 1948 Progressive Party candidate, and alleged Communist “fellow traveler” Henry A. Wallace, his check one of several photostatted by a possible spy.

   Wolfe is visited by Gwenn, who reports hearing an argument between the Emersons that implicated the jealous Paul, and “Mr. Jones,” a mysterious contact within the Communist party whom Archie has never met, and then has Archie call off the boys.

   Deducing that Reynolds is not Rony’s alias but the killer’s, Wolfe ghost-writes articles on the party’s inner workings (leaked by Jones) for Lon, now second in command at the city desk; his anonymous letter fingering Reynolds as their source leads high-ranking Harvey and Stevens — one of whom may be Jones — to sign a document identifying his photo.

   At the climactic confab, Wolfe forces Web to retract his first confession, only to reveal he is Reynolds, his stunned look the titular admission. In what Archie calls “the tail,” Sperling repays Wolfe by pulling Paul off the air, where he’d insulted Wolfe, and a satisfied Zeck sends him $15,000, replacing what he’d paid Jones, all set aside by Wolfe as a war chest.

   Wolfe finally makes good on his vow in Act III, In the Best Families, which begins when wealthy Sarah Rackham visits with cousin Calvin Leeds and hires him to learn the source of second husband Barry’s new income. As cover, Archie is to be called in on a valuable dog’s poisoning at Calvin’s Hillside Kennels, and invited with him to dine at her adjacent Westchester estate, Birchvale.

   That morning, Wolfe is expecting a sausage delivery from Bill Darst that he and Fritz plan to share with Marko Vukcic, but the box instead contains a cylinder of tear gas, a warning from Zeck to lay off Barry, suggesting an answer to Mrs. Rackham’s question; Wolfe hangs up when Zeck offers to replace her $10,000 with cash.

   â€œThis episode will be repeated. [The telephone] will ring, and that confounded voice will presume to dictate to us. If we obey the dictate we will be maintaining this office and our means of livelihood only by his sufferance. If we defy it we shall be constantly in a state of trepidant vigilance, and one or both us us will probably get killed.”

   Wolfe refuses to ignore the third threat, as does Archie, who advises that the household begin the “trepidant vigilance” and heads off to Westchester, casing Eastcrest, Zeck’s mansion. At dinner are Sarah’s widowed daughter-in-law, Annabel Frey; banker, Dana Hammond, her admirer; and secretary, Lina Darrow, as well as her admirer, state assemblyman Oliver A. Pierce.

   That night, Nobby, a Doberman pinscher given to Sarah by Calvin, crawls to Hillside and dies with a steak knife stuck in him; his mother, Hebe, gets the scent, leading Calvin and Archie toward Birchvale, but on the path is Sarah, stabbed with the same knife. Archie is candid with Archer, if omitting Zeck, and Leeds says, “It happens in the best of families” before he races home, where Wolfe has bolted, leaving three notes. Two offer Theodore and Fritz employment with Hewitt (who takes the plants) and Marko, respectively, while one reads, “A.G.: Do not look for me. My very best regards and wishes,” and a Gazette ad announces his retirement, referring only clients having “unfinished matters” to Archie.

   Marko reveals that Wolfe has given him a power of attorney, told him “to offer the house and its contents for sale [with] confidential instructions,” and bidden Archie “to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.” New millionaire Barry contradicts Archie, claiming that Sarah was going to consult Wolfe about possible mishandling by Hammond of her affairs, and disbelieving Archie’s ignorance of Wolfe’s whereabouts, Archer locks him up.

   Before Wolfe’s lawyer, Nathaniel Parker (mentioned, by surname, in The Silent Speaker), springs him, Archie is offered a job in the “organization” by his cellmate, Max Christy, who per Lon sets up “little weekend roundups … Anything men risk money for.”

   Bequests also go to distant relatives, servants, Lina ($200,000), Annabel (Birchvale plus $1 million), and Leeds ($500,000), whose corroboration of Archie is disbelieved as well; like him and everyone else, Cramer thinks Archie knows how to reach Wolfe but, having deduced the truth, he says Wolfe should return Sarah’s fee and Zeck “is out of his reach.”

   Archie decides to open his own office at 1019 Madison Avenue, with Annabel as his first client, who asks him to a gathering of the suspects … none of whom will cooperate. Max invites Archie to meet a man he thinks might be Zeck, but it is bearded Pete Roeder from L.A., who wants Archie to tail Barry and has his driver, Bill, take them up to 1019 to talk.

   There, he is revealed as Wolfe, who’d spent “the most painful month of my life — except one, long ago,” in Texas, and has lost 117 pounds. Like Charles Forbin in D.F. Jones’s Colossus (1966), he knows his only guarantee of privacy is to feign the need for female companionship, so Lily Rowan hosts a five-hour confab in her E. 63rd Street penthouse, necking with “Pete” en route to sell it.

   Having planted a seed of suspicion in Zeck, Pete has Archie hire the ’teers for the job, deliberately letting themselves be spotted, and when confronted by Barry, Archie accepts $6,000 to reveal that they are working — indirectly — for Zeck, whom he conjectures “is getting set to frame you for the murder of your wife.”

   Archie claims to have told Barry he was working for Annabel in his daily reports to Max, who takes him to an audience where Zeck denies seeking Wolfe, but tries to recruit him; with the threat of a murder rap, he wants to force Barry to help them duplicate Roeder’s successful L.A. operation locally.

   Summoned to Archer’s office, Archie encounters Lina (a name Stout, typically casual, used for two characters in the trilogy), jilted by Barry and peddling the tale of a fictitious whistle-blowing call from Wolfe to Sarah that gave him a motive. “About all that [his] ticket to the electric chair needed was my endorsement,” yet however deserved, it would end the anti-Zeck scheme, so he shoots the story full of holes.

   Persuaded that his only out is an accommodation, Barry is taken to Zeck by Archie — now nominally on the payroll — and Pete, with a gun beneath his briefcase’s false bottom, used to cover Barry when they abruptly bind and gag Zeck. He agrees to trade evidence Wolfe has assembled against him for evidence that will convict Barry, who grabs the gun Archie “carelessly” put down to free Zeck, kills him, and in turn is killed by henchmen.

   Back in the brownstone at last, Wolfe earns Sarah’s fee by revealing that Calvin tipped off Zeck, and only he would be trusted by Nobby enough to stab him after killing his new mistress; vacationing with Lily in Norway, Archie learns that Leeds has hanged himself in his cell.

   The only book in the trilogy to be adapted, “In the Best Families” (3/6/81) was directed for the William Conrad series — which, oddly enough, I was not watching while reading the books during its original January 16-June 2 run — by the prolific George McCowan and, like “Before I Die” (1/30/81), scripted by Alfred Hayes.

   I hope you’ll agree that to summarize the first two in detail gave the third an essential context! Guest stars Linden Chiles (Leeds), Burr DeBenning (Max), and Diana Douglas (Sarah) each made multiple appearances with Conrad on Cannon; DeBenning, the ill-fated scientist in The Incredible Melting Man (1977), was also later seen on Matt Houston opposite Lee Horsley (Archie).

   Even before Sarah and Leeds arrive, a messenger (Chuck Tamburro) delivers the fateful package from Arnold Dorso (Robert Loggia), “king of the spiders,” who knows Wolfe is out to change his untouchability. Defying this third warning, Wolf takes the job; Hayes excises several characters, but otherwise follows Stout closely with the Westchester trip, the introduction of Annabel (Juanin Clay) and Barry (Lawrence Casey), and the murder.

   Once again, Archie returns home to find the door wide open as Fritz (George Voskovec) and Theodore (Robert Coote) wait with the notes, yet no sooner has he been summoned to Rusterman’s than Marko (Alex Rodine) takes him to Wolfe, hiding in the meat locker.

   The spectacle of a chipper Wolfe in chef’s garb, singing opera, is a far cry from the folds of skin bespeaking “Pete’s” crash diet, and if he truly sought to disappear, hiding out with his oldest friend seems less than secure. It’s as if Hayes said, “Let’s adapt Gone with the Wind, but leave out all that nonsense about the Civil War”; why, with 46 to choose from, select and then vitiate the book whose distinguishing characteristic is Wolfe’s imposture?

   Archie rejects an offer from Annabel, who believes Barry is guilty, but accepts one from Max (now a Christy/Roeder amalgam), ostensibly bitter over his abandonment by Wolfe, whose dispute with Marko’s chef over seasoning is interpolated as supposed comic relief.

   The rest of the plot, and even the dialogue, remain faithful, with Archie flying solo in the climactic confrontation, and Annabel assuming some of Lina’s functions, just as Max did Pete’s. When the normally unsentimental Wolfe hands Leeds over to D.A. Emory (Arnie Moore) and his assistant (David M. Zellitti), his outrage over Nobby’s betrayal is true to Stout; in a lame tag, Archie refuses a delivery from another messenger (Bennett Roberts). Loggia’s toymaker in Big (1988) was a change of pace from crime stories, e.g., Scarface (1983), Prizzi’s Honor, Jagged Edge (both 1985)  — earning Loggia an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor — Innocent Blood (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Sopranos.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Disguise for Murder”
   

Editions cited:

   Too Many Women: Bantam (1955)

   And Be a Villain, The Second Confession, In the Best Families in Triple Zeck: Viking (1974)
   

Online source:

SURFSIDE 6. “Country Gentleman.” ABC / Warner Brothers. 03 October 1960 (Season One, Episode One). Lee Patterson (Dave Thorne), Troy Donahue (Sandy Winfield II), Van Williams (Ken Madison), Diane McBain, Margarita Sierra. Guest Cast: Ray Danton, Frank DeKova, Robert Burton, Janet Lake. Director: Irving J. Moore. Many shows available for streaming on the Internet Archive.

   As far as least a secondary function of the first show of the season is o introduce the characters, this particular one is (was) a gigantic flop. It might be me, but I felt as though I could have been watching an episode in the middle of the season rather than the first one.

   Not that that was much of a problem. The picture filled itself in easily enough, if all you want is to watch is a show with three good-looking guys running a PI agency in Florida (Miami) with the usual light-hearted effort to put on an otherwise ordinary PI TV show.

   But to put in the effort that a blogger who likes to watch old PI TV shows should be doing, let me crib from IMDb:

   â€œKen, Dave, and Sandy are three hip private detectives living on, and working out of, a houseboat in Miami, Florida. A yacht, belonging to socialite Daphne [Diane McBain], is anchored next to their houseboat. While not pursuing criminals, they spend time at the Fontainebleau Hotel chasing Cha Cha [Margarita Sierra], who works as an entertainer in the Boom Boom Room.”

   It is interesting to note that Van Williams’ character (Ken) was a fellow who previously was one the lead players on Bourbon Street Beat, another Warner Brothers/ABC production which had just closed down for good the previous spring.

   In this one, a cool suave but still somewhat crude gangster (played by totally cool suave but still somewhat crude Ray Danton) is trying to use his money and charisma to join whatever high society that Miami has to offer, and hitting a brick wall in doing so. When one of the gents who blackballed him is found dead, guess who is the obvious suspect? Not to mention that he and the Commodore’s daughter have become very close.

   This is a somewhat mediocre episode and yet perhaps as enjoyable a one as viewers were able to see in 1960. The stories may very well have improved, as the series was on for two years. But when the “villain” of the piece has more screen appeal than its nominal three stars, something’s just not right.
   

   Rex Stout’s third Nero Wolfe collection, Trouble in Triplicate (1949), contains a trio of novellas first published in The American Magazine: “Before I Die” (April 1947), “Help Wanted, Male” (August 1945), and “Instead of Evidence” (May 1946); the latter debuted as “Murder on Tuesday,” yet was curiously advertised a month before as “Too Stubborn to Live.”

   That’s how Martha Poor describes husband Eugene, convinced that his partner, Conroy Blaney, plans to kill him for his half of their novelty business. All agree that it is impossible to prevent this, but Gene wants Wolfe to ensure that Blaney gets caught, while she would prefer that he be bought out for a ridiculously low $20,000 — yet remain alive.

   When a real exploding cigar kills Poor, obliterating his face, longtime genre readers are perhaps unsurprised as “Gene” is revealed to have been her accomplice, eliminated after helping Martha implicate Blaney, and in fact, all three stories have imposture in common. In “Before I Die,” Wolfe surprises Archie by having him admit Dazy Perrit, King of the Black Market, who provides a phone number to offset the “Great Meat Shortage.”

   He is being blackmailed by Angelina Murphy, set up in his penthouse off Fifth Avenue as his faux daughter, Violet; he took this precaution because his enemy Thumbs Meeker learned that he had one somewhere: Beulah Page, now “among the top of her class at Columbia.”

   She turned two the week he went to prison, and believes that Perrit merely represents her mysterious, wealthy father; Dazy, whose minion is Archie’s namesake, also fears that her appearance and mannerisms, strongly resembling her dead mother’s, will be a give-away. Himself posing as Harold Stevens of the Dayton, Ohio Community Health Center, Archie invites Beulah and her fiancé, law student Morton Schane, to dine with Wolfe, who later threatens to turn “Violet” (aka Sally Smith) in on a Salt Lake City charge if she does not give him 90% of what she gets from Perrit. Archie assumes he plans to kick it back, but as he escorts her home she is gunned down, her last words, “It’s — uh…shame. Shame!”

   Archie is released after telling Lt. Rowcliff that the killer fired from a (stolen) car with a handkerchief over his face; no sooner has he reached the brownstone to be confronted by Perrit and Archie 2 than they, too, are shot dead from a taxicab. L.A. Schwartz, Dazy’s lawyer, tells Wolfe he will get $50,000 if he assents to be the executor “and in effect the guardian of his daughter,” then turns over a sealed envelope containing background data on Beulah, and a request that Wolfe make sure she receives his sizable estate. They are interrupted by calls from Fabian, an “associate” who may blame them for Perrit’s death, and Beulah, who has seen Archie’s photo in the paper, and shows up with Schane in tow.

   With Beulah — to whom he has revealed her patrimony — up in the plant rooms, Wolfe has just convened Fabian, Schwartz, Schane, and Saul Panzer when Meeker breezes by Fritz; per Archie, “Before I die I get to hear Wolfe bawling hell out of Thumbs … for dashing in to where Fabian is ready with his gun out.”

   Wolfe denies telling the cops that Archie had fingered Dazy and Violet for him, explaining that she had learned Beulah’s identity, and Schane, with whom she had a history, secretly cultivated Beulah. Violet’s final word was not “Shame!,” but “Schane!,” and when confronted with the truth he fires on Wolfe yet is shot down by Fabian, Meeker, and Saul, leaving Archie to dine with Beulah at Ribeiro’s.

   Like the stories in Not Quite Dead Enough (1944), “Help Wanted, Male” occurs during Archie’s World War II service as Major Goodwin of Military Intelligence (who notes in “Instead of Evidence” that “I had been a civilian again for only a week”). Publisher and politician Ben Jensen, whistle-blower in the (unrecorded) case of court-martialed Captain Peter Root, brings Wolfe the warning he’s received in the mail: “YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE—AND I WILL WATCH YOU DIE!” Archie recognizes it from an ad for the movie Meeting at Dawn, published in The American Magazine, ha ha ha, but Ben is not amused, especially when Wolfe refuses to provide protection … and 12 hours later, Jensen is killed.

   Shot along with him, Cramer reports, was Doyle, the best man at the Cornwall and Mayer agency (hired by Jensen on Archie’s suggestion), but while “not interested, not involved, and not curious,” Wolfe receives an identical clipping. Presuming a connection, he asks Archie to fetch Root’s fiancée, Jane Geer, delaying his trip to Washington to ask General Carpenter to send him overseas; the head of G-2, introduced in “Booby Trap” (1944), he was revealed as Mrs. Boone’s cousin in The Silent Speaker (1946), where Ribeiro’s was first mentioned. Arriving simultaneously is Ben’s son, the handsome Major Emil Jensen, who leaves with Jane when Wolfe suddenly shifts gears and refuses to see either of them.

   His request refused, Archie confers with Colonel Dickey on various cases, and then spots an ad in the New York Star: “WANTED A MAN” of Wolfe’s description, “Temporary. Hazardous.” Fleeing Pentagon red tape, he returns home, where a retired architect, H.H. Hackett, “an unsurpassed nincompoop with the manners of a wart hog,” is impersonating Wolfe, who believes Cramer is wasting his time trying to nail Emil, due to a quarrel upon learning that Ben sued his mother for divorce while he was serving in Europe. No sooner have Jane and the gate-crashing Emil arrived to see “Wolfe” than a shot — fired inside the house — nicks Hackett’s ear, and a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief is found in a vase.

   Giving the gun and a bullet Archie digs out of the wall to Cramer, Wolfe persuades the guests to stay during a ballistics test to see if it killed Ben and Doyle, yet when Cramer shows up with confirmation, Purley Stebbins, and a search warrant, he angrily demands that the latter be torn up before playing ball.

   He suspects Jane and Emil, as the killer had intended, until the absence of a sofa cushion points him in the right direction: Hackett is in fact Thomas Root. Peter’s vengeful father took a job as a doorman at Ben’s apartment house in order to kill him, then fired a separate shot from one of Wolfe’s pistols into the cushion as part of an elaborate ruse to implicate them, nicking his ear with a pocket knife.

   Among a handful of works adapted for the Wolfe TV series starring both William Conrad and Maury Chaykin, “Before I Die” (1/30/81) was directed for the former by Edward Abroms, second only to George McCowan with his contributions.

   Along with The Red Box (1937), “Black Orchids” (1941), The Silent Speaker, and five of Stout’s later works, “Before I Die” was also dramatized on a Russian series that ran for two seasons (2001-2002 and 2005), featuring Donatas Banionis as Wolfe, with Sergey Zhigunov as Archie. The Conrad version was scripted by Alfred Hayes, who had shared Oscar nominations for Teresa (1951) and — with Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini—Paisà (Paisan, 1946).

   Dazy is now Leo Crown, played by Darren McGavin’s fellow Night Stalker alum Ramon Bieri, also seen in The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Sorcerer (1977); surprisingly, Russ Tamblyn turns up as an unidentified police detective. Kidnapped by Eddie Meeker (H.M. Wynant) to end a war between them, Violet (Char Fontane) is released to Leo and Harry Fabian (Eddie Fontaine), then admits her masquerade to Wolfe and Archie (Lee Horsley), fearing for her safety. Angelina is followed there by Leo, who agrees to let her “retire,” and the two shootings — separated by Cramer (Allan Miller) questioning Archie — follow, with no last words for Violet, and Leo survived by his useless bodyguard (Robert Sutton).

   Saul (George Wyner) learns that in Utah, hooker Angelina had a boyfriend, local hustler Harvey Pine, and Cramer tells Eddie — who denies hitting Leo — he’d grabbed the wrong girl; Schwartz, now Arthur Poor (John Ericson), provides the envelope identifying Elaine Page (Tarah Nutter), warning that Harry will dislike the will.

   Archie flies his true colors when inviting Elaine, about to head for Maryland to wed Paul Shane (Kale Browne), chez Wolfe, suggesting that she will learn the truth at last. The dialogue and Nutter’s delivery convey how badly she wants it (“I’ve lived in houses that weren’t mine, with families that weren’t mine”), and how devastated she is at the news that her father was killed that day.

   As in the novella, Wolfe confirms his suspicions of Paul by tripping him up on an arcane legal point at dinner, and having Fritz (George Voskovec) save his “cracked” wine glass, complete with Pine’s fingerprints. A shot through the window of the brownstone later on suggests an attempt on the life of Elaine, kept there for safety, but was only an attempt at misdirection by Paul, who wished to marry into her fortune.

   We are deprived a climactic hail of bullets (with Saul proven to have fired the fatal shot) as a tipped-off Cramer takes Paul away, but Hayes is largely faithful, eliminating the blackmail angle, and ending on a grace note as Theodore Horstmann (Robert Coote) presents Wolfe’s ward with an orchid.

   Both “Before I Die” (6/16/02) and “Help Wanted, Male” (6/23/02) were directed for the Chaykin series by its own runner-up (after star Timothy Hutton), John L’Ecuyer, airing on consecutive weeks in the second season. They were adapted by, respectively, Sharon Elizabeth Doyle (by far the most frequent scenarist, a contributing producer that season) and, in his only contribution, Mark Stein.

   Interestingly, although each episode features a half-dozen of the show’s repertory players, they have none in common, while Dazy Perrit is played by Seymour Cassel, whose collaborations with John Cassavetes include his film debut, Shadows (1958), and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Faces (1968).

   The double-length international version of “Before I Die” is augmented with comedic and Corleonesque scenes created by Doyle in which Archie 2 (Joe Pingue) earns the grudging admiration of Fritz (Colin Fox) by teaching him how to make “gravy” (spaghetti sauce, to us non-Sicilians).

   Michael Small provides a jazzy score befitting this underworld motif, while the opening narration by Archie (Hutton) preserves Rex Stout’s immortal line, “To Nero Wolfe a meal without meat was an insult.” Ostensibly fresh out of St. Louis, Violet (Christine Brubaker) makes her N.Y.C. debut when Dazy introduces her to Fabian (Doug Lennox), Archie 2, and their respective girlfriends (Nicky Guadagni, Angela Maiorano).

   An in-joke has Violet show her friends a designer dress from Saks in a box conspicuously labeled “L’Ecuyer,” while a sexual relationship with Dazy either wasn’t in the novella, or went right over my head (admittedly plausible). Beulah (Lindy Booth) is a social activist focused on health work, who insists she is not a communist, and brings Schane (Matthew Edison) to dinner, where she impresses Wolfe with more dialogue original to Doyle.

   Bill MacDonald returns as Rowcliffe (sic), his role in “Prisoner’s Base” (5/13 & 20/01), while the shooting spree by Fabian, Meeker (Beau Starr), and Saul (Conrad Dunn) is retained as Schwartz (Ken Kramer) witnesses that they fired in self-defense — since Schane shot first.

   In “Help Wanted, Male,” guest star Larry Drake, who won consecutive Supporting Actor Emmy Awards as mentally impaired office worker Benny Stulwicz on L.A. Law, is well cast as “Hackett.” Convinced that Wolfe turned down the job because he thought it was too hot, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) invades Wolfe’s bedroom during breakfast to detail the deaths of Ben (James Tolkan) and Doyle (Randy Butcher). Jane (Kari Matchett) did have a grudge against Wolfe when she believed Peter (Steve Cumyn) a scapegoat, but revised her opinion of Root; she now fears that the adverse publicity from being a murder suspect will hamper her aspirations to be the first female vice president of her advertising agency.

   Noting the immediate attraction between Jane and Emil (Richard Waugh), Archie makes his abortive trip to Washington, where Carpenter (George Plimpton) states, “Your role as Mr. Wolfe’s assistant is absolutely vital.” Stein interpolates bizarre byplay between him and eyepatched Dickey (Robert Bockstael), and dramatizes Wolfe’s questioning of Root, brought to him from prison, which he merely related to Archie in the novella.

   Trying to maintain the façade, Archie has Fritz hold Jane and Emil at gunpoint so that he can coach Hackett, but Wolfe shortly reveals himself; as Cramer and Purley (R.D. Reid) investigate the shot’s trajectory, Archie and Fritz launch the separate search for the missing cushion.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Door to Death” [See comment #1.]

    Edition cited:

      Trouble in Triplicate: Bantam (1955)

    Online sources:

[link mislabeled as “Wolfe at the Door”]