Like Trouble in Triplicate (1949), Rex Stout’s next Nero Wolfe collection, Three Doors to Death (1950), contains three novellas that first appeared in The American Magazine: “Man Alive” (December 1947), “Omit Flowers” (November 1948), and “Door to Death” (June 1949). In “Man Alive,” Archie informs us, “The only thing that shakes Wolfe as profoundly as having a meal rudely interrupted is a bawling woman. His reaction to the first is rage, to the second panic.” Wolfe allows that “I respect and admire Mr. Cramer,” despite his doing the former; the latter is their client, Cynthia Nieder, whom he must clear of suspicion in an haute couture murder…of a man reported to be a suicide a year earlier.

   â€œOmit Flowers” involves Wolfe’s lifelong friend Marko Vukčić, introduced in Too Many Cooks (1938; the accents appear inconsistently). Marko is “one of the only three people who called him by his first name, but there were other factors. Rusterman’s Restaurant was the one place besides home where Wolfe really enjoyed eating…Marko owned it and ran it…”

   He asks Wolfe to clear Virgil Pompa, under whom he’d worked at Mondor’s in Paris in his youth, which Wolfe does, sans fee, as a favor; Pompa, say Marko, “forfeited all claim to professional respect,” becoming the #2 of the AMBROSIA restaurant chain, and is accused of murdering the man who married the founder’s widow and tried to oust him.

   â€œDoor to Death” finds Wolfe desperately seeking a replacement for Theodore Horstmann, “tender and defender of the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms on the roof,” called to his critically ill mother’s side in Illinois…indefinitely. He finds one in Andrew Krasicki, formerly employed—and recommended—by Lewis Hewitt, after braving wet December weather to poach Andy from the estate of Joseph G. Pitcairn in the Westchester village of Katonah. Offering to show off a Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in flower, Andy takes him and Archie to the greenhouse, conspicuously marked “DANGER-DO NOT ENTER-DOOR-TO-DEATH” due to the use of ciphogene, the deadly fumigant from “Black Orchids” (1941).

   Truer words were never painted—as those were by Mrs. Belle Pitcairn—for in addition to the P. Aphrodite sanderiana, they find her nurse and his fiancée, Dini Lauer, dead from it. Despite Wolfe’s pleading, Pitcairn’s prominence prompts Andy to be charged with first-degree murder by Ben Dykes, head of the county detectives; Lt. Con Noonan of the State Police; and Cleveland Archer, the county’s D.A. du jour after Anderson in Fer-de-Lance (1934) and Fraser in “Instead of Evidence” (1946). Well-meaning assistant Gus Treble says Dini “had given Andy the fanciest runaround he had ever seen,” and they have only Andy’s word for it that she had consented to marriage that day, so things look pretty bad.

   Archer is unable to complete a jealous love triangle with Gus, butler/chauffeur/handyman Neil Imbrie, or Pitcairn père et fils, Donald, but the p.m. shows she was knocked out with morphine, to which Andy had access, because the cook—Neil’s wife, Vera—suffers from facial neuralgia and had a now-missing box in the kitchen.

   According to Andy, they both planned to quit and head for New York after Dini broke the news to Mrs. Pitcairn, whose daughter, Sybil, helps care for her. Proving Andy innocent, Wolfe contends, rolling Dini under a bench overturned a pot in which he’d gotten a branch of Tibouchina semicandra to sport; “such a plant man” would automatically right it, as he did when she was found.

   Ordered out by Pitcairn, Wolfe sets up shop in Andy’s cottage, ostensibly to pack up his things, and probes Gus for dirt on the household (e.g., Joseph’s violent attack on paid-off ex-chippie Florence Hefferan) before Noonan ousts them. Wolfe, his mind “completely dominated by a single purpose,” has Archie summon Saul Panzer via Riverdale drugstore telephone to meet him at the Covered Porch near Scarsdale, eliciting Fritz’s disbelief that he isn’t coming home for dinner. His plan unfolds as the trio infiltrates the greenhouse in the dark—leaving Saul concealed under the bench where Dini’s body had been—then the house by the connecting door, compelling a chat with Joseph G. and children at gunpoint.

   Wolfe threatens to tell the newspapers about Florence, and how four colleges booted out Donald, whose lunge Archie has just slapped down when Belle—recovering from a back injury—appears, her $50,000 offer to shield them declined. At last allowed to inquire, he summons the Imbries as well, distracting everyone while Saul sneaks in and later makes a dramatic entrance, bearing a paper found under the Imbries’ mattress, a blackmail note to Joseph from Dini. It has, of course, been forged by Wolfe with the desired effect, leading to an attack on the father by Donald, who was threatened with disownment if he married Dini, and decided to kill her when she laughed at him and said she planned to wed Andy.

   Curiously, although Theodore was the object of the exercise in “Door to Death” (6/4/01), and a regular on the William Conrad series, he is never seen in this first-season episode—or any other—of A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle, it was the first directed by Holly Dale, and repertory player Kari Matchett’s first appearance as Lily Rowan, the sometime romantic interest of Archie (Timothy Hutton), not mentioned in the novella. Nicholas Campbell, who guest-stars as Andy in his second and final series role, had memorably portrayed serial killer Deputy Frank Dodd in the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone (1983), one of his several collaborations with director David Cronenberg.

   Right from the title illustrations by Hutton’s then wife, Aurore Giscard d’Estaing (thanks to Mike Doran for pointing that out), a cousin of former French President Valéry, much is made of Wolfe’s comical outing. In Doyle’s opening, Fritz (Colin Fox) has Saul (Conrad Dunn) summon Archie, who has been tangoing with Lily, to help out in the crisis, and the next day, he drives Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) to Westchester. Ensuing events are rendered faithfully as Andy finds Dini (Kristen Booth); Archie encounters Joseph (James Tolkan), his two children (Christine Brubaker, Boyd Banks), and the Imries (Ken Kramer, Nancy Beatty); and they are interrupted by Noonan (Beau Starr) and Dykes (Michael Rhoades).

   After Archer (Hrant Alianak), unmoved by Wolfe’s logic, takes Andy away, Archie says, “I’d like to get back to New York before Christmas…I’m getting married,” a tale told by Dale and Doyle in the next episode, “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), but not by Stout for more than seven years! A tell-tale branch moving outside the cottage window tips him off that someone is spying on them; it turns out to be Gus (Steve Cumyn), who first believes they have betrayed Andy, but is only too happy to cooperate once persuaded they really are on his side. Cast as Belle was Marian Seldes, whose collaborations with playwright Edward Albee included A Delicate Balance (1966), earning her a Tony and him the Pulitzer Prize.

   Accompanied by a droll Michael Small score, Operation Greenhouse finds Wolfe heavily bundled up; lashing out with his walking stick at “Some kind of serpent!,” the branch that trips him up; and even wading a brook. Unfortunately, with garish make-up and minimal screen time, stage legend Seldes is wasted in a role that, albeit brief, had possibilities on the page. After all Wolfe went through to secure his services, Andy is surprisingly never seen again, although the local law-enforcement officials previously figured in the Arnold Zeck Trilogy (accounting for Lt. Noonan’s apparently unpleasant but unspecified history with Archie), which will be the subject of my next post—y’all come back now, ya hear?

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

      Up next: In the Best Families

   Edition cited —

         Three Doors to Death: Bantam (1970)

   Online source —

  BOB HOPE PRESENTS CHRYSLER THEATRE “The Fatal Mistake” NBC, 30 November 1966 (Season 4, Episode 10). Roddy McDowall, Arthur Hill, Michael Wilding, Marge Redmond, Laurence Naismith, Alice Rawlings. Teleplay: Jacques Gillies. Director: Mark Rydell. Currently streaming online here.

   The Chrysler Theatre, often hosted by comedian Bob Hope, a fixture at NBC at the time, was a general 60-minute anthology series which ran from 1963 to 1967. Included among its offerings were musicals, dramas, comedies and mysteries. This (not surprisingly) is one of the latter.

   The two male leads, playing off each other magnificently throughout the show, are perfectly cast. Roddy McDowall plays a smarmy “insurance agent” who comes by the home of an accountant (Arthur Hill) to pick up a monthly blackmail check. There is something in Hill’s past he does not want either his wife or 17-year-old daughter to know about, much less the rest of the world.

   Posing as a friend of the family, McDowall showers the two women in Hill’s life with small gifts and flattery, while all Hill can do is stand there and take it, all the while seething inside. The fact that he keeps a small collection of reptiles in a back room, some rather deadly, tells the viewer exactly where the story is going.

   Which of course it does, with a small mild twist in the tale, unfortunately well telegraphed in advance. It’s a perfectly acceptable story, and well acted. (Roddy McDowell is superb, as always.) It’s just not quite up to the standards of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for example, but then again, what is (or was)?

THE GOLD ROBBERS. London Weekend TV, 1969; 13 episodes. Peter Vaughan, Richard Leech, Arto Morris, Maria Aitken, Louise Pajo, Fred Bartman, Peter Copely Guests: George Cole, Ian Hendry, Patrick Allen, Roy Dotrice et al. Produced by John Hawkesworth.

   When five million pounds sterling being flown into the United Kingdom by the failing government of a Middle Eastern state is met by a highly organized criminal team and stolen, an international manhunt is set off led by Detective Chief Superintendent John Craddock (Peter Vaughan) of Scotland Yard and Detective Sergeant Tommy Thomas (Arto Morris), an effort that will put their careers and lives at risk.

   The Gold Robbers is a thirteen episode closed crime series that was remarkably dark, violent, and dour for British television of its time. It marked and early part for reliable character actor Vaughan in a rare lead as an all to human but doggedly intelligent policeman. It highlighted as well a number of British stars like Ian Hendry, Patrick Allen, Roy Dotrice, and others as individuals involved in the complex heist that leads Craddock across Europe and into the worlds of high finance, international banking, smelting gold, and politics. It was  where high finance and society met low crime and criminals before the downbeat and not wholly resolved conclusion.

   Filmed in black and white, this one is well worth catching, marked by intelligent scripts and naturalistic acting. In each  episode Craddock and his team focus on some element of the heist, a driver, gunman, crooked air traffic controller, mercenary soldier and their families and loved ones while closing in on slimy crooked casino owner Victor Anderson (Frederick Bartman) who ran the operation for an unknown Mr. Big.

   Along the way, Craddock’s relationship with his son and his mistress fall apart while he is taken under the wing of charming wealthy newspaper and airline magnate Richard Bolt (Richard Leech), whose airline flew the hijacked gold into the UK.

   The ruthless gang uses money, threats, and murder to protect itself as  Craddock tightens the noose, despite setbacks and maddening interference from his superior the Assistant Commissioner (Peter Copely) that gets worse as Craddock closes in on the men behind the crime including some in the government.

   Characters weave in and out of the series, some suspects temporarily get away, some are brutally killed before they can talk, and all the time Craddock’s career is threatened as much by success as failure.

   You can currently find the entire series on YouTube (Nostalgia channel), and it is worth watching for its gritty realism, tough minded characters, sharp writing, and increasingly complex plot that builds to a satisfying downbeat ending that ties all the plot threads while leaving somethings open. It is basically a thirteen part serialized story though, minus cliffhangers and with each episode self contained.

   Among those contributing to the scripts are producer John Hawkesworth, spy novelist Berkley Mather (co-writer of the screenplay for Dr. No), and Allan Prior (Softly Softly: Taskforce and novels).

   The Gold Robbers is plotted more like a really good police procedural novel than a television series with character arcs for police and crooks, and a sense of the cost and the allure of crime. Vaughan’s Craddock is a flawed but compelling protagonist. The series holds up well and has a good mix of suspense, detection, police work, crime, and romance (even with a bit of nudity; it is British television) as the plot unfolds through the characters and not just around them.

  HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. Universal TV / NBC; made for TV, 1967.) Robert Wagner, Peter Lawford, Lola Albright, Walter Pidgeon, Jill St. John, Michael Ansara, and Len Lesser. Written by Gene Kearney. Directed by William Hale.

   This has an adolescent appeal I find irresistible, tinged with Man from UNCLE gimmickry, and a “This Week’s Guest Star” cast.

   Robert Wagner, pushing 40 and still exuding boyish charm, plays Jack Washington, all-American bad-luck-boy, who starts the show by falling into the clutches of arch-villain Walter Pidgeon — these were the days when arch-villains plotted in tacky resplendence, amid blinking switchboards and uniformed stuntmen who specialized in falling down — and then flashing back to the series of bad choices that got him where he is today.

   Wavy images, harp music…. and we’re somewhere on The Continent, or maybe the Universal back lot, where Jack, fresh out of the Army and bumming around, chance-encounters an old girlfriend (Jill St John) who invites him to spend a week on the Family Yacht with Mummy and Daddy (Lola Albright and Peter Lawford.)

   Which unravels quickly. Mummy has an unbreakable veneer of politeness, Jill looks to Jack for diversion, but Daddy doesn’t like him because… well there are any number of reasons, all centered around Jack being gauche, untalented, and not terribly bright… in short, a Loser. And Daddy shows what he thinks of losers, in a series of calculated humiliations that leave our hero looking foolish and insignificant – in short, like a teenager.

   And as in a teenage fantasy, Jack soon discovers that the man belittling him is evil. Objectively evil: a crook or smuggler of some sort, as well as a liar and a cheat. And here comes the adolescent appeal, because Jack sets out to bring down Lawford, armed with little more than a camera and notebook.

   The result is a messy thing, but firmly planted in the post-childhood-but-not-quite-grown-up swamp of youth. And it blossoms into gaudy fireworks entirely appropriate to that age range.

   Don’t let my affection for this silly trifle over-sell you; I’m not saying Vacation is actually any good – just that it once appealed to my pulp-fiction mind, and I remember it fondly.

   The Silent Speaker (1946) was Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe novel after a wartime hiatus, and the first from Viking, his publisher for the rest of his life, during which he wrote only of Wolfe. Titular victim Cheney Boone, the director of the government’s Bureau of Price Regulation (BPR), is found in a small room off the stage of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Grand Ballroom, bludgeoned to death with a monkey wrench — an exhibit for the speech he was about to deliver to the National Industrial Association (NIA). The court of public opinion having convicted the NIA, which is bitterly opposed to Boone’s policies, president Frank Thomas Erskine hires Wolfe to investigate, for which he convenes the interested parties.

   On one side of his office, Erskine is joined by son Ed, NIA assistant P.R. director Hattie Harding, Dinner Committee Chairman Don O’Neill, and Executive Committee members Breslow and Winterhoff. On the other are Boone’s wife, Luella, and niece, Nina; Alger Kates of the BPR’s Research Department; and Deputy — now Acting — Director, Solomon Dexter. “In between the two hostile armies were the neutrals or referees,” i.e., Inspector Cramer (whose initials, contradicting the previous novel, are indicated as “L.T.C.”), Sgt. Purley Stebbins, and the FBI’s G.G. Spero, although Wolfe’s telegram inviting them is not accepted by Boone’s confidential secretary, Phoebe Gunther, or the Waldorf’s Rohde.

   Everybody has an alibi and nobody has an obvious personal motive, with no clues given by the text of the speech, although a case containing cylinders from a dictating machine, which Boone made after a mysterious emergency conference in Washington and wanted Phoebe to transcribe, is missing.

   Ed displays apparently nonreciprocal interest in Nina, while Archie — sent to fetch Phoebe after they disperse in acrimony — finds Kates there, but her interview with Wolfe is inconclusive. Archie watches O’Neill retrieve the leather case from the parcel room at Grand Central Station, bringing them both to Wolfe; O’Neill arranges for the loan of a Stenophone, but is ejected by Archie before they listen to them.

   The case contains 10 cylinders dictated before the day of Boone’s murder, but although it was presumably switched for another of the 12 he used, Wolfe has Archie transcribe their seemingly innocuous contents.

   Desperate due to a lack of progress, Cramer agrees to his request to have Lt. Rowcliffe (sic) reconvene everyone, yet as the party is getting started, Fritz finds Phoebe by the basement gate; friend and neighbor Doc Vollmer confirms that she’s been bludgeoned with a piece of iron pipe, so now, nobody has an alibi, and all had opportunity. Nine cylinders are found in her Washington apartment, none with anything useful, but on a scarf in Kates’s coat, Phillips finds microscopic traces from the iron pipe.

   It belongs to Winterhoff, who claims it was stolen on his last visit, yet it could have been put there by anybody, so Cramer is again forced to disperse the group; Wolfe hires Saul, Bill Gore, and 20 men from Del Bascom’s agency, sans explanation, and asks Archie to gain Nina’s confidence.

   Wolfe declines a $300,000 offer from lawyer and self-described errand boy “John Smith” to pin the killings on Dexter or Kates, presumably on behalf of the NIA, and equally willing to toss O’Neill to the wolves. Commissioner Hombert says that Cramer has been relieved and replaced by Inspector Ash, one of his former captains, now in charge of Homicide in Queens, who summons Wolfe to Centre Street police H.Q.

   Ash gets a literal slap in the face, from Wolfe, and a figurative one, from Hombert, who says he’ll handle it with D.A. Skinner; Wolfe is impressed when told Cramer was fixating on the 10th cylinder. Luella says Phoebe confided that she knew who’d murdered Boone, had the cylinder, and would use it after maximum damage was done to the NIA, to whom Wolfe has tendered his resignation.

   To avoid the fallout, he has Vollmer certify that he is having a nervous breakdown until realizing that Phoebe hid the cylinder in his office, and Boone, living up to the title, reveals a warning from O’Neill’s VP, Henry A. Warder, that O’Neill was buying information from Kates, who killed Boone in an angry confrontation.

   â€œThe Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/2002), a two-part second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, was adapted and directed by Michael Jaffe (tripling as an executive producer); soap star Cynthia Watros and Second City Television legend Joe Flaherty make their only appearances as, respectively, Phoebe and Vollmer.

   Most other parts were, as usual, filled by repertory players such as James Tolkan, returning as FBI Agent Richard Wragg, a role he created in “The Doorbell Rang” (4/22/01), also written by Jaffe. Stout used Wragg in that book, but had yet to introduce him here, so in a logical move, Jaffe makes Wragg, in effect, a composite of Spero and another federal agent, Travis, from The Silent Speaker.

   Unlike the William Conrad series, Maury Chaykin’s has no uniform title theme or credit sequence. After a brief pan across a New York skyline, each episode opens with a unique Michael Small score and animated montage introducing “The Players,” in which Timothy Hutton, also the show’s most frequent director and an executive producer, is significantly billed first.

   â€œThe Silent Speaker” segues from a drawing of the BPR to an informational film about the NIA, symbolizing a conflict mirroring that between the real-life Office of Price Administration (OPA), run by Chester Bowles — note the similarity in name — and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

   When Archie (Hutton) requests permission from Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) to examine the “murder room,” Jaffe interpolates his wife (Nicky Guadagni), who reveals his first name; his bank balance low, Wolfe (Chaykin) baits the hook, having Archie “accidentally” drop the memo in Hattie’s (Christine Brubaker) office and ask Wragg for any reason he should not take interest.

   A montage conveys the time Archie wastes fencing with Hattie before Wolfe receives Erskine Sr. (David Schurmann), Jr. (Matthew Edison), Breslow (George Plimpton) and Winterhoff (Bill MacDonald). Later, Wolfe denies to O’Neil (sic; Richard Waugh) that he was asked to shift attention elsewhere, and invites him to their discussion.

   This is well choreographed with Cramer, Wragg, and Purley (R.D. Reid) observing while they face Luella (Debra Monk), Nina (Manon von Gerkan), Kates (Julian Richings), and Dexter (Robert Bockstael); in her solo visit, Phoebe makes an impression on Archie, with whom she flirts, and Wolfe (“A woman who is not a fool is dangerous”). Jaffe supplants Gore with series regular Fred Durkin (Fulvio Cecere), and gives Fritz (Colin Fox) a more active role in O’Neil’s humiliation.

   Lunching with Nina at the Tulip Room, Archie gets a call from Wolfe, livid at being served by Ash (Doug Lennox), and repertory players Gary Reineke and Steve Cumyn make one-off showings as Hombert and Skinner, respectively.

   The comic potential of Vollmer’s diagnosis is maximized, with Jaffe adding “some tests to rule out any sort of neurological problems here,” e.g., inkblots identified by Wolfe as “an Eastern European village where the inhabitants have coins as heads” and “a piece of veal,” and a search for phrenologic bumps. The denouement is delicious: Wolfe, having returned the NIA’s fee, still collects their $100,000 reward for the killer, and after Archie posits his finding the cylinder days earlier, he hypothesizes the delay to further Phoebe’s ends (having told her in the novel, “I don’t like the NIA. I’m an anarchist”). Vindicated, Cramer gives Wolfe an orchid in gratitude for handing the murderer directly over to him.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Trouble in Triplicate

      Edition cited —

The Silent Speaker  in Seven Complete Nero Wolf Novels: Avenel (1983)

      Online source —

   Rex Stout took a wartime hiatus from writing Nero Wolfe novels after Where There’s a Will (1940), abridged as “Sisters in Trouble” for The American Magazine (May 1940), which started publishing the novellas with “Bitter End” (November 1940). Introducing the posthumous collection Death Times Three (1985), biographer John McAleer explains that the publisher refused to run an abridgement of Stout’s Techumseh Fox novel Bad for Business (1940), but paid him double to convert it into the Wolfe novella “Where There’s a Will,” adapted in 1969 for the Italian TV series, gives Inspector Cramer his first name, Fergus, and has Wolfe leave home on business for a case involving the Secretary of State.

   The first Wolfe collection, Black Orchids (1942), pairs the title novella with “Cordially Invited to Meet Death,” abridged as—respectively—“Death Wears an Orchid” (August 1941) and “Invitation to Murder” (April 1942). The former introduces millionaire, fellow gourmet, and future ally Lewis Hewitt, whose Long Island greenhouse produced the three titular plants, demanded in payment by an envious Wolfe for sparing him embarrassment while investigating a murder. In the latter, he sends eight of those flowers to the funeral of Bess Huddleston, who was murdered with a deliberate infection of tetanus after hiring Wolfe to stop the anonymous poison-pen letters threatening her party-planning business.

   Not Quite Dead Enough (1944) also paired the eponymous work (abridged; December 1942) with another first published in The American Magazine, “Booby Trap” (August 1944). Both take place during Archie’s World War II service as Major Goodwin of U.S. Army Intelligence; in the former, he must goad Wolfe—who has been “in training” with chef Fritz Brenner, walking by the river and dieting, to kill Germans, as he did in 1918—to return to work. The returning Lily Rowan is briefly a suspect, and Cramer reveals that Lily’s late father “was one of my best friends. He got me on the force, and he got me out of a couple of tight holes in the old days when he was on the inside at [Tammany] Hall.”

   Also invoked, Captain Albert Cross and Archie’s superiors, Colonel Harold Ryder and General Mortimer Fife, all figure in “Booby Trap.” An anonymous letter to John Bell Shattuck links Cross’s fatal plunge from New York’s Bascombe Hotel with the betrayal of “secrets of various industrial processes,” entrusted to the Army, to “those who intend to engage in post-war competition of the industries involved,” which the congressman’s committee is authorized to investigate. After Wolfe says Cross, tracing stolen “samples” of brand-new H14 grenades, was murdered, Ryder is blown apart by an H14 he’d given Archie as a souvenir for his work on the case, which was returned at Wolfe’s insistence.

   Securing Fife’s grudging permission to see General Carpenter in Washington, Ryder had his suitcase already packed, and when sent by Wolfe to remove its remains surreptitiously from the site, Archie finds it gone. Deducing that it was taken by his secretary, Sergeant Dorothy Bruce, Archie is surprised to see Lieutenant Kenneth Lawson, Jr. in the WAC’s apartment when he fetches it and her, and even more so when — en route to Wolfe’s — she offers him $10,000 for it. Claiming that was a test of his loyalty, she is revealed to be the source of the anonymous letter and others; after a private talk with her, Wolfe tells Archie only that the grenade was inside the suitcase, which was booby-trapped to murder Ryder.

   Setting his own “booby trap” with props in his office, Wolfe arranges for Archie to watch from concealment as, sequentially, Lawson, Colonel Tinkham, Fife, Shattuck, and Bruce are each left alone there; none does anything clearly incriminating, but with Bruce’s help, Shattuck is exposed.

   Working undercover for Carpenter with Lawson, she sent 30 letters to smoke out the traitors, and Ryder was silenced when—shocked by Cross’s murder and his son’s death in combat—he decided to fess up to Carpenter. Wolfe has Archie drive to Van Cortlandt Park, where he gives Shattuck, whose political career is ruined, the chance to commit suicide with another H14, which Carpenter had provided for the “booby trap.”

   Bizarrely, “Gambit” (4/3/81)—an episode of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series starring William Conrad, with Lee Horsley as Archie—took its title from Stout’s 1962 novel, but credits “Booby Trap” as its source. The only entry scripted by Stephen Kandel, later a prolific writer-producer on MacGyver, it was directed by the show’s most frequent contributor, George McCowan; its executive producers, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, created Charlie’s Angels and shared an Oscar nomination as co-writers of the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). Fritz (George Voskovec), orchid-meister Theodore Horstmann (Robert Coote), Saul Panzer (George Wyner), and Cramer (Allan Miller) were regulars.

   Best known as reporter Carl Kolchak in the 1972 TV-movie and ensuing series The Night Stalker, Darren McGavin guest-stars as John Alan Bredeman, first seen in comic mode as a faux service tech, hiding a surveillance system in the brownstone. Patti Davis, daughter of recently inaugurated President Ronald Reagan, plays magazine reporter Dana Groves, seeking an interview with Wolfe, against which he refuses to break a long-standing rule. Kandel rewrites Wolfe’s wartime role as “Butterfly,” commander of an intelligence unit, three members of which died when betrayed by Bredeman—code-named “Filligree”—who specialized in demolition, and now plans to kill Wolfe, having served 20 years for it.

   After asking Cramer to check on Bredeman, Archie risks bringing Dana to Wolfe, but as he is dressing them down, Bredeman gloats via the intercom that he has cut off the phone, and provides a “demonstration” by blowing up the stove, injuring Fritz. Asserting that he was innocent, he has rigged the whole house and planted a bomb on the elevator, defused by Archie with Wolfe’s guidance. As Dana exults in a juicy story, the staff disables three cameras, so Bredeman threatens death unless they gather in the entry hall, in view of the fourth; intending to slip out through a plant-room window, Archie sends her down, but in the stairwell, Dana—Bredeman’s daughter and accomplice—calls him on a walkie-talkie.

   Tipped off, he fires at Archie with a rifle (his aim spoiled by Wolfe tossing a pot through another window), belying his assurance to her that he means no harm to innocents; Fritz and Theodore cut off the power, gas, water, and intercom as Wolfe and Archie seek other explosives. Bredeman sneaks in to face his foe, trying to extract a confession for framing him, yet Wolfe, displaying unusual physicality, disarms him and tells Dana he’d deduced her imposture. In her presence, he confronts Bredeman with the truth: he was absent on the unit’s fatal mission, having alerted the enemy to their route, and over the years, guilt had twisted his mind, but attempting to flee, he falls victim to one of his own booby traps.

   Kandel’s “Gambit”—the last alleged adaptation on Conrad’s series—has little to do with “Booby Trap,” let alone Stout’s Gambit, used in 1971 and 2012 on the Italian series with Tino Buazzelli and Francesco Pannofino, respectively. Sally Blount hires Wolfe to clear her father of a murder charge after he served hot chocolate to Paul Jerin, poisoned while playing 12 simultaneous blindfold games at the eponymous chess club. The murder was a gambit, “an opening in which a player gives up a pawn or a piece to gain an advantage. The [murderer] had no animus for Jerin [who] was merely a pawn. The target was your father,” and Archie gets the proof on tape via a hidden mike in John Piotti’s restaurant.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: The Silent Speaker

   Editions cited

Where There’s a Will: Avon (1941)
Death Times Three: Bantam (1985)
Black Orchids, Not Quite Dead Enough: Jove (1979)
Gambit in Seven Complete Nero Wolf Novels: Avenel (1983)

   Online source [link mislabeled as “Before I Die”]

SOFTLY, SOFTLY: TASK FORCE. “Blind Alley.” BBC, UK, December 3 1975 (Series 7, Episode 15). Frank Windsor, Norman Bowler, David Lloyd Meredith Guests: Ralph Michael, Michael Culver. Teleplay: Elwyn Jones (Format Creator). Director: Gilchrist Calder.  Streaming online here.

    This series that ran from 1969 to1976 was a police procedural that spun off from the famed Z Cars (from 1962 to 1978 and featuring Brian Blessed in a key role as a PC for several seasons) and its own spin-off Softly, Softly (1966-1969) moving the action from Wyvern possibly around Bristol to Thamesford and the city of Kingly where former Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns) is promoted to Superintendent and his top Inspector John Watts (Frank Windsor) to Chief Inspector forming a new special department designed to respond quickly to crimes in the area.

    There were a number of series regulars over the series run but only a few that appeared in most episodes, with Windsor’s John Watt appearing in the most episodes and replacing Johns as Superintendent when he moved on to another series in Barlow at Large in 1971.

    Other regulars over the course of the series were Norman Bowler as Harry Hawkins (who appeared in Softly, Softly from 1966 to 1968) rising from CID Sergeant to Chief Inspector over the series run 1969-1976), the more or less romantic lead; David Lloyd Meredith as Bob Evans (1969-1976) who rises from uniformed Sergeant to Inspector over the series run, a wry Welshman with a nose for crime; PC eventually Sergeant Snow (Terence Rigby 1969-1976) who begins the series as a K9 handler and is eventually promoted to Evans old job; and, Walter Gotell (also Softly, Softly and From Russia With Love, The Guns of Navarone, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only) as Chief Constable Cullen (1969-1975) their superior, canny political figure as much as policeman.

    There was also a short Softly, Softly, Strike Force series in 1984.

    Unlike Z Cars and Softly, Softly which had many episodes erased by the BBC, all the episodes but one of Task Force are available on YouTube at various sites. Seasons run from thirteen to fifteen episodes and most are self contained although personal struggles and histories carry over from episode to episode and season to season though the series tends to focus on the main characters at work and not at home with only Barlow, Watts, and Hawkins domestic lives explored much.

    Along the line of a British 87th Precinct the series deals realistically with crime and police and there is no guarantee in any episode that the police will triumph and the criminals be caught. Many episodes portray the criminals as human beings caught between their chosen way of life and the police who offer them little room to maneuver. The police aren’t always happy with their own tactics and constraints and are torn between distrust and a natural desire to catch the bad guys and often old relationships with them over the years.

    As often as not the final solution is left in the air or the villains to be caught on another day in other circumstances. Like real police work the cases are messy, plans go awry, and innocents caught out by both police and criminals.

    The format for the series was created by Elwyn Jones with many episodes written by novelist Alan Prior and at least one by none other than novelist Kingsley Amis.

    Frank Windsor’s John Watt is the conscience of the series, a much less high handed and brutal man than Barlow who is portrayed as fairly ruthless and more feared than loved by his men. The camaraderie between higher ranking officers often portrayed in American police series is less noticeable here, the emphasis on discipline and rank however human the officers are. These are human beings, not stereotypes and cartoon figures. This isn’t Dragnet, nor is it car chases and gunfights though there is action in many episodes. Police are vulnerable, fallible, and prone to human mistakes and sometimes butt heads with each other.

    In “Blind Alley” Justice Ballantyre (Ralph Michaels), a notable and often strict judge has bought a weekend home in the area and the Task Force is bending over backward to protect him on his weekends when PC Lincoln (Peter Clough 1975-76) of the Mounted Patrol notices someone has been spying on the judge. While the judge is out of town his home is broken into and leaflets are posted on his window and door while the intruder burns FDR into his lawn, a reference to a radical group Ballantyre sentenced to prison, Free The Daventry Resisters.

    Meanwhile Sgt. Evans is about to officially receive promotion to Inspector, a secret no one on the force seems able to keep.

    When the break-in happens a reporter from London (Michael Culver) shows up claiming he knows the man, a well known radical member of the Daventry Registers, who is willing to surrender to the police, but Watts and Hawkins suspect the man is wanting publicity and they are wary to give it to him, with good reason it seems when the Judge returns and reveals a secret that changes everything.

    Things take a more radical change when they snub the confessor who makes an unexpected attack on the judge turning a celebration into a dark finale for the season.

    Strong writing, flawed protagonists, solid plots, and a jaundiced view of crime and police marked the series. Certainly weighted in favor of the police point of view the series still managed to present criminals as human beings developing more of a social conscience as time went on over its eight year run. Over the years the series dealt with many serious issues and did so sensitively as well as doing the usual mix of seventies subjects like terrorism and hijacking.

    Even if your tastes don’t run to police procedurals the quality of the acting and the writing on this series was exceptionally high. For beginners, I’d dip into a few of the later episodes after the series had its feet and if I liked it — and I did, very much — go back to the beginning. I don’t know about the original Softly, Softly, but a few episodes of Z Cars are on YouTube.

   Rex Stout’s seventh Nero Wolfe novel, Over My Dead Body (1940), was one of several to be serialized or, as in this case, abridged in The American Magazine (September 1939). Since The League of Frightened Men (1935), Stout had produced the spin-offs The Hand in the Glove (1937), introducing early female P.I. and occasional employee Theodolinda “Dol” Bonner, and Red Threads (1939), which featured Inspector Cramer. In The Rubber Band (1936), he mentioned the painting of Sherlock Holmes hanging over Archie’s desk; brought Purley Stebbins onstage at last; and introduced Police Commissioner Hombert, D.A. Skinner, the hated Lt. George Rowcliff, and London “snoop” Ethelbert Hitchcock.

   The Red Box (1937) offers a murder actually committed, via poisoned aspirin, in Wolfe’s office, and an early example of the climactic gathering of suspects there. Also introduced in, respectively, Too Many Cooks (1938) and Some Buried Caesar (1939) are his lifelong friend, Marko Vukčić, the owner of Rusterman’s Restaurant, with whom Wolfe “hunted dragonflies…in the mountains” and is on a rare first-name basis, and Archie’s sometime romantic interest, heiress and socialite Lily Rowan, who dubs him Escamillo — the torero in Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) — after a run-in with a bull. All four were adapted in a 1969-71 Italian TV series, featuring Tino Buazzelli as Wolfe and Paolo Ferrari as Archie.

   Well, now that we’re all caught up, Over My Dead Body opens with a visit from Carla Lovchen, who — as Archie tells Wolfe— “seems to be named after a mountain. The Black Mountain. Mount Lovchen. Tsernagora. Montenegro, which is the Venetian variant of Monte Nero…”

   Her friend Neya Tormic, also a pseudonymous immigrant from Zagreb employed at the dancing and fencing studio of Nikola Miltan (whom Wolfe has met at Marko’s table), has been accused of stealing diamonds from a man’s pocket. Unnerved when she says “Hvala Bogu” (Thank God), Wolfe orders her ejected; “I have skedaddled, physically, once in my life, from one person…a Montenegrin woman…many years ago.”

   Barely an hour later, Wolfe is visited and reminded by a G-man, Stahl, about the Federal statute “requiring persons who are agents in this country of foreign principals to register with the Department of State.” He says that he is not, although as a boy he served as an agent of the Austrian government and in the Montenegrin army, noting that he “starved to death in 1916,” then walked 600 miles to join the A.E.F. when the U.S. entered the war.

   Wolfe states that he has neither communicated with nor provided money to Prince Stefan Donevitch of Zagreb (the nephew of Old Peter, dying in Paris, whom he knew long ago), but has contributed to both the Loyalists in Spain and the League of Yugoslavian Youth.

   Wolfe tells Stahl, “I was born in this country,” flatly contradicting a previous statement that “I wasn’t born here” (Too Many Cooks) and a reference to “my boyhood in Europe” (Some Buried Caesar). He is, in fact, a Montenegrin; Rex Stout’s authorized biographer, John McAleer, attributed this retcon to “violent protests from The American Magazine, supported by [publisher] Farrar & Rinehart,” but “that even in 1939 Wolfe was irked by the FBI’s consuming curiosity about the private business of law-abiding citizens [so he thus] felt under no constraint to tell the truth about himself when interrogated by Stahl.” No, there won’t be a quiz later on, but this stuff will be important as the series progresses.

   In the copy of United Yugoslavia Carla perused while awaiting his descent from the plant rooms, Wolfe finds a 1938 document. It empowers Stefan’s wife, Princess Vladanka, to talk and act in his name “in all financial and political matters and claims pertaining to me and to the Donevitch dynasty, with particular reference to Bosnian forest concessions and to the disposal of certain credits at present in the care of Barrett & De Russy, bankers of New York.” Wolfe sums up the “Balkan mess” thus: “The regent who rules Yugoslavia [then including Montenegro] deviously courts the friendship of certain nations….Prince Stefan…is being used by certain other nations, and…using them for his own ambition.”

   Wolfe mails the document to freelance P.I. Saul Panzer when Carla reappears, claiming that Neya is his vanished and adopted daughter (unseen since she was 3) and producing his signed adoption record, which he pockets, then solicits the details. Hired with Carla via an introduction by Donald Barrett, son of banker John P., Neya denies being seen by fencing student Nat Driscoll returning his suit coat to his locker, and was searched to no avail by Mrs. Jeanne Miltan. Belinda Reade and a dancing client, Ted Gill, refute Neya’s claim that she was then giving an épée lesson to Percy Ludlow, who asserts that she was getting cigarettes from his identical coat, mistaken for Driscoll’s, in an adjoining locker.

   Driscoll appears with lawyer Thompson, who retracts the charge — saying he’d forgotten his secretary took the gems to a jeweler to be set in a bracelet — but Archie advises Neya not to sign the quittance he produces. Chaos erupts as Jeanne is refusing him permission to ask the porter, Arthur, about stubs and ashes (“just curious”) in the room where Neya fenced with Ludlow, found with an épée stuck through his body. Its blunt point does not bear a col de mort (collar of death) stolen from Nikola’s office…which Archie discovers, upon returning home, in his coat pocket, rolled in a woman’s canvas gauntlet; at Wolfe’s to ask Archie about fleeing the crime scene, Cramer learns of three Feds descending on it.

   He lists 10 suspects with no apparent motive; one of them, Rudolph Faber, alibied Neya, last to see Ludlow alive, and comes to ask Wolfe’s interest in her, departing after he fails to retrieve the document while alone in the office. Another suspect, couturière Madame Zorka, calls to say that she saw Neya put something in Archie’s coat and plans to tell the police, so Wolfe tries to bring them together with Cramer, who has Purley fetch Neya as Carla tags along, also revealing Ludlow and Faber to be confidential agents of the British and German governments, respectively. Zorka has skipped, but Neya admits finding the gauntlet in her robe’s pocket and transferring it to Archie’s, because he was there to help.

   The roomies leave with Wolfe’s promise to return both papers to Neya that day, when she hopes her “political errand” will be done. Then Donald arrives, forced by Wolfe—under threat of exposing his designs on Yugoslav property—to let Archie collect Zorka, stashed at his love nest with Belinda, tipsy and déshabillé, but she escapes the brownstone during the night, which is reported to Cramer. Wolfe orders Archie to give Carla the document in Neya’s presence, yet in the flat they find Carla gone and Faber dead, so having gotten it back from Saul, Archie has fellow operative Fred Durkin, who was tailing them, return it to Wolfe, mindful of the thorough frisking the police will give him when they’re called.

   Back home, John P. comes and goes after Wolfe refuses an offer to hire him, and Zorka is pulled in by Cramer, admitting when confronted with evidence located by Saul that she is Pansy Bupp of Ottumwa, Iowa, backed by Donald. After further machinations, we learn that Neya, the incognito Vladanka, killed Ludlow, who knew she was in cahoots with the Barretts in dealing with the Nazis, and Faber, who tried to blackmail her. When she goes after Wolfe with a dagger, he kills her with a beer bottle (shades of Fer-de-Lance); Carla, accompanying her due to dependence on the Donevitch family, is really Wolfe’s adopted daughter, and he intends to help when she announces her decision to remain in America.

   Over My Dead Body was the earliest work in the canon to be adapted for the small screen (at least in the U.S.), as the two-part first-season finale of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery. “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01) was directed by star Timothy Hutton, who played Archie opposite Maury Chaykin’s Wolfe, and served as an executive producer; scenarist Janet Roach, in her only series entry, shared an Oscar nomination with Richard Condon when the latter’s novel Prizzi’s Honor (1982) was filmed by John Huston in 1985. The series boasted handsome period settings, exclusively Stout-based material, and a cast of more than twenty repertory players rotating in the roles of killers, victims, and suspects.

   Here, they embody the killer, Neya (Francie Swift); the victims, Ludlow (James Tolkan) and Faber (Richard Waugh); and suspects Carla (Kari Matchett), Zorka (Debra Monk), Jeanne (Nicky Guadagni), Nat Driscoll (Hrant Alianak), Belinda (Dina Barrington), and Donald (now Duncan; Boyd Banks). Other members include George Plimpton (as John Barrett), Robert Bockstael (Stahl), and David Schurmann (Thompson), with a two-time guest star, Ron Rifkin, as Nikola. The remaining regulars are Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), assistant Purley (R.D. Reid), cook/butler/majordomo Fritz Brenner (Colin Fox), and “the ’teers”: Saul (Conrad Dunn), Orrie Cather (Trent McMullen), and Fred (Fulvio Cecere).

   A collaborator with Alan J. Pakula on such films as Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), series composer Michael Small gives his score a suitably Balkan feel, heavy on cimbalom and violin. Roach hews closely to Stout while understandably omitting, for example, Archie’s encounter with Arthur (Peter Mensah) — in the novel a literally eye-rolling caricature, decidedly un-P.C. by today’s standards — as he flees the studio. The comic element is played up as Wolfe conceals the gauntlet and col de mort inside a loaf of hollowed-out Italian bread, disguised as a cake with chocolate icing, and then returns them to Archie’s coat to be “discovered” in Cramer’s presence at the end of the first half.

   Curiously, despite the scripted name change, the younger Barrett is playfully referred to as “Donnybonny,” as he is in the novel; Plimpton, who brings a properly patrician air to his father, was the “participatory journalist” whose book Paper Lion (1966), filmed with Alan Alda in 1968, depicts his tryout with the NFL’s Detroit Lions. In an odd directorial choice, separate encounters in Wolfe’s office with Barrett, Cramer, and Zorka are intercut into a montage that throws continuity to the winds. Over My Dead Body was adapted in 2012 on another Italian series, with Francesco Pannofino as Wolfe and Pietro Sermonti as Archie, as were Fer-de-Lance, The Rubber Band, The Red Box, and other books by Stout.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Booby Trap”

      Editions cited:

   The Rubber Band, The Hand in the Glove, Some Buried Caesar, Over My Dead Body: Bantam (1982, 1983)

   The Red Box, Too Many Cooks, Red Threads: Pyramid (1963, 1964)

      Online sources:

POKER FACE.“Dead Man’s Hand.” Peacock, 26 January 2023. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Natasha Lyonne (as Charlie Cale, a casino worker who goes on the run), Benjamin Brat (as Cliff LeGrand, the casino head of security, who is on the chase after her), Ron Perlman (as Sterling Frost Sr., the casino owner (voice only in this first episode)). Guest star: Adrien Brody (as Sterling Frost Jr.). Written, created and directed by Rian Johnson.

   The gimmick in this one, a new well-received streaming series that I think qualifies as a solid hit, is that casino cocktail waitress Charlie Cale has the unique ability to know when someone is lying to her face. Until things got too hot for her, she made a lot of money playing poker, where an ability would be hugely helpful.

   And of course knowing who is telling the truth and who is not would come in equally useful in solving crimes, including murder, which she does quite easily in this first episode, the only one I’ve seen so far. Invited in to a high stakes poker game by the manager of the casino where she’s working, she solves the killing of a maid she knows well, but in doing so, gets so far into hot water that by the end of the episode she’s forced to head out of town as fast as she can.

   The show is told in Colombo-type fashion, as we the viewer first she the killing and then flashing back to see exactly where Charlie manages to fit in. And as the last sentence of the previous paragraph suggests, each followup episode is a page out of The Fugitive’s notebook.

   Charlie is a brassy, self-identified “dumb ass” with wild hair type, and Natasha Lyonne is perfect for the part. (I think she had a great deal to do with the creation of the character.) The first season consists of ten episodes, with lots of well-known guest stars, and I’ve read that the series has already been renewed for a second season.

   The only drawback that I can see is that as a superpower, being a human lie detector could easily make solving crimes all too easy. Superman had Kryptonite to keep him in check. What’s Charlie’s Achilles heel?

   It’s too bad you have to sign up for Peacock (a subsidiary of NBC) to see this, but on the basis of this first episode, it’s well worth the money, given that there’s other stuff there to watch as well.

RICHIE BROCKELMAN, PRIVATE EYE. “A Title on the Door, and a Carpet on the Floor.” NBC, 31 March 1978 (Series 1, Episode 3). Dennis Dugan (Richie Brockelman), Barbara Bosson (Sharon Deterson), Robert Hogan (Sgt. Ted Coopersmith). Guest Cast: Carol Lynley, Charles Siebert, Rene Auberjonois, Jim McKrell. Screenplay: Steven Bochco & Stephen J. Cannell. Director: Arnold Laven. Available on YouTube here.

   Coming in at perhaps exactly the middle of this short-lived private eye series, it is difficult to explain what was the driving force behind it. It started out first a made-for-TV movie, then a two-hour episode of The Rockford Files. Following this it was picked up a short series episodes on NBC, then appearing once again as another two-hour episode of The Rockford Files. (If I have any of this wonrg, please so advise in the comments.)

   Suffice it to say, perhaps, that it was the apparent youthfulness of Richie Brockelman that was intended to be its appeal, at 22 the youngest PI in town, complete with a semi-dorky haircut and a somewhat funny name. Otherwise it was just another PI show taking place in LA with lots of scenes with cars driving from one place to another.

   In this particular episode, both Richie and his secretary are hired by a much bigger outfit to come work for them, even while Richie is still investigating the death of a client’s husband. Does the discerning viewer think that someone at the much bigger outfit has a nefarious reason behind this? The discerning viewer does, and the discerning viewer would be absolutely correct.

   I may have made this sound less interesting than it was, but in all seriousness it was no better nor worse than the standard TV PI fare at the time. In this case, at least, “no worse” was not enough, and the plug was pulled after only the five episodes.