Three for the Chair (1957) is a somewhat transitional work, containing the last two Nero Wolfe novellas originally published in The American Magazine  —  as all others had been: “Immune to Murder” (November 1955) and “A Window for Death” (as “Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue,” May 1956). Rex Stout’s longtime outlet ceased publication with its August 1956 issue, so “Too Many Detectives” (September 14, 1956) debuted in Collier’s (which ironically followed suit soon after). “Window” concerns a murder committed in the Churchill Towers, and thus occasions mentions of “Tim Evarts, assistant house dick, security officer to you,” although Archie himself later repeats the “house dick” reference.

   â€œDetectives” also marks the first appearance in the canon proper of early female P.I. and occasional employee Theodolinda “Dol” Bonner, who after a solo effort, The Hand in the Glove (1937), figured in the Tecumseh Fox novel Bad for Business (1940), but ended up on the cutting-room floor when the latter was rewritten as the Wolfe novella “Bitter End” (1940).

   â€œI am against female detectives on principle,” Archie begins, but “there are times when a principle should take a nap, and that was one of them.” In Albany, he meets Dol and operative Sally Colt when all 590 private detectives licensed by the state, including a typically tetchy Wolfe, are summoned for questioning due to the “wiretapping scandals.”

   Three confreres from the Association of Licensed Private Detectives of New York State (ALPDNYS) — Steve Amsel (fired by Del Bascom), Jay Kerr, and Harland Ide — are also waiting to follow as Albert Hyatt, a special deputy of the secretary of state, questions our heroes. A man purporting to be Otis Ross had hired them to tap his own phone, which is legal, and disappeared when they learned he was not; Hyatt tells Wolfe he has a surprise, and gets one himself when the client, waiting in another room, is found strangled. Leon Groom, Albany’s chief of detectives, arrests them as material witnesses in the murder of William A. Donahue, who claimed Wolfe knew his identity…and that the tap was illegal.

   Bailed out by Stanley Rogers at the behest of Parker, and compelled to take a room at the Latham Hotel, Wolfe gathers the confreres/suspects to pool knowledge and resources; he learns that each had similar experiences but Amsel, who says he refused a tap-request by Donahue using his own name. Those tapped and his target manqué constitute the Charity Funds Investigating Committee, and Wolfe has the 48 operatives they collectively supply look into any connections with Hyatt, who had arranged for all seven to be there that day. The counsel for one of the suspect fund-raising organizations, Hyatt planned to scapegoat Donahue, believed safely out of the state, and killed him after he appeared unexpectedly.

   â€œImmune” finds Wolfe and Archie as guests at River Bend, the Adirondacks mountain lodge of Hemisphere Oil Co. (Hemoco) tycoon O.V. Bragan, at the request of Assistant Secretary of State David M. Leeson; Ambassador Theodore Kelefy, of “a foreign country with which our country wanted to make a deal,” has asked to catch a brook trout and have it cooked by Wolfe. A friend/advisor, financier Spiros Papps, identifies the others as oil-syndicate representative James Arthur Ferris and spouses Sally Leeson and Adria Kelefy. One of the five anglers doesn’t get to sample the baked brook trout Montbarry: Leeson, whom Archie finds in the river, his skull smashed in, while landing his own “supertrout.”

   Noting that the Kelefys and Papp enjoy “diplomatic immunity from arrest or detention,” D.A. Jasper Colvin says the evidence points to murder by somebody at the lodge, with a club from the woodpile, and the obvious inference a connection with the rivalry between Bragan and Ferris over Kelefy’s oil rights. Wolfe (weight-watch: Archie specifies his as 278 lbs.), who refuses to explain why the 20 trout he cooked included none caught by the ambassador — as verified by cook Michael Samek — wants only to go home. As all await the arrival of state A.G. Herman Jessel, Wolfe reluctantly tells Kelefy, “it amuses me to twist the tails of highly placed persons…I thought it would be nice touch of mockery…”

   Wolfe tells Jessel, Colvin, and Sheriff Nate Dell he’s ready to identify the murderer, but only with everyone present — and after a call to the Secretary of State, in which he reveals the true reason: Kelefy’s trout had been caught prior to the others, allowing him time for the murder. Having conferred by phone (in French, as a trooper listened) with Parker, he knew he might risk imprisonment if Kelefy were maltreated by “officers of the law,” thus the call to Washington. The motive is revealed to have no “relation to his public mission or the negotiations” but was purely personal, as Sally confirms that her husband had been seduced by Adria while he was the embassy secretary in their unnamed fictional country.

   Directed by John R. Pepper, and also broadcast in a double-length international version, “Immune to Murder” (8/18/02) was the final episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, and the only one adapted by Stuart Kaminsky. The prolific, Edgar Award-winning novelist, film professor/biographer, Mystery Writers of America president, and occasional scenarist  —  e.g., Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America (1984) — specifies Kelefy (Giancarlo Esposito) as the “Vezenhuegan ambassador.” Local law has been scrambled somewhat, with Colvin, Dell, trooper Lt. Hopp, and Jessel recombined into Captain Colvin Jasper (sic; Richard Waugh), trooper Nate (Matthew Edison), and D.A. Jessel (Steve Cumyn).

   A faux news report kicks off the episode, identifying Bragan (David Schurmann), Ferris (Seymour Cassel, previously seen in “Before I Die” [6/16/02]), and Papps (Carlo Rota),  on camera. A reporter (Adam Reid) interviews Leeson (Robert Bockstael), who calls the gathering “an experiment on how being in nature — away from the secretaries, the pens and paper, [and the] long tables of formal diplomacy…may actually be able to change people’s minds,” explicitly compared with Ike’s then-imminent use of Camp David. In his narration, Archie (Timothy Hutton) notes that, “Twenty years ago…Wolfe [Maury Chaykin] got the papers that made him a U.S. citizen,” and thus agreed out of gratitude.

   Here, Papps has a predetermined “migraine,” sitting out the angling with Sally (Susannah Hoffmann) and Adria (Manon von Gerkan), as the Cook (George Plimpton) makes an ill-advised joke to Wolfe about his recipe requiring salt and onion. The credits are typically careless: Waugh’s character is addressed as Captain Colvin in the dialogue, and Cassel’s identified as, respectively, “Janus” and “James” in the opening and closing titles. Sadly, the series does not end on a high note, with pervasive scenery-chewing by, e.g., Waugh, Schurmann, and even Chaykin, as he bellows (via Kaminsky, not Rex Stout) about being in “a nightmare, dime-store, frontier theme park filled with bacteria-infested animals…”

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Christmas Party”

Edition cited  —

      Three for the Chair: Bantam (1958)

Online source —

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and paperback.  TV mini-series: CBS 1978 (starring James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”).

   The Dain Curse is a bad novel cobbled together from four interlinked stories from Black Mask. I disliked the novel when I first read it many years ago. Then after a recent debate on the Rara-Avis listserve about its merits, I resolved to read it again. This time reading the four stories as originally published to see if that improved my experience. It didn’t.

   Taking the four stories separately, however, there are some ebbs and flows of merit. It is Hammett after all. And bad Hammett is still better than a lot of stuff out there. I just wouldn’t recommend a re-read is all.

Story 1: “Black Lives.”  (Black Mask, November 1928)

   The Continental OP is hired by an insurance company to investigate stolen diamonds. Edgar Leggett had been loaned the diamonds by a local jeweler for the purpose of conducting some experiments adding hue to the stones. The OP begins to suspect that there’s something fishy about the so called theft.

   And bad things happen to Leggett and his family. Leggett’s daughter, Gabrielle, is informed by her step mother that all of the badness can be traced to a family curse (her mother’s maiden name was Dain): The Dain Curse: “[Y]ou’re cursed with the same rotten soul and black blood…all the Dains have had, you’re cursed with your mother’s death on your hands before you were five; you’re cursed with the warped mind and the need for drugs that I’ve given you in pay for your silly love since you were a baby. Your life will be black as…mine [was] black; the lives of those you touch will be black”.

   In the end the OP solves the crime of the missing diamonds, the insurance company is happy. But the Dain Curse remains!!

Story 2: “The Hollow Temple.” (Black Mask, December 1928)

   By far the best of the four stories, in this one Gabrielle Leggett joins a cult and goes missing. The OP is hired by her fiancé to recover the girl — which he does — but not before crushing the hollow temple forged by a charismatic charlatan out of morphine, laughing gas, sight gags, and mullah.

Story 3: “Black Honeymoon.”  (Black Mask, January 1929)

   Once Gabrielle Leggett is saved from the hollow temple, her fiancé elopes with her. The honeymoon does not go well, and the OP is called in to pick up the shards.

Story 4: “Black Riddle.” (Black Mask, February 1929)

   The so called riddle is this: If you don’t believe in Dain curses, why are all these bad things happening to Gabrielle Leggett? In this horribly told story, the OP mansplains for all to hear the solution to the three prior stories.

   He doesn’t show us. He tells us. Giving us a bunch of undisclosed information based on unsupported guesswork that just so happens to be completely right and confessed to by the criminal mastermind. It’s absolutely the worst kind of ending of a mystery. No fair play. No show don’t tell. Just a boring dispositive lecture telling you the answer in a terribly unsatisfying way.

         —

   So yeah. Hated it. Almost couldn’t finish it. Upon starting the book I immediately remembered who the ‘criminal mastermind’ was. This made my experience of the book infinitely worse as I could witness the lack of fair play in real time as the story unfolded.

   If Fast One is ODTAA (thanks, Roger) – -for whatever reason Hammett eschews ODTAA, insisting on a criminal mastermind to tie all of the miscreants and their collective miscreantry together. It’s an unnecessary conceit that spoils the whole thing. Ironically the curse of the Dain Curse is that there’s no Dain Curse.

   If Hammett had simply allowed the curse to linger all might have been okay. But Hammett takes such pains to dispel the curse that he destroys whatever mystery is left. Rather than solving the case, the whole thing crumbles in a monologue that neatly ties up everything in a bow. But what results is neither trick nor treat. Turns out the Dain Curse is the cursed book itself.

   I’ve lost a lot of time and energy to a stubborn UTI since Thursday, but after being on meds since Friday, I think my wheels are finally back on track. Back in action soon!

(*) If you don’t know what a UTI is, incurred by me following a semi-annual bladder checkup the week before, you can Google it. But even if you do know, what I know is that you don’t want to have one…

   First three episodes available today or tonight, or so they say:

EMMA LATHEN – Brewing Up a Storm. John Putnam Thatcher #23. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1996. Harper, paperback, 1998.

   Just in case there is anyone left who doesn’t now that Emma Lathen is really Mary Latsis and Martha Henissart, now you do.

   Thatcher, Senior VP of Sloan Guaranty & Trust, finds himself in the middle of trouble again when one of the bank’s clients, a brewer of beer both alcoholic and non-, finds itself targeted by an organization against youthful drinking which seems to feel that the brewer is deliberately trying to lead the youth of America from one of its products to the other.

   The leader of the organization is a lady who is something of a loose cannon who is in the process of alienating everyone she comes in contact with, friend or foe. The campaign attracts the attention of politicians, special interest groups, and all sorts of other people, and feelings run high. Then there’s a murder.

   I like Emma Lathen’s books. Always have. They are predictable in their format, but they are well and smoothly written, and the business backgrounds are always well researched and interesting. Thatcher is not a Great Detective, and indeed is probably not on stage over half the time, if that. After having lurked around the edges for most of the book, though, he usually has a flash of insight that helps bring the case to an end. Good, dependable stuff, and this is one of the better.

ROBERT SILVERBERG – The Time Hoppers. Doubleday & Co., hardcover, 1967. Avon S372, paperback, October 1968; cover art by Don Punchatz. Belmont Tower, paperback, 1974. Ace, paperback, 1982. Expansion of the story “Hopper,” which first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, October 1956, and was collected in Next Stop the Stars (Ace Double F-145, 1962).

   Quellen, a minor bureaucrat in the Secretariat of Crime, found his own solution to the overcrowded conditions of the world in the year 2490: a secret illegal hideaway in Africa. But others have resorted to time travel as an answer to their problems, and Quellen is assigned the job of stopping the hoppers without disturbing the stability of the present time.

   There are the usual paradoxes which are brought out, [and] the obvious course of action occurs soon enough, but there is more. Mankind is becoming dehumanized with the intolerable masses of people. Unspeakable crimes and customs are common, sore of a preliminary interlude before the world of Archexecutive Shale in “Pity about Earth” (Report 93), but here they are more forcefully realized. Time travel has this time become the background to an excellent picture of despair.

Rating: ****½

JOSEPH MONCURE – The Wild Party. [Narrative poem.] Pascal Covici, Inc. hardcover, 1926/1928, banned in Boston. Covici Friede, hardcover, 1929. Citadel Prss, hardcover, 1949. Award, paperback, 1975 (novelization by Terence O’Neill of film produced that same year based on the book). Pantheon, hardcover. 1994 (drawings by Art Spiegelman.) Many/most/all? reprint editions as by Joseph Moncure March. Film: AIP, 1975 (director: James Ivory; starring James Coco, Raquel Welch, Perry King). Two stage musicals, NYC, 1999-2000.

   Queenie and Burrs are a couple. A sodden, soiled couple of handsome gutter rats, dressed to the nines.

   Burrs, most folks agreed “in language without much lace

   They’d like to break his god-damned face”

   â€œOh, yes—Burrs was a charming fellow:

   Brutal with women, and proportionately yellow”

   â€œ[One victim’s] brother had great fun

   Looking for Burrs with a snub-nosed gun”

   Queenie, hungover, pleads:

   â€œBurrsie! pour out a cup for me!

   Said she”

   Burrs, ever the gentleman:

   â€œThe hell I will, you lazy slut!

   Do you think you’re the prince of wales, or what?

   â€¦You rotten bitch!

   I’ll fix you yet!

   She grabbed a knife from the kitchenette

   Her face was white as through newly plastered.

   You touch me—

   I’ll kill you, you filthy bastard!”

   They decide what they need is a wild party to cure the doldrums.

   â€œA grand piano stood in the corner

   With the air of a coffin waiting for a mourner”

   Queenie gets all dolled up:

   â€œMy god, Queenie; you’re looking swell!

   Quoth Queenie:

   I’m feeling slick as hell!”

   Queenie decides to find a replacement man at the party. And finds a suitable suitor, named Mr. Black.

   â€œBlack said nothing, but he thought hard…

   So she lived with Burrs!

   He was somewhat jarred

   He looked Burrs over, and he liked his looks

   About as well as a fish likes hooks…

   His smile grew knowing:

   His drink grew small:

   Just a good-looking harlot, after all!”

   Burrs gets a bit jealous of Queenie and Black:

   â€œYou’re jealous!

   Jealous?

   He gave her a glittering stare:

   You’re crazy!

   What the hell do I care!”

   â€œThe bed was a slowly moving tangle

   Of legs and bodies at every angle”

   â€œWho yer laughin’ at, you tart!

   I’ll break yer god-damned face apart!”

   â€œHis face began to twitch:

   I’ll fix you plenty, you son of a bitch!”

“Some love is fire: some love is rust

   But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.”

   Burrs catches Queenie and Black in In flagrante delicto.

   â€œThe gun flashed—

   Crashed!

   Staccato, and vicious it spoke.

   Silence.

   Darkness.

   The air smelled sharp with smoke.”

   â€œJes’s Christ!—I’ve hurt my shin—

   The door sprang open

   And the cops rushed in.”
         —-

   It’s alright. No need to run out and get a copy or anything. But it is an interesting document of its times and shows that the hardboiled style knows no bounds, poetry being a perfectly fine setting for a street vernacular told tale of alcohol, sex and vengeance.

   A copy of the book is currently available online here:

      https://musicalstagecompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/The-Wild-Party-March.pdf/
   

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE – A Study in Scarlet. Ward, Lock & Co., July 1888. Lippincott, US, 1890. First appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 (eleven copies are known to still exist). Reprinted numerous times. Adapted to radio, TV and the movies perhaps even more countless times.

   The question must be asked at once: Would A Study in Scarlet be remembered and read today if there had been no other Sherlock Holmes novels or stories to follow it? Certainly it would be read, to the extent that Doyle’s White Company and Lost World are read, but it’s doubtful the book would have anything approaching its present popularity. A Study in Scarlet owes its status as a cornerstone to the fact that it introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes.

   However, the book is not without merit of its own. Doyle’s clear achievement in creating the character of Sherlock Holmes,complete and full-blown, is nothing short of masterful. The case he investigates certainly has its points of interest, and the surprising arrest of the killer at the end of part one is a scene that would not be matched in mystery fiction until the equally surprising arrest at the conclusion of Ellery Queen’s Tragedy of X.

   The first half of the novel deals with the meeting of Holmes and Watson, their taking rooms together in Baker Street, and Holmes’s investigation of the Lauriston Garden mystery, in which two men named Drebber and Stangerson are found murdered. each with the German word for revenge written in blood on the wall above the bodies. Holmes traps the killer at the book’s halfway point. and part two is devoted to a lengthy flashback to the early Mormon settlement of Utah, and the crimes that prompted the revenge slayings half a world away.

   Though the Mormon portion of the book is interesting enough on its own. one longs to return to Holmes, and this same sort of flaw marks The Valley of Fear and to some extent The Sign of the Four. Only in The Hound of the Baskervilles is the narrative maintained without the final flashback. Still. no study of Holmes is complete without A Study in Scarlet.

   Of the other novels, The Valley of Fear (1915) is far superior to The Sign of he Four (1890), in part because its flashback portion tells a fascinating story of labor unrest in the Pennsylvania coal fields of a secret society called the Scowrers, obviously patterned after the Molly Maguires. The other three short-story collections — The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927) — all have their high spots, and all should be explored by the dedicated mystery reader.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – July 1967. Overall rating: ***½

CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG “The Second Commandment.” Short novel. A minister’s wife falls to her death while answering a “call of nature” along the highway. Afterward the minister discovers he can no longer love all his neighbors. Fine personal point of view, but fails as a mystery story. (4)

AGATHA CHRISTIE “At the Stroke of Twelve.” First appeared in The Sketch, 10 OctobeR 1923, as “The Kidnapping of Johnnie Waverly.” Poirot deduces a man has kidnapped his own son, but then he has all the clues. (3)

JOHN DICKSON CARR “The Lion’s Paw.” First appeared in The Strand Magazine. July 1938, as “Error at Daybreak” by Carter Dickson. Colonel March. A fake suicide attempt is mistaken for a mysterious murder on a deserted hearth. (3)

CORNELL WOOLRICH “Divorce – New York Style.” Serial, part 2 of 2. The girl in a staged hotel room bit dies in the bed, end of Part 1. Scene two in the police station is disappointing. (3)

DENNIS M. DUBIN “Elroy Quinn’s Last Case.” First story. Elroy stops a plot designed to disrupt international relations. Clever! (5) [Note: the author’s only work of short crime fiction.]

ELLERY QUEEN “The President Regrets.” Puzzle story with presidential names. (2)

SHIRLEY WALLACE “The Tiger’s Cub. First story. A man defends his son. (3) [Note: The author’s only work of short crime fiction.]

CELIA FREMLIN “The Special Gift.” An amateur authors’ club meets a man with a strange deadly dream (3)

GUY CULLINGFORD “Something to Get at Quick.” Juvenile delinquency and a stabbing in London. (4)

MIRIAM ALLEN deFORD “The Impersonation Murder Case.” An actor discovers that he is the fall guy in a murder investigation. Sorry, I don’t Believe It. (3)

JOAN RICHTER “Intruder in the Maize.” An arrogant man in Africa should not deal with poison. One bad flaw. (2)

BRIAN HAYES “Security Risk.” First appeared in The (London) Evening News, 19 April 1961. A test works beautifully. (4)

LAWRENCE TREAT “B As in Burglary.” Bankhart of the Homicide Squad is led to the stolen jewels by the murderer’s daughter, and the romance is over. (4)

PAUL CAIN – Fast One. Doubleday Doran, hardcover, 1933. Originally published serially in Black Mask magazine. Reprint editions include: Bonded Mystery #10, 1946. Avon #178, paperback, 1948. Southern Illinois University Press, hardcover, 1978. Popular Library, paperback, 1978. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   Gerry Kells is a retired gunman living in L.A. He’s now a gentleman gambler. Or at least a gambler. Whose bets are rarely gambles at all, since the fix is almost always in. That’s what he thinks.

   L.A. is wide open, and various gangs are battling for control. Kells wants none of it. He thinks he can stay out of the fray by staying neutral.

   But one by one, each of the mob bosses arrange a meeting, to hire his gun, to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

   I’m quits, he repeats. Time and time again. I’m done. I don’t even carry a gun.

   But no one believes him. They figure if he’s not with them, he’s against them. And they try to take him out.

   And one by one, they lose. Yes, he’s just one man. But he’s plenty tough and a fast one with a piece.

   The mobs keep pulling fast ones on him, only he’s faster. And before he knows it, he finds himself in a pretty good spot to take over L.A. himself. With a little luck, and some help from his moll Granquist and a couple of friends, he gives it a shot. Or however many shots he can, ’til the ammo runs out.

   It reminds me a fair bit of Red Harvest — another open city Poisonville, but from a gunman’s perspective. And like the Continental OP, Kells is constrained in his violence by a sense of justice and fair play missing from his adversaries. So while he’s no knight errant, he’s motivated as much by greed as revenge in the service of justice. Which he extracts, exactingly.

   The prose is Hammer-like. But don’t be fooled into reading it quickly. While my edition was under 150 pages, the action is dense. He doesn’t belabor the action. With spartan description: Double and triple crosses occur in an eye’s wink, and if you don’t take your time in reading and re-reading the lines as they come at you, you’ll find yourself lost. There’s lots of players and more action than you can shake a gat at. No time to flick off the safety. Be ready. It’s coming at you at the speed of birdshot.

   This is my third time reading it in the span of maybe twenty-five years. There’s so much action that I remembered very few of the details going into it. The sheer amount and speed of the action gives the book a level of re-readability seldom found. And I enjoyed it more and understood it better this time than ever before.

   I’d put it in the pre-1933 hardboiled canon, with the other cannonballs being Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, Glass Key, Green Ice, Death in a Bowl, You Can’t Win, Louis Beretti, Young Lonigan, Sanctuary, Daughter of Earth, Georgia Nigger, the writings of Jim Tully and Hemingway, Life in the Iron Mills, and precious little else.

   Highest possible praise for this groundbreaking hardboiled novel.