REX STOUT – Death of a Doxy. Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin #42. Viking Press, hardcover, 1966. Reprinted several times.

   The word “doxy” is no longer a common word, certainly not one in everyday language today. To get this review started, allow me to quote from page 45 of the 1995 Bantam paperback edition:
   

         â€œMy sister was a what?”

         “D, O, X, Y, doxy. I happen to like that better than concubine or paramour or mistress….”
   

   Or a “kept woman,” perhaps, but maybe that’s a phrase that’s outdated and old-fashioned, too.
   

      Dramatis personae:

Isabel Kerr, the doxy, formerly in show business
Avery Ballou, rich businessman and Isabel’s sugar daddy
Orrie Cather, private investigator
Jill Hardy, Orrie’s fiancée, an airline stewardess
Stella Fleming, Isabel Kerr’s sister
Barry Fleming, Stella’s husband, a mathematics professor
Amy Jackson, a.k.a. Julie Jaquette, a night club singer and Isabel’s best friend
Archie Goodwin, private investigator and assistant to
Nero Wolfe, private investigator
   

   Orrie Cather, one of three freelance PI’s Wolf calls upon when needed, is suspected of killing the doxy, with who Cather had has an ongoing relationship and who was using it to threaten his current engagement with Jill Hardy (see above). Conferring with Sanul Panzer and Fred Durken, the other two of Wolfe’s staff of standby PI’s, he and Archie agree that Orrie is innocent, and that they must take his case, even though he is not a paying client.

   And so they do. The real killer identifies him/herself quickly. Evidence to support their conclusion is non-existent. The problem is threefold: (1) find such evidence, but in such a way that (2) the sugar daddy (see above) is not identified, and if possible (3) get paid.

   All of which requires quite a bit of finesse, which is accomplished in a most exemplary fashion, assisted in large part by one of the most fascinating female characters I’ve ever encountered in one of Wolfe and Archie’s cases, that being Julie Jaquette, the dead woman’s best friend who agrees to pull off a huge bluff to entice the killer out into the open, a ploy that involves more than a hint of danger.

   Not only is she gutsy, but she’s a woman who’s also not shy, can think on her feet (listen in on her conversation with Inspector Cramer when he becomes a little too inquisitive, for example). She goes toe-to-toe in banter and other conversation not only with Archie but Wolfe himself. She may be the only woman who’s ever stayed in the brownstone overnight and called Wolfe “Nero” in the morning.

   And what’s more, the ploy works to perfection.

   Right now this has become my favorite Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin novel, and that’s saying something. I don’t want to crowd in on Matthew Bradley’s ongoing series about the TV adaptations of the books and stories, so I’ll just mention in passing that Death of a Doxy was shown in two parts on the A&E Nero Wolfe series, and that the first ten minutes of it (all I’ve seen so far) is pitch perfect in execution.