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 —