The Black Mountain (A Nero Wolfe Mystery Book 24)

Product Information

Contains the short stories " A Window for Death", " Immune to Murder" and " Too Many Detectives" [1] :84 (a fix-up novel) The author, Rex Stout, wrote many other Nero Wolfe stories before this one. There is a reason in that factoid not to make this your first Wolfe read. Out-of-Genre Experience: While most of the stories are armchair-detective-meets-noirish-gumshoe murder mysteries, this one is more of an adventure story with elements of a 1950s Cold War spy thriller bolted onto it.

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Stout, Rex (2000). An Officer and a Lady and Other Stories. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-0764-X. Stout’s characters are flat and wooden. By his own admission he once said he doesn’t want people focusing on the characters but on the story (I found out last week in a short bio on Wikipedia — consider the source. He may have been all about character development). Instead he wanted his readers to focus on the story, the mystery, apparently.All I can say is Wow! Considering the fact that this book was written in 1954, it seems very presc Time reviewer J.F. Powers gave the book a favorable review, indicating that "even veteran aficionados will be hypnotized by this witty, complex mystery." [1] Publication history [ edit ] Fritz came in with a piece of paper in his hand and demanded, ‘Were you drunk when you wrote this?” Rex Stout, Death of a Doxy 13. The Father Hunt Stout, Rex (April 19, 1963). "Why Nero Wolfe Likes Orchids". Life. Vol.54, no.16. p.108 . Retrieved 2015-03-20.

And now I’m going to do something unusual and give you the last lines of the book, because it doesn’t make any difference to the mystery and it’s what made me fall in love with Stout: The Illegal: Wolfe and Archie are undocumented immigrants in Montenegro, but manage to avoid both imprisonment and deportation. Dirty Communists: Gospo Stritar, Jube Bilic, Peter Zov, and the Albanians are all nefarious reds of one sort or another, but the Tito-Stalin split means they are not all on the same side.

Need Help?

A Family Affair is a Nero Wolfe detective novel published by the Viking Press in 1975. It is the last Nero Wolfe book written by Rex Stout who died less than six months after the publication of the book. Darby, Ken, The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe (1983, Little, Brown and Company; ISBN 0-316-17280-4). Biography of the brownstone "as told by Archie Goodwin." Includes detailed floor plans.

Abridged as "Dark Vengeance" in The American Magazine (June 1939); republished as The Mountain Cat Murders [1] :16–17 This is a very unusual move for Wolfe, because, as previously noted, he hates going anywhere. Normally, he can’t abide vehicles, as expressed graphically in Some Buried Caesar (1939)—”My distrust and hatred of vehicles in motion is partly based on my plerophony that their apparent submission to control is illusory and that they may at their pleasure, and sooner or later will, act on whim”—and in The Red Box—“’Sir, I would not enter a taxicab for a chance to solve the Sphinx’s deepest riddle with all the Nile’s cargo as my reward.’ He sank his voice to an outraged murmur. ‘Good god. A taxicab.’” He was also, as he noted to Martin Dies, very anti-Communist, which later led him to become a proponent of the Vietnam War, which did not win him favor in some quarters. There was some comment, too, about another quote he gave: “I used to think that men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen.” It was nice that he liked Austen, everyone felt, but what did that say about the rest of womankind? Mood Whiplash: Wolfe and Archie's solemn tragical reflection about the murder of a close friend and major recurring character is humorously interrupted when Archie observes that Wolfe needs directions to find the Manhattan morgue despite the decades he's spent solving murders. Written in 1955, Stout places the Cold War front and center of the book. We begin with the death of Marko Vukcic, a recurring character who was a friend of Nero and owner of one of the very few restaurants the big man would deign to enter. As the author moves us into the weeks ahead, it becomes clear that the killer has left NYC, if not the USA.

Stout's authorized biographer John McAleer describes this as Stout's first published story [a] [2] :546 That was the same year as his last book, A Family Affair. The plot of that book tied in tightly with Watergate and “the skullduggery of Richard Nixon and his crew.” A few years earlier, in 1971, Stout had said in an interview, “One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there’s always some reason to live another year. And I’d like to live another year so that Nixon won’t be President. If he’s re-elected, I’ll have to live another four years.” If you know and enjoy the world of Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe and his brownstone in his other stories, this is an interesting divergence. He Who Fights Monsters: As a guerilla committed to fighting the regime, Danilo has had to sacrifice some of his humanity and morality, to the point where he almost condemns Wolfe and Archie to death. Only a speech from his wife convinces him otherwise. Contains the short stories " Home to Roost", " The Cop-Killer" and " The Squirt and the Monkey" [1] :82