I decided last week that I needed to be reading something that lent itself to small chunks, since during the time I was nominally re-reading Freedom & Necessity, I was really mostly flipping through old Discover magazines, because Freedom & Necessity was too likely to consume time and energy I didn’t have to spare. None of the anthologies we had at the time looked appealing (or they were, you guessed it, in boxes somewhere), so I thought I’d work my way through the Nero Wolfe collections in order because, well, why not?
I’d recently read both the first, Black Orchids, and the second, Not Quite Dead Enough. Both are two story collections; the next, Trouble in Triplicate, sets the pattern for the rest by having three stories and some reference to “three” in the title. (The only exception is And Four to Go.) Later collections sometimes have a theme, which is indicated by their title (for instance, Three Witnesses); this book’s theme is apparently “stories Kate doesn’t like.”
I began reading the first, “Before I Die,” and partway through said, “Oh look—legal stuff!” (In case anyone is curious: I’m almost certain the legal maneuvering at the end wouldn’t have worked then. It would be much easier to achieve that purpose now, but with a different method.) This is the one where Wolfe gets involved with the Mob because he’s craving meat and there’s a shortage. It was on A&E recently, and I passed up watching it because it’s frankly a silly premise.
“Help Wanted, Male” was on A&E last night; someone’s out to kill Wolfe and he hires a decoy. It does have Archie in uniform, being the third World War II story (the other two are in Not Quite Dead Enough), but beyond that I think it has little to recommend it, turning on a deeply absurd plot point. (Chad tells me that I missed seeing Fritz trying to look menacing while holding a gun on people, which I admit could have been worth a look.) I’ve never liked this one and still don’t.
“Instead of Evidence” has a nice subtle, though not very distinctive, title, and that’s about all. I don’t understand the series’ apparent obsession with explosive devices, and the longer I read these, the more annoyed I get at Wolfe’s cavalier attitude towards methods of justice. Also, I refuse to believe Archie could be as stupid as he appears, even for the moment described in the book.
As Wolfe would say: Pfui.