I am full of contentment and generalized good-will today; it started yesterday with a lovely dinner, and continues because I currently have something like free time for the first time in, oh, weeks. It’s not going to last, but while I have it, I’m going to get this updated, darn it.
Early last week I snagged a copy of Rex Stout’s Black Orchids while in Albany for a job interview. Unlike Chad, I wouldn’t rule out the title story appearing on TV, since Johnny’s part could easily be filled by Orrie. It was interesting to see that in this, the first Wolfe story collection, Stout made an attempt at linking up the stories with some filler text and a forced cross-story reference. I’m glad the device wasn’t used again, as the explicit reference doesn’t really work, though there’s a subtler touch that I thought was amusing. On the first page of “Black Orchids,” Archie explains that of course he was the one stuck with going to the flower show, because “Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out.” In “Cordially Invited to Meet Death,” Archie reports to Wolfe on a visit to the client:
When he’s doing a complete coverage, he thinks nothing of asking such a question as, “Did the animal pour the iodine on the grass with its right paw or its left?” If he were a movable object and went places himself it would save me a lot of breath, but then that’s what I get paid for. Partly.
I’m not all that crazy about “Black Orchids,” but “Cordially Invited . . . ” was fairly entertaining, even if Wolfe does one-and-a-half things wildly out of character. If nothing else, it made me very grateful that tetanus vaccinations are available now; I didn’t realize how easy it could be to get infected.