"Black Orchids"

Nero Wolfe may be a nearly insufferable genius and remarkably successful detective, but he is also a man with a great many distinctive personal likes and dislikes. His taste in food combines the gourmet with the gourmand, as a result of which he generally weighs about a seventh of a ton. He rarely leaves home on business, preferring to send Archie Goodwin on errands and explorations. And he has a passion for growing orchids, which he indulges in the plant room on the top floor of the New York City brownstone where he lives and works. His time with these beauties cannot be violated; daily, he tends to the orchids from 9 to 11 in the morning and then again between 4 and 6 in the afternoon. As a general rule, the orchids simply add a great deal of color, both to Wolfe's life and the reader's pleasure, but they are - again generally speaking - valued primarily for their decorative value. However, on a few occasions in the course of Rex Stout's 33 novels and 39 novellas featuring Mr. Wolfe and Archie, the orchids have been unusual enough to warrant their being featured at the heart of one of the stories. That's the case with the two novellas published together in 1942 as Black Orchids. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

In the first of the two stories, which itself is entitled “Black Orchids,” Nero Wolfe is both tempted and frustrated by the news that a rival orchid grower is displaying three extremely rare black orchid plants which that rival himself had bred. Wolfe sends Archie to the flower show to see the flowers and take some mental notes, but by the fourth day, Mr. Wolfe can no longer stand the strain, and he goes to the flower show to see these rare orchids for himself. And then, of course, there is a murder, with Archie and Mr. Wolfe right in the thick of things. Which is about the last thing homicide Inspector Cramer and his team want to find when the police arrive at the murder scene. On the other hand, Wolfe has his own plans which just might allow him to acquire the exotic black orchids for himself...

The second mystery in the book is called “Cordially Invited to Meet Death." As Archie explains, the connecting factors between these two stories are black orchids, for, we are told, Wolfe sent eight of those ultra-rare beauties to a funeral service – and you’ll have to read the story for an explanation. It’s about a particularly nasty murder that takes place among a group of very high society party planners led by Bess Huddleston – think real-life society hostesses like Perle Mesta or Elsa Maxwell, both of whom were in their prime and very much in the public eye in the 1940s. Bess Huddleston has been getting poisoned pen letters and wants Wolfe to make them stop. There are some wonderful details in the setting – Bess lives in a mansion where wild animals such as a chimpanzee, a cheetah and a couple of bears wander unmolested through the area behind her house. And the murder method is both quite ingenious and uniquely horrifying (although Stout himself did use a similar method in another of the Nero Wolfe books).

There's a great deal of fun to be had with Black Orchids. I think that Stout was often more successful when he was working under the time-and-length restrictions necessary for the shorter form of the novella. I think you'll enjoy these stories.