Fans of Rex Stout's novels about Nero Wolfe and his right-hand man, Archie Goodwin, will know that there is very little that frightens Wolfe. What kind of shock would it take to make Nero Wolfe flee? I mean run away from the brownstone house on West 35th Street in New York City - run away and disappear, after announcing his retirement from the detective business?
What would it take? The answer: Arnold Zeck, perhaps Wolfe's equal in genius - but an evil genius, through and through. The story of what happens when these two brilliant titans clash is told in In the Best Families. It's the third book in a trilogy featuring Wolfe and Zeck, and it's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete podcast by clicking here.
Last week, I reviewed Rex Stout's The Second Confession, the second book in the Zeck trilogy. Wolfe and Archie came very close to death in that book - and readers surely realized that a third, final confrontation was inevitable. Here's what Archie has to say - describing Arnold Zeck for us, after the first time Archie and Zeck meet face-to-face:
I had a good view of him at ten feet…Actually there was nothing to him but his forehead and eyes. It wasn’t a forehead, it was a dome, sloping up and up to the line of his faded thin hair. The eyes were the result of an error on the assembly line. They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless. They did not now look the same as shark eyes because Arnold Zeck’s brain had been using them to see with for fifty years, and that had had an effect.
In the Best Families begins with what seems at first to be just another fairly simple case: a very wealthy woman hires Wolfe to find out where her second husband is getting so much cash that he no longer needs to ask her for money. Wolfe takes the case – and then someone sends a tear-gas bomb to Wolfe’s house, and it goes off in the kitchen. There’s no doubt that it is from Arnold Zeck Again, experienced readers will know just how well that would sit with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. But then there is a murder. And Archie, who has been sent to Westchester to work on the client’s investigation, returns home to New York City to find the brownstone empty and Nero Wolfe apparently fled. Archie is dumbfounded and grief-stricken and furious that Wolfe would simply disappear and not say where he was going. But Wolfe’s final instructions are explicit – do not look for me, Wolfe’s note to Archie says, and Archie will obey.
Most of the remainder of In the Best Families is taken up with what will ultimately be the final confrontation between the two geniuses (and, of course, Archie). That’s all I want to say about it, except that it’s one of the most complex plots ever hatched by Wolfe or his creator, Rex Stout.
While most of Rex Stout's books about Wolfe and Goodwin can be read in any order, I would strongly suggest reading these three novels about Arnold Zeck in order - begin with And Be a Villain, then read The Second Confession, and finish up with In the Best Families. These links go to each of the books independently. However, back in the 1970s, Bantam published a single volume, called Triple Zeck, which contained all three of the novels in a single volume. It's long out of print, but Amazon's independent booksellers (and, I'm pretty sure, your own favorite indie book store) appear to have a number of copies available, if you would rather get them in that format. I urge you to do so.
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