To Archie Goodwin, it probably seemed like a dream come true - at least at the beginning. Nero Wolfe had been hired to find out whether a hit-and-run accident victim named Waldo Wilmot Moore was, in fact, murdered. And, as Nero Wolfe never willingly leaves the house on business, he sends Archie to the company where that victim worked, the idea being that Archie would take an undercover job at that company - a large engineering supply firm - and see what he could find out. That's when Archie discovers that there really can be Too Many Women, which is the name of Rex Stout's eleventh book about the remarkably sedentary and corpulent Nero Wolfe and his assistant, Archie Goodwin, who is Wolfe's right hand (and, as Archie says, "the heart, liver, lungs, and gizzard of the private detective business of Nero Wolfe, Wolfe being merely the brains." Too Many Women, first published in 1947, is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
Nero Wolfe is approached by a businessman named Jasper Pine. He is the president of a very large supply company named Naylor-Kerr (those were the names of its two founders). Waldo Moore, one of the company's senior managers, was killed some months earlier by a hit-and-run driver. The police (and most of the senior managers at Naylor-Kerr) believe it was an accident. Now, though, another senior executive at Naylor-Kerr is insisting that Waldo Wilmot Moore was murdered. And as that senior executive is named Kerr Naylor (and happens to be the son of one of the company’s founders and the owner of a large block of the company’s stock), Jasper Pine has to pay some attention. So what Pine wants to do is to hire Nero Wolfe to determine for sure whether Waldo Moore was the victim of an accident…or was murdered.
Archie finds himself assigned by Wolfe to go take a job as a personnel expert at Naylor-Kerr, under an assumed name, where he can investigate and report back to Wolfe. And that’s how he comes to the unusual setup at Naylor-Kerr. Here’s how he describes the stock department, where he will be working:
Primarily, as far as space went, it was a room about the size of the Yankee Stadium, with hundreds of desks and girls at them…One good glance and I liked the job. The girls. All right there, all being paid to stay right there, and me being paid to move freely about and converse with anyone whomever, which was down in black and white. Probably after I had been there a couple of years I would find that close-ups revealed inferior individual specimens…but from where I stood at nine-fifty-two Wednesday morning it was enough to take your breath away.
However, Archie quickly begins to discover that a lot of those young women had agendas of their own, and they could be quite unscrupulous about accomplishing their goals. As for Kerr Naylor, who had made that original accusation about Waldo Moore being murdered, he would prove to be rather bizarre in his behavior. Eventually a killer would strike again. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin would find themselves stymied at almost every turn, unable to pry loose any of the information they needed to carry out their jobs – or to uncover a killer – until Wolfe came up with a daring and very risky gamble to force a killer’s hand.
Too Many Women isn’t really among my favorite Nero Wolfe adventures. It tends to be talky, the plot isn’t the book’s strongest suit, and a lot of it may be politically incorrect, to say the least. It’s worth reading, as always, for Archie’s wisecracks and the presence of so many other series characters at Wolfe’s brownstone. Archie winds up doing most of the work in this one, while Wolfe grumbles in the background until it’s time to plot out the final course of action to uncover the killer. Worth reading, though? Of course!
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