As regular visitors to this blog are undoubtedly aware, I'm very much a fan of Rex Stout and his books featuring Nero Wolfe, that gourmandizing, orchid-loving genius, and Wolfe's right hand assistant, Archie Goodwin. Over the course of his career, Stout wrote some 33 novels and 39 novellas featuring Wolfe and Goodwin. The novellas - longer than short stories, shorter than novels - appeared first as serials in leading magazines and then were published, usually in groups of between two and four novellas in a single volume. Most of them are pretty good. There's one novella in particular, though, that I think is worth my re-mentioning here. It's one of three stories in the 1956 collection called Three Witnesses. Here (as usual, slightly edited) is what I had to say about the stories in that collection when I first reviewed it on the Classic Mysteries podcast:
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Three witnesses. One is a dog – a black Labrador Retriever, whose instincts lead investigators to a ruthless killer. One is a man who was believed to have been killed during the Korean War, but came back to life – only to die again. And the third, grossly overweight, vastly uncomfortable away from home, is Nero Wolfe himself, whose testimony might save an unjustly accused man from the electric chair. Three stories. Three problems for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Three Witnesses – the name of the book by Rex Stout.
Stout was a master of the long short story form often called the novella. Some of his best stories about Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin and the rest of the 35th Street crew, are the ones written at novella length. Three of those stories were collected and published in 1956 under the title Three Witnesses. It contains my favorite Wolfe novella, along with two other pretty good stories, and they’re all worthy of your consideration. In a novella, there really isn’t room for a story to drag, or for too many irrelevancies to creep in. The writing tends to be much more pointed, the action more direct, the dialogue crisper.
In the first of the stories in this collection, called “The Next Witness,” Nero Wolfe has been called as a prosecution witness against a man accused of murdering a switchboard operator at a telephone answering service. Before Wolfe can be called to the stand, however, he suddenly leaves the courtroom with Archie Goodwin in tow. Why? Because in listening to the testimony, Wolfe has come to the conclusion that the accused man could not have committed the murder – and Wolfe is unwilling to testify against the man. He has concluded that the only way to prove the man’s innocence is to discover who is really guilty – and he must now do so while avoiding the police and other representatives of the law who will be looking for him and trying to arrest him for contempt and get him back into the courtroom.
Wolfe quickly determines that something is very wrong at that telephone answering service – for today’s readers, the concept of an “answering service” takes some explaining: we’re talking of a time long before answering machines and voice mail. How Wolfe manages to uncover the secrets – and the amazing trick he pulls to force the court to hear his deductions and conclusions – make for a thoroughly enjoyable story.
The second story, called “When a Man Murders,” begins when a man and woman come to Wolfe’s office to try to hire him – or at least Archie. The man and woman are married – or thought they were married. The woman was married to a man who was officially reported as having died on the battlefield in Korea. Now, having remarried, her first husband has reappeared, very much alive. She wants Wolfe and Archie to try to talk her first husband into giving her a divorce. But when Archie goes to the hotel where the first husband is staying, he finds the man dead = and it takes the police no time at all to arrest her second husband for the murder. Wolfe and Archie eventually get it all sorted out during one of Wolfe’s signature office confrontations.
It is the third story, “Die Like a Dog,” that makes this collection one of my favorites. I think this story is among Rex Stout’s best. It begins with Archie trying to return a switched raincoat to a man living downtown – the man had inadvertently taken Archie’s coat, leaving his own, when he came to try to hire Nero Wolfe for a job which Wolfe had refused. Archie arrives at the apartment building to find police on the scene – a man has been murdered there. Archie leaves – but a large black Labrador retriever follows him away from the building. When the dog saves Archie’s hat (which had blown off his head), Archie decides to bring him home, planning to tweak Wolfe by pretending that he is adopting the dog. To his surprise and chagrin, Wolfe also befriends the dog – who knew that Wolfe had a weak spot for dogs, particularly for black Labs? At which point the police arrive: turns out the dog belonged to the murder victim and they want to know why Archie, in their words, removed the dog from the murder scene.
So the dog quickly becomes a central character – though it’s important to note that he is not a humanized-dog. That is, unlike many of today’s animal-driven cozies, this dog actually behaves like a dog, not like a human detective in dog form. But by behaving as a dog behaves, the Labrador leads Wolfe to identify the murderer correctly – and provides solid evidence that nails down the police case against the killer.
So there you have it. Three stories. Three Witnesses. It’s an entertaining collection. It contains everything you’d expect to find in a Nero Wolfe book – the regular characters, Archie, Fritz, Inspector Cramer, Sergeant Purley Stebbins, Saul Panzer; the food; the orchids. The writing, as always, is tight and funny. It’s Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe at their best.
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You can listen to the complete recording of the original podcast review by clicking here.
Next: More Work for the Undertaker, by Margery Allingham.
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