Over the past several years, I have often raided the Classic Mysteries vault to bring back some of my favorite Rex Stout mysteries, especially the ones starring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. And why not? After all, these books are well-written, well-plotted and populated with regular series characters who are great fun to be with. Today, I am bringing back another of those books, The Final Deduction, which has the distinction of dealing quite neatly both with a blackmail plot and also with murder. Nothing that Wolfe and Goodwin can't handle quite neatly - and also unusual enough to keep your interest piqued. Here's a transcript of the audio review I presented on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years back. As usual, it has been lightly edited.
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The woman standing on Nero Wolfe’s doorstep was very rich. She was also very frightened. Her husband, she said, had been kidnapped. The kidnapper wanted half a million dollars. And, he had warned her, if you want to see your husband alive again, tell nobody. So she went to Nero Wolfe, to ask him to keep her secret – but find her husband. And if the worst happened, if the kidnapper decided to kill the victim, she wanted Wolfe to investigate and find the person responsible. And she was prepared to pay a fabulous sum of money to get her husband back – alive. So Nero Wolfe went to work – and, of course, put Archie Goodwin to work as well. The results are outlined in The Final Deduction, by Rex Stout.
I suppose that a cynic might say that in The Final Deduction, Nero Wolfe was only in it for the money – although I’m not sure that isn’t true of most of his cases. Wolfe is lured into the case by the very large sum of money that Althea Vail was prepared to pay for the return of her husband, Jimmy Vail. So when Jimmy Vail is released by his kidnappers and returns – alive – Wolfe is willing to agree to the victim’s plea that he say nothing about it for a couple of days. After all, the kidnapper had threatened Jimmy with death if he spoke out too soon.
Only there are complications. For one thing, a couple of murders suddenly bring the police on the scene – police who know nothing about that kidnapping. And Wolfe and Goodwin are forced into some pretty fancy footwork to avoid talking to the cops in order to keep their promise of silence.
And, in the meantime, there’s also a lot of ransom money that has gone to someone…perhaps even to someone in, or close to, the Vail family. And Wolfe will be offered the chance to earn a significant portion of that money – if he can help find it.
It all makes for an entertaining case, with plenty of surprises and twists to it. And, as is usually the case with Nero Wolfe, a great deal of the reader’s pleasure will come from spending time in that wonderful brownstone on West 35th Street in New York City, where Wolfe and Goodwin live and work. It’s always fun to have dinner with them, courtesy of Wolfe’s chef and major domo, Fritz Brenner. After one of those meals, for example, Archie describes Wolfe’s conversation this way…quoting now:
At the dinner table, in between bites of deviled grilled lamb kidneys with a sauce he and Fritz had invented, he explained why it was that all you needed to know about any human society was what they ate. If you knew what they ate you could deduce everything else – culture, philosophy, morals, politics, everything. I enjoyed it because the kidneys were tender and tasty and that sauce is one of Fritz’s best, but I wondered how you would make out if you tried to deduce everything about Wolfe by knowing what he had eaten in the past ten years. I decided you would deduce that he was dead.
As I say, I tend to read and re-read Rex Stout’s books for that kind of wisecracking detail about life in the brownstone. The Final Deduction deals with kidnapping – something of a rarity in these books – as well as murder. It’s a very tightly-written book, one of the shortest, I think, of all the novels – really it seems like little more than a novella stretched out for a few thousand more words. That’s not a complaint; I think Stout’s best stories are the ones he tells in the most concise terms. I do recommend The Final Deduction.
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.
Next: Necklace and Calabash, by Robert Van Gulik
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