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Title: And Be A Villain
Series: Nero Wolfe #13
Author: Rex Stout
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 207
Words: 65K
| Synopsis: |
From Wikipedia
Cyril Orchard, the publisher of the weekly horse racing sheet Track Almanac, is poisoned with cyanide during a live soft drink commercial on a popular radio talk show. A media sensation, the case attracts the attention of Nero Wolfe, who is facing a crippling income tax bill, and Archie Goodwin is dispatched to convince the producers and sponsors to hire Wolfe to investigate the crime. The police have identified several suspects, including the show’s host Madeline Fraser; her business manager, friend and former sister-in-law Deborah Koppel; her on-air side-kick Bill Meadows; Tully Strong and Nathan Straub, representatives of the show’s sponsors; script-writer Elinor Vance; Nancylee Shepherd, the head of Fraser’s fan-club; and F.O. Savarese, an assistant professor of mathematics and the show’s other guest.
Although his initial investigations seem unpromising, Wolfe eventually learns that a separate bottle of the beverage being advertised was provided for Fraser, identified with tape around the neck. When pressed, the producers admit that Fraser is unable to drink the beverage she was advertising because it gives her indigestion, and instead drinks iced coffee from the bottle instead. As the marked bottle was the one containing the poison, this suggests that Fraser was the intended victim instead of Orchard.
Wolfe passes this information on to Inspector Cramer, seeing this as an opportunity to claim his fee without further work. When the press — prompted by Archie — criticises him for his lack of effort, however, he is stung into further action but, to Archie’s surprise, begins investigating a different murder. Beula Poole, the publisher of an independent political and economics journal, has been shot dead in her offices days before. Although there is no apparent connection between the crimes, Wolfe is skeptical that two independent publishers would be murdered within weeks of each other without any link. His investigations reveal that the magazines were in fact the front for a sophisticated blackmail operation which targeted its victims using the threat of slander to compel them to purchase subscriptions for a year. This, in turn, brings Wolfe into contact with Arnold Zeck, the shadowy and powerful criminal mastermind behind the operation, who warns Wolfe not to interfere in his affairs.
After the blackmail story is published Walter Anderson, the president of the soft drink company, tries to end Wolfe’s investigations by paying him off and announcing that his company is withdrawing sponsorship from Fraser’s show. With no further leads, Wolfe sends Archie to Fraser and her entourage with a fake letter implicating Elinor Vance in order to try and shake a response out of the suspects. During the meeting, Deborah Koppel dies after eating a piece of candy laced with cyanide. Discovering the letter on Archie, the police threaten to charge him with obstructing justice, but they are interrupted by a phone call from a rival radio station. Wolfe has announced that he knows the identity of the murderer and threatens to reveal it on-air that night.
To avoid humiliation, the charges against Archie are dismissed and Wolfe is permitted to reveal the identity of the murderer in his office. Once the suspects have arrived, Wolfe presses Anderson to reveal the reason he tried to terminate his contract with Wolfe and Fraser’s show. Anderson had discovered that Madeline Fraser had received blackmail letters, and it is revealed that Fraser was being accused of murdering her husband years before. However, while the blackmail syndicate had previously created false claims about their victims to slander them, in this case they had unwittingly stumbled upon the truth – Fraser had in fact murdered her husband. Fraser murdered Orchard and Poole to conceal her secret, and Koppel when she began to suspect the truth. Fraser is arrested and charged with murder. The novel ends with Wolfe receiving a phone call from Zeck, congratulating him on solving the case — and warning him not to interfere in the crime lord’s affairs.
| My Thoughts: |
The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight,
but the wicked falls by his own wickedness.
~Proverbs 11:5 (English Standard Version)
This Bible verse is the first thing that sprang to my mind when thinking about reviewing this book. The second part of the verse anyway. Fake blackmailers stumble upon a real crime and pay the consequences and the criminal gets hers as well. Evil devouring itself.
This was a book of several crimes that appeared unconnected but ended up all being part of one big crime. It reminded me very much of Dan Willis and his urban fantasy series The Arcane Casebook featuring Alex Lockerby. In fact, thinking about it, I suspect that Willis has read enough of Rex Stout to be influenced in his own writing. That’s really neither here nor there, but it was something else that popped into my brain while reading this story.
There was also a LOT of negative interaction between Archie and Wolfe this time around. Mainly because Archie deals with the bills and Wolfe is just lazy. I am now curious what a book about each of them on their own would be like. I am being careful about that wish though, because that very interaction, whether positive or negative, is what drives my interest a lot of the time.
Overall, another good entry in the Nero Wolfe series and I’m happy with what I read.
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