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Title: Plot It Yourself
Series:
Nero Wolfe #31
Author: Rex Stout
Rating:
4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages:
152
Words: 56K
I’ve been giving these Nero Wolfe books 3 ½ stars for just about the entire series so far. But I’ve realized that every story is solid (even if I don’t care for it) and that I KNOW I’ll be re-reading these (but not like Fraggle, who read them back to back to back. You go girlfriend!) and thus I’ve realized something. These totally deserve 4stars as the base rating and thus from here on out, that’s what I’m planning on doing.
I especially enjoyed this story because it was about authors and plagiarists and murder. If you don’t know, I have a “complicated” relationship with authors. As long as they write their books and entertain me, me and authors get along famously. But as soon as they try to become “people” and use their books for whatever cause they happen to believe in at that moment, well, then I despise, detest and generally am ready to throw them off a cliff. Throw in an entitled attitude or two and usually I just do my best to avoid authors as people. So in this story several authors get murdered and that made me very happy. All of the people involved, authors to publishers, in the plagiarist side of things lie to Wolfe and each other and thus I was perfectly ok with them being killed. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.
That really added some relish to my reading. Sometimes an idea or plot point just clicks and makes the whole book that much better. This was one of those times.
I have also come to realize that I am not a Do It Yourself Detective either. I don’t WANT to solve the mystery myself or before the main character. I want the author to do all the work and I just sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s tough to do that with Agatha Christie novels or Ellery Queen mysteries, which is why I’ve given up on both those authors. They think (technically, thought, since they are dead and not thinking at all right now) they were clever, but the reality is that they were just doofuses who enjoyed confusing people. Rex Stout enjoys telling a good story first and foremost. Which is why I’m still reading Nero Wolfe stories 31 books later :-)
★★★★☆
From Wikipedia
Someone has been getting away with a different spin on plagiarism. It's the old scam – an unsuccessful author stealing ideas from an established source – but it's being worked differently. Now, the plagiarists are claiming that the well-known authors are stealing from them (as Wolfe puts it, "plagiarism upside down."[2]). And they are making their claims stick: three successful claims in four years, one awaiting trial, and one that's just been made.
These claims have damaged both the publishers and the authors. The Book Publishers of America (BPA) and the National Association of Authors and Dramatists (NAAD) form a joint committee to explore ways to stop the fraud, and the committee comes to Wolfe for help. The first four claims have shared certain characteristics: in the first, for example, the best selling author Ellen Sturdevant is accused by the virtually unknown Alice Porter of stealing a recent book's plot from a story that Porter sent her, asking her suggestions for improvement. Sturdevant ignores the accusation until Porter's manuscript is found in Sturdevant's house. The writing and publishing industry is convinced that the manuscript was planted, but the case was settled out of court.
That scenario, with minor variations, is repeated four times, with other authors and by other plagiarists. The latest complaint has been made only recently, and the target of the complaint wonders when a manuscript will show up somewhere that it wasn't the day before.
Wolfe's first step is to acquire and read the manuscripts that form the basis for the complaints. Wolfe's love of literature turns out to be useful in his investigation: from the internal evidence in the manuscripts, Wolfe concludes that they were all written by the same person. Aspects such as diction, punctuation and syntax – and, most convincingly, paragraphing – point Wolfe directly to the conclusion that one person wrote all the manuscripts.
At first, this seems like progress, but then it becomes clear that it's the opposite. The task initially seemed to be to show that the first fraud inspired a sequence of copycats, and the universe of suspects was limited to the complainants. But now that Wolfe has determined that one person wrote all the fraudulent manuscripts, that one person could be anyone. Wolfe meets with the joint committee to discuss the situation.
A committee member suggests that one of the plagiarists be offered money, along with a guarantee of immunity, to identify the manuscripts' actual author. The committee concurs, and asks Wolfe to arrange for the offer to be made to Simon Jacobs. The next day, Archie goes to make the offer to Jacobs, but finds Sergeant Purley Stebbins at the Jacobs apartment: Mr. Jacobs has been murdered, stabbed to death the night before.
In short order, Archie discovers two more dead plagiarists. Wolfe blames himself for not taking steps to protect Jacobs and the others, who had been made targets by the plan to pay for information. The only one left is Alice Porter, who first worked the fraud successfully, and who is now repeating it with Amy Wynn and her publisher. Wolfe, concentrating on Porter, catches her in a contradiction that identifies the murderer for him.
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