"This Won't Kill You" is a 60-page Nero Wolfe mystery novelette by Rex Stout. It was first published in the September 1952 issue of The American Magazine. It later appeared in book form in the short-story collection Three Men Out, published by Viking Press in 1954.
I have read this story many times and it is one of my favorite novelettes in the Nero Wolfe series. It is very different from the normal short fiction in that series. For one thing, at the beginning of the story Nero Wolfe is attending a baseball game, which means he had to leave his home, which is very unusual. And in addition the story starts out being typical detection by Nero Wolfe, and then takes a turn into an adventure segment with Archie saving the day.
Wolfe and Archie are at a baseball game because Wolfe's friend Pierre Mondor, a famous chef from Paris, is visiting and has asked to see a baseball game. Wolfe feels he must oblige as Mondor's host, and being Wolfe he has a grateful client who can supply tickets. It soon becomes clear that the game is going very wrong; one player is missing and several of them cannot play their usual game. I won't go further into the story because I would spoil it.
Amazingly I have found a good number of reviews of this story, and about half agree with me that this is a excellent story and half don't like it all because it is so untypical.
There are two other novelettes in Three Men Out: "Invitation to Murder" and "The Zero Clue". I don't remember much about those stories but I will be reading them soon.
2 comments:
Like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Nero Wolfe and Archie never go out of style.
And Nero at a baseball game is unusual. I am not even sure he is a fan. He strikes me more as the chess type and you can play chess at home.
You are right, Kathy, Nero Wolfe is definitely not a baseball fan, and if he was he would not go out in a crowd to watch the games. He is probably more likely to play chess, but I am not sure that I remember that ever coming up. (There is a novel about a death at a chess club.) He reads a lot; many of the novels talk about the book that Wolfe is reading at the time.
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