Short Story Wednesday: "Disguise for Murder" by Rex Stout

 

Rex Stout's "Disguise for Murder" is an 80-page story in the Nero Wolfe series. It is one of three stories in Curtains for Three, published in 1950. 

The introduction to the book describes the contents as three novelettes, although I think 80 pages is more like a novella. No matter, it is an entertaining story. It was first published in The American Magazine, September 1950, as "The Twisted Scarf". 

As usual, Archie Goodwin narrates the story. Some semi-regular characters are included: Saul Panzer, a free lance detective; Fritz, the cook; and Inspector Cramer of the NYC police.

As the story begins, the Manhattan Flower Club has been allowed to visit Nero Wolfe's greenhouse at the top of his brownstone, to view his orchid collection. Saul and Fritz are vetting all the attendees and Archie is mingling and otherwise keeping an eye on the crowd. 

While mingling he notices an attractive young woman. Later in the afternoon she meets with Archie in Wolfe's office, and tells him that she can identify the murderer in a case that has plagued the police department for months. She seeks an audience with Wolfe, but before that happens she is found dead in Wolfe's office, after most of the guests have departed. 

After the police are done examining the scene and interviewing witnesses, Inspector Cramer refuses to allow Wolfe access to his office for an extended period of time. This infuriates Wolfe, and he decides to solve the case himself rather than collaborate with the police. He has spotted a clue that Cramer obviously missed in the witness statements. He proposes that Archie take on a dangerous assignment to unmask the killer. Saul Panzer is Archie's back up but the plan goes awry, and in the end it is all up to Archie.  This one has a little more action than usual and less humor.

I did have a quibble with the last part of the story (and it bothers me every time I read it), but I still consider this one of the most memorable of the novellas. 

The other two novellas in Curtains for Three are "The Gun with Wings" and "Bullet for One".

Plot It Yourself: Rex Stout

I had not planned to review this book, but then I realized that this is a bookish book, with the plot revolving around authors, publishers, and accusations of plagiarism. Rex Stout gets to poke some fun at publishers, authors, and even himself in this book.

Rex Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas about the private detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant, Archie Goodwin. The series began in 1934, with Fer-de-lance, and the last book in the series, A Family Affair, was published in 1975, shortly before Stout's death. I have read all of the novels and the shorter works several times over the years, so this was a reread for me.

In Plot It Yourself, four authors have been accused of plagiarism over four years. The four incidents have been similar, and looking back it is clear that they were carefully planned and have similarities. In most of the cases, the publishers have settled before the case went to trial. When a fifth author is accused of plagiarism, a group of authors and publishers band together to get help with this issue. They ask Nero Wolfe to solve the mystery of who is behind the false plagiarism claims.

Wolfe takes some time evaluating the situation, reading the books of the people who claim to have been plagiarized, and comes up with a plan to identify the culprit. When a death occurs as a result of his investigation, Wolfe realizes he has made an unpardonable mistake. Now that there is a death, the police are investigating that crime, but the publishers group asks Wolfe to continue working on the plagiarism case. 

Nero Wolfe has many quirks. He doesn't like to leave his house; he is a confirmed armchair detective. He lets Archie do much of the leg work and pulls in a team of freelance investigators when needed. He spends most of his time on gourmet food, cooking, beer, and orchids. While working on this case, he is so enraged by the mistake he made that he vows to eat no meat and drink no beer until the murderer is caught.

See my post about Top Ten Reasons Why I Love Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Series for an overview of the series.

This is actually a very good book for someone new to the Nero Wolfe series to start out with. It is a straightforward mystery. Some of Rex Stout's novels can be fairly convoluted and seem to involve intuition just as much as detection, which doesn't bother me, because I am reading more for characters than plot in this series. 

This book counts for the Bookish Books Reading Challenge hosted by Susan at Bloggin' 'bout Books.

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Publisher:  Bantam, 1989. Orig. pub. 1959.
Length:      208 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Nero Wolfe, #32
Setting:     New York
Genre:      Mystery
Source:     A reread.

Two Brief Reviews

I read these books in March. Both were good books and very different stories. Each was challenging to read at times, and both were well worth the effort.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

The story is about a woman, Lucy Barton, who was in a hospital in New York City in the 1980s for many weeks due to complications following an appendectomy. Her husband doesn't visit her very often because they have two young daughters at home and he has a job. Her mother comes to sit with her for a few days when she is in the hospital and they have some strained conversations about the past. This leads Lucy to remember her strange and unfortunate upbringing and her relationship with her parents and siblings. 

Lucy tells the story; thus it feels very personal. She is telling it years after it happened. That approach worked very well.

My thoughts...

•  I loved this book. I do have to caution that this is not a happy, feel good book; I found it unsettling and sad at times.  Also sometimes it was very funny. 
• On the other hand, it is only about 200 pages long and it had me longing to read more about Lucy and her life. Fortunately there are three more books about Lucy Barton. 
• I like the themes, childhood experiences and mother-daughter relationships. This was only my second book by Strout; I read Olive Kitteridge a few years ago. 

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

This is a historical mystery, set in a very small town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique in 1952. New apartheid laws have recently gone into effect. 

The protagonist is an English police detective who is investigating the death of an Afrikaner police captain. The Security Branch takes over the investigation. They would like to blame the death on black communist radicals, and will be happy to beat a confession out of any suspect that fits their bias. Detective Emmanuel Cooper is directed by his superior to stay in the area so that he can ensure that the real murderer is arrested, if possible.

The story gets very complex. Emmanuel, an emotionally traumatized World War II vet, has problems of his own. The dead Afrikaner policeman's sons have it in for him, and he spends a lot of time avoiding them. He is lucky to be working with a native Zulu officer, Shabalala and a Jewish doctor who has no real credentials in South Africa.

My thoughts:

• The setting of South Africa in the 1950s was well done. There was plenty of action and a sense of dread about how the English detective could survive. 
• I could have done without some of the melodrama but I liked the depiction of apartheid at this time, and hope to continue reading the series. 
• Apartheid is not a totally new subject to me, but I don't know much about it. I am still trying to understand the differences between the various racial groups involved.
• It was a good story but a difficult read. The same thing applies to the other book I read that was set in South Africa during apartheid, A Lonely Place to Die by Wessel Ebersohn. That one was published in 1979 and set around that time. 

Your Republic is Calling You: Young-Ha Kim

 

The story takes place over the course of one day in the life of Ki-Yong, a South Korean with a wife and teenage daughter. Except that he is really a North Korean spy who has been in Seoul, working as a film importer, over 20 years, and has now been recalled to North Korea. About 10 years into his assignment in South Korea, the man who had run his intelligence group was purged; after that they had heard nothing from anyone in North Korea. For 10 years he has led a normal life but now it has been upended in one email; although Ki-Yong immediately begins following plans for his exit from South Korea, he is fearful and uncertain about his future.

The reader also follows Ki-Yong's wife and daughter throughout the day, and those parts of the story are told from their point of view. The daughter is in high school, doing well in school and with lots of friends, but with typical teen-age angst. His wife is alienated from her husband and unhappy with her life, although we don't understand why until later in the story.

My Thoughts:

• The book is spy fiction, but it is more than that. It is also the picture of a family dealing with problems, and focuses most on how they are affected by the events. We get to know much more about each member of the family as the day unfolds.
• One minor disappointment was that the book is mostly set in South Korea. There are flashbacks to the protagonist's youth in North Korea and they are interesting, as are his reflections on the differences in life in South Korea and North Korea.
• I was immersed in the story, and it whetted my appetite for more reading about North and South Korea.

-----------------------------

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2010 (orig. pub. 2006)
Length:     236 pages
Format:    Trade paperback
Setting:     South Korea, North Korea
Genre:      Espionage fiction
Source:    On my shelves since 2012
Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim

Six Degrees of Separation: From Lonely Planet's Best Ever Photography Tips to ....

 

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Usually Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point, but for April's Six Degrees the instructions were to find a travel guide such as a Lonely Planet title or an Eyewitness title.

So the first book in my Six Degrees chain will be Lonely Planet's Best Ever Photography Tips. It features "45 practical tips and ten golden rules from award-winning travel photographer Richard I'Anson." My husband is and always has been interested in photography and he has many books on the subject.

1st degree:

My first book is also from my husband's shelves: A Wandering Eye: Travels with My Phone by Miguel Flores-Vianna. The book is filled with photos taken with his smart phone while traveling. There are some really gorgeous pictures in this book.

2nd degree:

Continuing the theme of photography, my next book is Plates + Dishes: The Food and Faces of the Roadside Diner by Stephan Schacher. This is a fantastic book, following Schacher's travels from New York up into Canada, starting with Ontario, going across to the Yukon, into Alaska, back down through British Columbia into the US. In the US he covered the western coast states, then some midwestern states, through the deep South, and back up to New York. His plan was to document the diners he visited. Per Publishers Weekly, he visited  "70 highway eating establishments, and photographed the food he ate and the women who served it to him." He made the trip using various vehicles: a Volkswagen van, a motor home, and a motorcycle. This edition was published in 2005, and Schacher's travels appear to have taken place between 2002 and 2004. There isn't much text in this book, just an introduction. The focus is really on the photos.

3rd degree:

The next link is one of our cookbooks, Retro Diner: Comfort Food from the American Roadside by Linda Everett. The book contains recipes for diner food and also includes photos of the exteriors and interiors of some old diners. We have used at least one of the recipes because we have notes in the book on suggested changes. 

4th degree:

At this point I will move toward fiction. In The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, Cora and Nick Papadakis own and operate a small diner in rural California, not far from Los Angeles. Cora is sick of her husband and tired of running the diner. Frank Chambers, a drifter, has just arrived in the area and does some odd jobs for Nick. Frank wants Cora to leave her husband behind and drift around the country with him. The book is very well written, but too dark and dreary for me. 

5th degree:

Even though the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout feature a lot of gourmet foods and situations focused on food and eating, Archie Goodwin often visits diners to eat, when he just wants to eat plain food, or when he isn't getting along with Wolfe, or he is out doing some errands for Wolfe. In Plot it Yourself, a mystery about authors, publishers, and plagiarism, Archie twice mentions going to Bert's Diner around the corner on Tenth Avenue near Wolfe's brownstone. Early in the book, Archie says: "I eat in the dining room with Wolfe, except when we are not speaking; then I join Fritz and Theodore in the kitchen, or get invited somewhere, or take a friend to a restaurant, or go to Bert’s diner around the corner on Tenth Avenue and eat beans." Towards the end of the book, when he thinks he will be having a meatless dinner with Wolfe at home, he considers going to Bert's to "eat hamburgers and slaw and discuss the world situation for an hour or so." Thinking about these connections motivated me to reread this book in late March.

6th degree:

I decided to stick with a novel by Rex Stout in this last link. Black Orchids collects two novellas, "Black Orchids" and "Cordially Invited to Meet Death." As I noted above, food is very important in the Nero Wolfe stories. Usually Wolfe doesn't like to have anything to do with women, but somehow, in "Cordially Invited to Meet Death," he ends up with one in his kitchen, where he is experimenting with making corned beef hash. She offers to help. 

"... corned beef hash is one of my specialties. Nothing in there but meat, is there?”

“As you see,” Wolfe grunted.

“It’s ground too fine,” Maryella asserted. 

Wolfe scowled at her. I could see he was torn with conflicting emotions. A female in his kitchen was an outrage. A woman criticizing his or Fritz's cooking was an insult. But corned beef hash was one of life's toughest problems, never yet solved by anyone. To tone down the corned flavor and yet preserve its unique quality, to remove the curse of its dryness without making it greasy—the theories and experiments had gone on for years. He scowled at her but he didn't order her out.

"Cordially Invited to Meet Death" is one of my favorite Nero Wolfe stories.

My Six Degrees took me from traveling and photography to roadside diners, to mysteries with an emphasis on food.  If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on May 4th, 2024 and the starting book will be The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop.

Short Story Wednesday — Doctorow: Collected Stories

 

My husband purchased Doctorow: Collected Stories at the 2023 Planned Parenthood Book Sale, and at his suggestion, I read some short stories from that collection, which is comprised of fifteen short stories written by E. L. Doctorow. Per the dust jacket, the stories were "selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015."

I read the first five stories in the book, plus a later story I was especially interested in. Of the six stories I read, I only really liked two of the stories, but I liked those a lot, so it was a worthwhile experience.

These are the first five stories:

• "Willi"
• "The Hunter"
• "The Writer in the Family"
• "Heist"
• "The Water Works"

I did not care for "Willi" at all. I found these stories confusing: "The Hunter," "Heist," and "The Water Works." From what I have read, "Heist" was expanded to be the novel City of God.

"The Writer in the Family" was my favorite of the first five stories I read. It tells about a man who dies and how his death affects his family. The man's sisters don't want to tell his 90-year-old mother about his death, so they tell her that he has moved to Arizona. They request that his wife and two sons join in this deception. One of the sons is asked to write letters to his grandmother as if they are from his father. Not only is it a very moving story, it gets a lot across in 15 pages.

The other story I read was "Wakefield," which was first published in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008. It was one of the longer stories in the book at about 35 pages. In 2016, the story was adapted to film, starring Bryan Cranston and Jennifer Garner.

The story is about a man, Howard Wakefield, who leaves his wife and family, in a manner of speaking. I am not even going to try to summarize the story any further than that. I wanted a more definitive ending but it was still an effective ending. I liked this story very much.

Here are the first few sentences of the story:

People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the raccoon droppings—which is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of course—whereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage. Diana would think of her last sight of me, that same morning, when she pulled up to the station and slammed on the brakes, and I got out of the car and, before closing the door, leaned in with a cryptic smile to say goodbye—she would think that I had left her from that moment.

"Wakefield" is available online at The New Yorker.