The Black Mountain (A Nero Wolfe Mystery Book 24)

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Wolfe was not taking it like a man. I had expected him to quit being eccentric about vehicles, since he had decided to cross an ocean and a good part of a continent, and relax, but there was no visible change in his reactions. In the taxis he sat on the front half of the seat and gripped the strap, and in the planes he kept his muscles tight. Apparently it was so deep in him that the only hope would be for him to get analyzed, and there wasn’t time for that. Analyzing him would take more like twenty years than twenty hours." Stout’s characters are flat and wooden. By his own admission he once said he doesn’t want people focusing on the characters but on the story (I found out last week in a short bio on Wikipedia — consider the source. He may have been all about character development). Instead he wanted his readers to focus on the story, the mystery, apparently.

Wolfe, for his part, is highly appreciative of Archie’s abilities, even if he has his own way of expressing it: “I have noted, perhaps in more detail than you think, your talents and capacities. You are an excellent observer, not in any respect an utter fool, completely intrepid, and too conceited to be seduced into perfidy” ( The Silent Speaker, 1946). Okay, this is now one of my favorite books in the series. Somehow, Rex Stout takes his characters completely out of their element, nearly switches their traditional roles, and yet never writes Nero and Archie out of character. That is an amazing skill!Everything changes when Wolfe's friend Marko Vukic is murdered. Wolfe doesn't just leave his brownstone ... where his meals are prepared by his personal chef Fritz Brenner and he spends parts of his day with his orchids ... he leaves the country. He heads to Montenegro which requires getting on several different planes. Wolfe is the man who doesn't trust machinery and will only let Archie drive him in a car ... when absolutely necessary. Wolfe has vowed to bring the man who murdered his friend to justice.

He is also Wolfe’s bookkeeper, and that “thorn” function means that he is constantly reminding Wolfe that the house is low on money and so he’d better accept that case that just walked in the door, or he won’t be able to pay the weekly salaries of his nonpareil cook Fritz Brenner, his orchid specialist Theodore Horstmann, or, ahem, Archie himself. An appearance of immunity? Under pressure of necessity? It brings to mind the passage in Over My Dead Body: “I carry this fat to insulate my feelings. They got too strong for me once or twice….I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I’ve got it in hand.”Fer-de-Lance was published in 1934, so we don’t have long to wait. Something tells me he has nothing to worry about.

Insistent Terminology: Wolfe absolutely refuses to refer to Podgorica by its new name "Titograd", even at the risk of drawing unwanted attention. Dirty Communists: Gospo Stritar, Jube Bilic, Peter Zov, and the Albanians are all nefarious reds of one sort or another, but the Tito-Stalin split means they are not all on the same side.By 1926, Stout was half a million dollars richer, and he retired, moved to Paris, and started writing in earnest—emphasis on the “earnest.” They were literary novels, heavy on the psychology and well-reviewed, but they didn’t sell particularly well—and then the Great Depression hit, wiping out most of Stout’s investments. “I realized that I was a good story-teller, but would never make a great novelist….Whatever comments I might want to make about people and their handling of life could be made in detective stories as well as any other kind.” This book and the pre-war novel Over My Dead Body both involve international intrigue over Montenegro, but under very different circumstances, first concerning Nazi designs on the Balkans, and later in the context of Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia. Yet, Archie Goodwin insists, “He was elegant with women” ( Fer-de-Lance) and when a woman confronts Wolfe with an accusation of misogyny in Too Many Cooks, he does an interesting thing. He shakes his head. “I couldn’t rise to that impudence,” he says. “Not like women? They are astonishing and successful animals. For reason of convenience, I merely preserve an appearance of immunity which I developed some years ago under pressure of necessity.” Fritz came in with a piece of paper in his hand and demanded, ‘Were you drunk when you wrote this?” Rex Stout, Death of a Doxy 13. The Father Hunt