Nero Wolfe: Black Orchids, Not Quite Dead Enough, The Silent Speaker, Too Many Women

[cimorene]

Black Orchids (#9) is two novellas united by the motif of rare black orchids, but they also have memorable settings. The first one has an incredibly vivid portrait of a state/county fair which serves to illustrate that they didn't change much between the 1930s and the 1990s. The second features an eccentric wealthy person's estate populated by free-ranging wild animals who figure in the mystery.

Not Quite Dead Enough (#10) contains a novella in which Archie frames himself a bit, which I have to admit is the first time in all my mystery and detective fiction reading I've seen that particular premise.

The Silent Speaker (#11) depends for its plot on audio recording devices and the ones they use are cylinders that fit a proprietary machine the size of a piece of furniture, which is quite a memorable feature. It has a faint reminiscence to my eye of "The Dying Detective" (Sherlock Holmes).

Too Many Women (#12) contains my favorite female character so far, Cecily Pine. She's a self-possessed and commanding wealthy serial cougar who gets tired of pretty young men quickly and is described as rather small and round and wholesome-looking, but extremely elegantly dressed.

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Here are some more memorable lines:

"I suggest, if the discussion is to be at kindergarten level, that we all sit on the floor."

• [H]is sharp gray eyes gave the impression that they wouldn't know how to beam.



• "The day you're nervous I'll shave with a butter knife."



• "And for God's sake don't think. It's repulsive, the idea of you thinking."



• [He] is a gentleman from his skin out



• He was not only spilling the beans; he was smashing the dish.



• "I have—a feeling."
  
  "Pfui. Based on what?"
  
  "I know her."
  
  "You do." Wolfe continued to frown, and his lips pushed out, once, and in again. "By divination? Phrenology? What specific revelations of her character have you observed? Does she pull chairs from under people?"



• glaring at me as if I had sent him an anonymous letter



• He struck me as barely bright enough for life's simplest demands, but I admit he might have been a darb at a party.

—Rex Stout, Black Orchids

• Since it said keep out, naturally my impulse was to go on in, but I restrained it and knocked.



• I looked at my watch and it was 10:40. An hour later I looked again and it was 10:55.



• "With all your defects, Archie, you are neither a strangler nor a nincompoop."



• "I suggest, if the discussion is to be at kindergarten level, that we all sit on the floor."



• [He] looked like a collection of undersized features put together at random in order to have somewhere to stick a little brown mustache

—Rex Stout, Not Quite Dead Enough

• His basic attitude was that of a Sunday School teacher in a den of thieves.



• my state of mind was really not fit to be recorded for family reading



• Anyhow I was telling the truth, and since I’m not very good at telling the truth I couldn’t very well expect him to believe me.



• It was only a ten-minute walk to the post office on Ninth Avenue and back, but I was in no mood for walking. I only like to walk when I can see some future ahead of me.



• “Mr. O’Neill is a headstrong and bumptious man”



• I got busy on the chair problem. There were six there in the office, and the divan would hold four comfortably, except that in a murder case three days old you don’t often find four people connected with it who are still in a frame of mind to sit together on the same piece of furniture.



• He was so sore that he pretended he didn’t believe in shaking hands, acknowledged the introduction with a nod that wouldn’t have spilled a drop if he had had a jar of water on his head, sat down and regarded the visitor unsympathetically, and asked curtly: “Well, sir?”



• Of course my reaction was that I had got along fairly well for something like thirty years without knowing Don O’Neill and saw no reason for a change in policy, but my personal feelings could not be permitted to dominate.



• Breslow looked as if he had been born flushed with anger and would die, when the time came, in character.



• I knew we had him now, so I snooted her.

—Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker

• “His name’s Ferguson,” a wiry little guy with a mustache tossed in. He had a dry look and a dry voice and was as crisp as Melba toast.



• “Mr. Cramer, you’re an imbecile,” Wolfe told him for his information.



• How the devil that woman has any money left, with her passion for getting rid of it, is a mystery.



• She was marvelous when she was showing forbearance in the face of injustice being done her. So marvelous that I would have liked to cut her into thin slices and broil her.



• He was trying to look nowhere and at no one, which really cannot be done unless you go at it with all your might and shut your eyes.



• I had thought his hair was undisciplined when he came to see me on Thursday, but now no two hairs were parallel.



• “[I]f I stick my foot in something down there that you have to pull it out of, don’t blame me.”

—Rex Stout, Too Many Women

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Delightful!