Customer Reviews

League of Frightened Men

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I really loved this book even before I read "Stout Fellow" by "O.E.McBride." Her insightful analysis of all of Rex Stout's work confirms what I already suspected: Rex Stout's earliest books were his best.

This one can be forgiven some narrative excesses (the pink tie and soup, for example) in fair exchange for some of Wolfe's best Wolfeisms. The one about membership in the Hardvard Club is in this book.

And finally, Paul Chapin is a much better "Moriarty" than Arnold Zeck. He's much deeper and more complex, in fact, than virtually any other of Stout's other characters, doubly subtle by the way in which his villainy is propounded.

Fetishism, kinky stuff - all here more so that in anything else of Wolfe's that comes to mind. And it is expertly read in audio.

A hazing accident at a Harvard dormitory leaves a young man hopelessly crippled. The 35 men responsible for the injury form a League of Atonement to help support their victim. Eventually the victim discovers he has great literary ability and becomes a lionized author. All his books have as their theme the murder of various characters modeled after various members of the League of Atonement. The victim has become a Literary Avenger. Then one member dies violently at a reunion while in close proximity to the Literary Avenger. The survivors receive an anonymous poem suggesting the Literary Avenger has become a literal avenger. Another dies of poisoning shortly after a meeting with the Avenger. Another group of poems goes out. A third disappears without a trace. Another anonymous poem goes out to the League. They have transmogrified from the League of Atonement to the League of Frightened Men.

They consult with Nero Wolfe, and he undertakes to relieve their fears for an obscene fee. Wolfe feels that all he needs is the answers to three questions and he can corkscrew a confession out of the Literary Avenger. Before Wolfe can pull it off, his target gets himself arrested for the murder of a fourth member of the League, and it looks like an open and shut case. Wolfe stands to lose his fee. If the Avenger gets electrocuted for the fourth murder, the League won't owe him a cent.

Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's confidential assistant, sees the problem quite simply. All Wolfe has to do is exonerate the Literary Avenger in the fourth murder and get confessions to the first three. The pair of detectives travels a complex path to achieve Archie's simple solution. Archie gets poisoned, Wolfe gets kidnapped, and it all culminates in one of the most Machiavellian maneuvers ever to spring from Wolfe's fertile imagination.

January 8, 2003: Finished listening to this on the way to work today. It ends with a gentle insult that cracked me up. Otherwise, I think I would recommend reading this over listening to this. I think it would go faster, and the conversations would be easier to follow. This particular reader is advertised as having a golden voice; not on my system, he didn't.

A man, Paul, was injured in college. Some number of fellow students felt responsible and guilty enough to undertake some degree of lifetime support (more or less) of him. He was not always fond of this. Some 20 or 30 years later, some of those fellow students begin dying, and later evidence indicates to the remaining that Paul has killed them.

Straightforward (in as much as any of them are) mystery with the twist that you don't know whether the deaths are, in fact, murders--and some may be, some may not be, there may or may not be more, and Paul himself may or may not have been the murderer. I liked that; it presented complications. Some other events (data) laid forth drew me to really basic conclusions ... which were wrong. But appropriately wrong: I had missed something or not been devious enough in my thinking. I had concluded on too little evidence, maybe. I liked that, too.

A bit longer than most of Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries, but still well worth the read. This is also one of the earliest Nero Wolfe books so there are a few differences between it and later stories, which made it even more interesting.
A good read, a great story line, and great value for the money compared to the $9 or $10 for a 90 minute movie, not including the 20 bucks for popcorn and soft drink.

Referring to the Kindle edition: I am a long-time Nero Wolfe fan, and am slowly collecting the books on Kindle. I am discovering that typos in Kindle books are almost the norm, and this edition of "League of Frightened Men" is no exception. The nature of the typos indicates that someone ran the original book through a scanner and didn't bother to do a lot of editing.

If a book is issued by the publisher (Bantam) in a Kindle edition at essentially the same price as the paperback, I expect some serious attention to formatting and detail. On the other hand, "Fer de Lance" contained a completely screwed up line of text that had been copied exactly from the same printing error in the original Bantam edition.

Would it be asking too much to have someone read these over before selling them?

This is the second novel in the wonderful Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. Vengeance is at the heart of the plot. Many years earlier, a hazing incident at Harvard left a young man crippled. That young man, Paul Chapin, goes on to literary fame, making sure to model characters in his novels on one or another of those who had done him the injury. Then, one by one, somebody begins to murder the 35 members of the group that had hazed Paul Chapin. The group (the League of Frightened Men), comes to Nero Wolfe and asks him to save their lives.

The plot is complicated and there's a lot of dialogue with many different characters, and a lot of theorizing, too, between Nero and Archie. I liked this story because I love Nero and Archie and the brownstone house and orchids and all that. But here, as in his first novel, Rex Stout is still developing both the characters and the type of short but complicated mystery he would write. It took another couple of books for Stout to start writing his best.

Nero Wolfe is the world's smartest detective, as he proves once again as he takes a group of Harvard grads as clients. The group, known among themselves as the League of Atonement, feels threatened by another grad, Paul Chapin, whom they caused to be seriously injured years earlier in a college hazing incident.

As usual, Wolfe, aided by his wise-cracking assistant Archie Goodwin, collects information as he sits in his home/office on New York's West Side. Wolfe doesn't use DNA and forensic science to solve the case. He conducts interviews and digs into the past. You, the reader, observe most of the discovery of evidence so you can test your powers of reasoning alongside Wolfe's.

Author Rex Stout does not talk down to his readers. He has created a unique group of characters and situations. Through them you will pick up diverse bits of information and know more when you finish the book than when you started. Keep a dictionary handy. Stout will challenge your vocabulary. You will also learn fragments about fine foods, the cultivation of prize winning orchids, world geography and important books of non-fiction.

You will also be amused. Archie's fast-talking ways always provide, at least, a smile. And the references to everyday life in 1935 (when the book was published) will seem humorous when compared to today's world.

Wolfe gets a worthy adversary in this take on the mystery convention of proving a clever murderer guilty without much evidence. A group of college men end up crippling another in a stupid fraternity prank and then they start to die. The victim of the fraternity prank claims his responsibility in an indirect manner and this "League of Frightened Men" hire Wolfe to solve the murders. Wolfe does so in a manner that is quite unexpected and makes this early Wolfe story interesting more for the mystery than the characters, which is a departure from the norm.

Rex Stout is one of my favorite authors. This particular book is one of his best. Nero Wolfe is at his best here.

Nero Wolfe had been approached by Andrew Hibbard who was seeking Wolfe's protection from a man that Hibbard and a group of his friends had inadvertently crippled years before during a college prank. Recently various members of the group had met untimely ends, and their long ago victim was claiming responsibility for their deaths. Hibbard was afraid that he would be next but he put so many restrictions on Wolfe about the case that Wolfe turned it down. A few weeks later though when Hibbard disappeared, presumably at the hands of the man he had approached Wolfe about, and probably fatally Wolfe felt compelled to act.

There were many twists and turns to this case, as often happens in Stout's novels. What sets this one apart is that Archie finds himself in need of rescuing and it is Wolfe who sails forth from the confines of the brownstone to provide it! Fans of the series will delight into once again joining Wolfe's little household as Nero and Archie solve the case of THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN.