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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent!,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Right to Die (Mass Market Paperback)
One of the better late Nero Wolfe stories. I notice that the other reviewer (thus far) finds Wolfe irritating--of course, he's meant to be that way, which is why we are presented with Archie as Boswell to his ponderous Johnson, perhaps the best solution ever reached to the Dr. Watson problem. What is the Dr. Watson problem? The detective can only seem brilliant if his cards are hidden--but a 1st person narrative is the only way to really involve the reader in the mystery. Thus, the author provides an assistant to the great "Sherlock." The problem is that Dr. Watson figures often seem like idiots--we're unconvinced (in a few stories) that Holmes is a genius because only Watson could have missed the obvious. Archie is competent enough himself that we never doubt for a moment that Wolfe is truly a genius--and the dialogue between Archie and Wolfe is some of the best give-and-take ever written.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Civil Rights and Private Wrongs,
By
This review is from: A Right to Die (Mass Market Paperback)
A beautiful young debutante joins the civil rights movement and falls in love with a co-worker. They plan to marry. He is black, she is white. Today this would present no great problem. In 1964, such a marriage was unlawful in many states and unthinkable in most of the others. The young man's father employs Nero Wolfe to "dig up some dirt" on the girl so that he can use it to talk his son out of "ruining his life."While Wolfe plays muckraker the girl gets herself killed and her fiance discovers her body. In the wake of the discovery he manages to act guilty enough to get himself arrested. Despite the incriminating circumstantial evidence, his innocence is obvious to everyone except the police. Wolfe undertakes to find the real killer, and discovers that almost every single member of the civil rights group had motive, means, and opportunity to kill the girl. One of the group even volunteers to confess to the murder to save the young man. Wolfe keeps Archie and Saul Panzer hopping as they run down leads and try to sort through the tangle of evidence, and of course they come out the other side of the maze with a surprising and satisfying solution.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wolfe and Archie fight racism,
By
This review is from: A Right to Die (Mass Market Paperback)
Paul Whipple doesn't want his son to marry outside of his race. It's not that he doesn't like white people, but a black man marrying a white woman in 1964 is trouble. Whipple wants Nero Wolfe to help him find a way to break up their engagement. Wolfe would normally reject job like this but he owes a debt to Whipple because of an incident that had occurred in the distant past when Whipple helped him solve a case.So off Archie goes to Racine, Wisconsin to dig up some dirt on Susan Brooke but after a fruitless search that finds not a trace of scandal, Archie gets a call from Wolfe. Return to New York... Susan Brooke has been found beaten to death in her apartment. And when Whipple's son is arrested for the crime, the case changes into a hunt for the real killer. The book was written in 1964 at the same time the debate over the Civil Rights Act was going on. Stout covers what was controversial material at the time, reminding us that attitudes in 1964 were not the same as they are today. But this book also reminds us that we haven't come as far as we might like to think. The n-word is used in the book, but only in dialog when Stout uses it to reveal something about the character of the person who says it. Wolfe and Archie never use it, and as Archie says, "I have felt superior to plenty of people but never because of the color of my skin." As to the the mystery itself, it is one of the best I have read so far. I didn't have the slightest idea who the killer might be and yet when it was revealed I wanted to smack myself for not getting it.
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