Customer Reviews

The Second Confession - A Nero Wolfe Mystery

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nero Wolfe's favorite drink, beer, is not a beverage you can come to like on the first taste. You will find beer bitter and repugnant, but if you keep at it you will eventually begin to tolerate it, then to like it. So it is with Nero Wolfe. At first taste you will find him arrogant, eccentric, and thoroughly unlikeable. Keep at him. Because Rex Stout chose the novella as the format for most Wolfe stories you can read the stories at a sitting. After three novellas you will come to tolerate the corpulent crimefighter. After five, you will even come to have some affection for him.

"The Second Confession" might better be named "The Second Confrontation," because Wolfe faces his archnemesis, Arnold Zeck, for the second time. ("And be a Villain" chronicled the first confrontation). When Sherlock Holmes discovered the existence of Professor Moriarty, he immediately undertook to destroy the professor's criminal empire. When Nero Wolfe discovered the existence of Arnold Zeck, he immediately began to avoid Zeck at all costs. Holmes' course of action led to the Reichenbach Falls. Wolfe's led -- you'll have to find out in the final novella of the trilogy, "In the Best Families." Suffice it to say that Wolfe undertakes to expose a communist, runs afoul of Arnold Zeck, gets his orchids machine-gunned, and winds up trying to solve a murder for Zeck. Along the way Archie gets in deep trouble with the local constabulary, Wolfe confounds the police, the two manage to outright break several laws, and they severely bend a few more.

I don't understand the reviewers who complain about loose ends. Do you normally expect the second book in a trilogy to wrap everything up? I'm guessing that those reviewers didn't realize that Zeck appears in three books (And Be a Villain, The Second Confession, and In the Best of Families, in that order). At any rate, any ends left loose in this book are tied up in the third.

But even if you know and care nothing about Zeck, you should still be able to enjoy this books; he does not dominate it. Wolfe and Archie are both in top form, and the ploy Wolfe uses to expose the murder is both enjoyable and clever.

Some of the reviews here disparage Rex Stout's "pandering" to the Red Menace thinking of 1949. Let's put this into perspective...

Long before it was fashionable or even easy to represent for civil rights, Rex had Nero Wolfe honoring people of all races. Nero never generalized about (we'd now use the term "stereotyped") people with one key exception: Rex, a devoted husband and father of women, had Nero suspecting and disparaging women as flighty, treacherous and dangerous.

So here Nero accepts a commission to prove that Louis Rony is a Communist. In all truth, the way this is treated in the story Nero might as well have been asked to prove Rony was a philatelist. It's a matter for factual establishment or disestablishment...

To place this book's purported view of Communism as outweighing Stout's lifelong commitment to freedom of speech and expression is illogical.

And, please, don't forget how this book ends. That, too, puts things into an important perspective.

When the identity of the killer was revealed, I actually gasped aloud. I had two suspects in mind, and it was neither of them. But then, when you go over the plot and events, it makes perfect sense.

In addition to careful plotting, this book has all the other elements that make us love this series. Archie is by turns wry, pouty, clever, conceited and always very funny. Wolfe is as self-involved as ever -- though this time he reveals a bit of self-revelation, too.

The book is true to its time (the late 1940s, the dawn of the 1950s). There's a lot of "red menace" talk, but that didn't detract from the story for me. In fact, I thought it was important. As we look at how hysterical a previous generation was when confronted with a threat to our way of life, we may wish to consider the way we are responding today, in a new millenium, to a similar situation.

Once again Wolfe receives a phone call from the mysterious Arnold Zeck, warning him that he's getting too close with an unwanted investigation. On this occasion, Wolfe is involved in a request from a leading industrialist to investigate the background of his daughter's current suitor. When Wolfe refuses to back down, Zeck backs up his warning with violence that hits Nero where it hurts...

Communists, orchids and a manor-house mystery dropped on its head. This is one of Stout's stronger Wolfe novels on its own, and also makes a powerful second punch in his Zeck trilogy of books. I've seen quite a bit of commentary that criticizes what they perceive as Stout's anti-Communist agenda in the book. All I can say to that is "read it again". While not a fan of Communists, Wolfe and Archie are not friends to people spouting off about the red menace either. Mickey Spillane he isn't, thank goodness. Consider this a measured glance at the politics of the era by a writer who was trying to show the issues from a position of (relative) neutrality. Note his nod to the middle way with the treatment of the Paul Emerson character.

Recommended.

Rex Stout's Second Confession provides a fine Nero Wolfe mystery, with Michael Prichard's strong narrative skills bringing alive the detective story of Wolfe's encounter with a gangland boss. Murder and his investigation of a lawyer blend in this vivid story.

Rex Stout goes down so smoothly, nearly all of his detective novels have entertainment value. Some may have lamer jokes, dimmer ideas, or more forgettable plots, but I've never wanted my money back.

And one is a masterpiece of its kind. This one.

THE SECOND CONFESSION is Stout at full throttle. Archie has an outstanding dalliance with a WWII widow ... the gags are this series at its sharpest (asked if he might ever enter politics, Wolfe declines as though "he'd been asked if he intended to take up basketball") ... the strategies and plot twists are marvelously inventive -- Archie poses as a corporate photographer, hatches a doping scheme that goes mortifyingly haywire, and even resorts to actual highway robbery. As for Wolfe, he unreels an astonishing campaign to recruit U.S. Communists as prosecution witnesses, in a hit-and-run case where his own car is the murder weapon!

And there are educational pleasures. We get a snapshot of post-war America, Wallace and the Progressive Party, the Cold War, the witch hunts in the wings. True, the USSR is no more, but labeling this novel out-of-date is as silly as dissing ROMEO AND JULIET because dueling is illegal. Like any writer of substance, Stout dealt in universals: in place of yesterday's Red scare, substitute today's immigrant scare, Islam scare, and other reactionary hobgoblins. Plus we've got our own up-to-the-minute versions of other elements in the novel: the right-wing broadcaster who hates academia ... the billionaire CEO who wants to run the world ... and it's a uniquely ironic moment when they find out who -- and what -- the real Commie is.

Which points to the book's crowning pleasure, the reason I put it on the top rung in Stout's output: it boasts one of the genre's slickest surprise solutions -- a feat of ingenuity that makes me rank this novel with such Golden Age marvels as Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS, Berkeley's TRIAL AND ERROR, and Carr's THE BURNING COURT.

So it's odd that the yarn has gotten mixed notices at this site. Some readers whine about "loose ends," yet I doubt that they were paying decent attention, because, as another reviewer notes, "The writing style is much more mature than most modern mysteries." Exactly. Stout wrote for grownups and saw no need to shout his plot points: wandering spouses are common in his novels but presented with restraint and subtlety -- so it is here; the dead man's specialty was upper-crust blackmail -- that's firmly implied. One of Stout's virtues, then, is the credit he gives his readers for intelligence and the ability to connect dots -- but if you skim and skip, you'll let him down every time.

Finally, too much is made of this being the middle book of a 3-part saga: Wolfe has incidental brushes with a brainy crime boss -- one more face-off along the lines of Holmes vs. Moriarty, Batman vs. Penguin, Gandalf vs. Sauron. But in this instance as in so many others, the bad guy doesn't live up to his billing: during the final book (IN THE BEST FAMILIES), he's defeated by disappointingly humdrum measures, and the trilogy isn't an artistic success. But book one (AND BE A VILLAIN) and THE SECOND CONFESSION are still top-drawer ... and the latter is the most skillful detective story Stout ever penned.

This is for the audio version of this book. Prichard is, of course, flawless as the voices of Wolfe and his wise-cracking assistant Archie Goodwin. Wolfe remains deliciously true to character at every eccentric turn, and Stout continues the master of the English language and the occasional surprising Wolfian epithet (nincompoopery!). Phrasing so rich that sometimes I just had to pause the recording and write it down to savor it later. I've not read/heard a Wolfe novel yet that wasn't an complete pleasure.

Rex Stout's THE SECOND CONFESSION receives a fine uninterrupted continuation by pairing Los Angeles actor Michael Prichard with another fine Nero Wolfe mystery: this revolving around a warning shot to Wolfe from a gangland boss. His investigation of a lawyer boyfriend of a millionaire's daughter may be placing his own life in jeopardy.

The Second Confession is another in the long line of Nero Wolfe novels. The story begins with a man coming to Wolfe and asking him to prove that the man his daughter is dating is a communist so he can force the two to break up. Wolfe wisely amends the terms of the deal by opening it up to include any facts that would make him unacceptable to the daughter rather than limiting it to communism. When he begins digging into the man's past, it raises the ire of a man named Arnold Zeck (who previously appeared in And Be a Villain (Crime Line) (Crime Line)). Zeck is a powerful crime lord reminiscent of Professor Moriarty and when Wolfe fails to stop investigating he has the orchid room destroyed by machine gun fire to make his point. From here, there are many twists and turns until the mystery is solved and justice is served.

Archie sparkles as always while investigating first the background and then the murder of the possible communist with gangster ties. When he tries to slip a mickey into the drink of one suspect so he can search the guy's room, he gets a nasty surprise that is so entertaining that it alone is worth buying the book for.

Some reviewers suggest that the mere investigation of someone's possible status as a communist makes this book dated. I really don't see that. By this definition, any old detective story is dated because they don't have cell phones, hair and fiber analysis, etc. All stories set during WWII would be dated by mere mention of Nazis. That's just silly. It is one thing for a story to be clearly set in a past time, which this one is. As long as the story itself still works and is entertaining than I personally do not consider it dated.

While I would not rate this as one of the very best Nero Wolfe novels, it is far from the worst. The story moves along nicely and there is a good deal of the trademark humor that makes the series so enjoyable. It is also the second of three Arnold Zeck books and this one is referred to quite often in the third part, In the Best Families (Crime Line). If you are interested in reading that book, you would do well to read this one first.