Sunday, October 13, 2002

I've read Nero Wolfe books for twenty years, at least, and I thought I'd read them all (more than once). But no - an unexpected surprise at the local library, Black Orchids, a really good one. I just read it all the way through at one go. Marvelous! Here's how Rex Stout reintroduces the familiar cast of characters on the first page: After all the ballyhoo in the special Flower Show sections of the Sunday papers, it was a cinch that some member of our household would have to go take a look at those orchids, and as Fritz Brenner couldn't be spared from the kitchen that long, and Theodore Horstmann was too busy in the plant rooms on the roof, and Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out, it looked as if I would be elected. I was. There are so many colorful phrases. After Wolfe has finished another of Fritz's excellent meals, we find him "leaning back with his fingers laced over his sausage mausoleum, his eyes half closed." And Johnny Keems is described as "a gentleman from his skin out". I'd read a few of the books to my sons so we were all delighted when A&E started showing a new Nero Wolfe series. The cast is excellent and the show captures the characters wonderfully; we watch favorite lines and gestures over and over again. Especially Inspector Cramer:   The dick got out his memo book and wrote it down. "I don't think it was deliberate," he said. "I think she just changed her mind. I think she just--"   "You think? You say you think?"   "Yes Inspector, I--"   "Get out. Take another man, take Dorsey, and go to that address and look into her. Don't pick her up. Keep on her. And for God's sake don't think. It's repulsive, the idea of you thinking." Just one more quote: someone has died of tetanus, after a cut from broken glass. Later Archie hears someone else cry out in the shower and goes to investigate and is stopped at the threshold by the maid:   "What happened?" I asked.   "Nothing serious," the maid said. "A cut on her arm. She cut herself with a piece of glass."   "She what?" I goggled. But without waiting for an answer, I stepped across and walked through the maid into the bathroom. Janet, undressed in the fullest sense of the word and wet all over, was seated on a stool. Ignoring protests and shaking off the maid, who was as red as a beet having her modesty shocked by proxy, I got a towel from a rack and handed it to Janet.   "Here," I said, "this will protect civilization. How the dickens did you do that?" 9:33:54 AM

© Copyright 2002 John Sands.