Somebody Else's Nimrod

More Rex Stout

Rex Stout, Too Many Clients: After a murder, Archie discovers the victim's love nook, and Wolfe is determined to parlay into a fee from *someone*. This one suffers from some dated social attitudes (including one incident of domestic violence that is startlingly ugly for Stout), but is still fairly funny. The solution doesn't quite come out of the hat it initially seems to.

Stout, Plot It Yourself: An association of writers and publishers hires Wolfe to catch someone masterminding a scheme of false plagiarism charges and sets off a string of murders. Like Prisoner's Base, this is the rare suspenseful Stout, where the body count can be anticipated but not prevented. A relatively large cast of secondary characters is well-drawn. Although the culprit is reasonably connected to the crime in the end, the motives for the underlying scheme are never really made clear.