The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe: "The Damned Doorbell Rang"

My recent re-introduction to Rex Stout's terrific Nero Wolfe mysteries led me to a 2020 short story compilation with a title as long as Nero Wolfe was wide: The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe: Parodies and Pastiches Featuring the Great Detective of West 35th Street. What I find most intriguing about the collection is that none of the stories in it were written by Rex Stout. Instead, all of them were written by authors who were fans enough of the series that they consider Stout to have been an influence on their own work. Interestingly, the collection even includes a story written by Rebecca Stout Bradbury, the daughter of Rex and Pola Stout. Other contributors include the likes of Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, Robert Goldsborough, John Lescroart, and Otto Penzler.

The book is divided into three sections titled: "Pastiches," "Parodies," and "Potpourri," and the story title that jumped right out at me turned out to be the very last one in the collection, "The Damned Doorbell Rang," by Robert Lopresti. I figure this one caught my attention first because I recently purchased a copy of Stout's novel The Doorbell Rang and I've found myself more and more eager to begin reading it.

The biggest surprise about "The Damned Doorbell Rang" is that Nero and Archie only make an appearance in the story at all via the memories of a woman explaining to her granddaughter why she and the girl's grandfather moved out of New York City decades earlier - and she doesn't even know the names of the two men who lived next door to them there in the city. And she never did.

"The Damned Doorbell Rang" begins as one of those "worst neighbors ever" stories, this one about various comings-and-goings at all hours of the night, oddball visitors who often rang the wrong doorbell, celebrity sightings, explosions, and attempts on the life of the fat man next door. Nero Wolfe fans, of course, will recognize early on who these horrible neighbors have to be, so it's hard not to laugh out loud when the grandmother assures her husband that he is wrong about the two men being gay - and that she knows this for certain only because the younger one "gave her the eye" on occasion. Turns out that Gran even deserves credit for saving Wolfe's life not too long before she and her husband fled to a quieter lifestyle in New Jersey - a lifestyle that her granddaughter now finds terribly boring.

 The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, which even includes a story envisioning Nero Wolfe as the son of Sherlock Holmes, promises to be great fun. As much as I would love to read all of the stories in it, the clock started ticking on this one a few days before I could get to it, and the library will electronically yank it away from me my in just a few days. But if this one is half the fun I'm hoping it will be, I'll gladly get back in line for a second go at it.