Not Quite Dead Enough - Rex Stout

For a number of reasons, Not Quite Dead Enough, comprised of two novellas published under a single title, is probably the most fascinating Nero Wolfe book that I’ve read. The first of the  two novellas, Not Quite Dead Enough, was originally published in 1942 in an abridged format in the December edition of The American Magazine, and the second, Booby Trap, was abridged for the same magazine in August 1944. But the most fun thing about the novellas is that, because they were written and published in the midst of World War II, Stout decides to remove Wolfe from his NYC apartment cocoon and force him to cope (which he does rather effectively) in the real world.

Not Quite Dead Enough begins with Archie Goodwin, now a newly promoted Army major, tasked with convincing his old boss Nero Wolfe that Wolfe should apply his investigatory talents to furthering America’s war efforts — free of charge, of course. Archie agrees to give it a try, but receives the shock of his life when he attempts to surprise Wolfe by showing up at Wolfe’s apartment unannounced. Neither Wolfe nor Fritz (the cook) are anywhere to be seen; every surface in the apartment is dusty, piles of unopened mail are on Wolfe’s desk, and even Wolfe’s beloved orchids are being ignored. Are the two men dead or have they been kidnapped? Neither, as it turns out. 

Even more amazingly, Wolfe (a World War I veteran) and Fritz are getting themselves in shape to join the army so that, as Wolfe puts it, they can “kill Germans.” Archie, though, has the perfect way to get Wolfe back in the game: a dead woman who moves around even after she quits breathing. 

By the time that novella number two, Booby Trap, begins, Wolfe has agreed to help the army investigate the murder of an officer who may have been involved in a plan to profit from advanced weapons technology being readied for battlefield deployment. Either the dead colonel was in the middle of the scheme or he knew too much about it to be allowed to live another minute. Either way, Wolfe considers everyone involved to be traitors to the country during a time of war, and he badly wants to nail them. 

Bottom Line: The two novellas in Not Quite Dead Enough give Nero Wolfe the chance to show a different side of his personality. In both novellas, readers get a glimpse of a patriotic, much less self-absorbed, and much more ruthless Nero Wolfe than they expected ever to see. Wolfe has always been willing to be both “judge and jury” during his investigations. Now the question is whether he is also willing to be “executioner.” 

Rex Stout

An Obvious Fact - Craig Johnson

In what turned out to be one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments, one of my 2021reading goals was to catch up on some of the crime/detective series I love so much. Among those targeted was Craig Johnson’s (soon to be) seventeen-book Longmire series because I had already read fourteen of the sixteen so-far-published novels. So, now, after having just finished reading An Obvious Fact, the twelfth book in the series, I’m officially caught up until the September 21 publication of Daughter of the Morning Star. But I enjoyed An Obvious Fact so much, that I’m starting to second guess my decision to catch up on Longmire - or any of my other favorite series, for that matter. After all, it’s really kind of nice to know that any reading slump you might find yourself enduring can be quickly stopped in its tracks by picking up a book filled with characters and settings that you have already enjoyed so much. 

For a couple of reasons, An Obvious Fact is one of my favorite books in the whole series. First, it’s set in and around Sturgis during what is easily the largest motorcycle rally anywhere in the world every year, and second, both Vic Moretti, and especially Henry Standing Bear, play major roles in the action. That’s just about perfect because much of the fun of a Longmire novel comes from watching Walt interact with Vic and Henry over the course of an investigation, and this one offers that treat as much, if not more, than any other novel in the series. Walt and Henry have been friends almost their entire lives, but they now share a bond with ex-Philadelphia cop Vic that will last all of them the rest of their lives. 

Walt Longmire is sheriff in a spacious Wyoming county, but he doesn’t let county lines stop him from going after the bad guys. Not everyone welcomes Walt’s help, but this time around, he’s actually been asked to cross the state line into South Dakota to help investigate a hit and run accident that left a young biker in a coma. So Henry, a regular at the annual Sturgis rally, and Walt climb into Henry’s 1959 Thunderbird called Lola, hook up a trailer to carry Henry’s vintage Indian bike to the rally, and head to Sturgis, South Dakota. Henry even packs the three annotated volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories he’s recently borrowed from Walt, a decision that Walt will soon regret after Henry begins to pepper him with appropriate quotes from the stories at every new stage of their investigation. 

Craig Johnson is a master when it comes to inserting humor when you least expect it, such as when Walt and Henry find out that they were spotted entering a property during an illegal search they made:

…Feeling relatively assured, I made the corner at the alley and walked directly into the extended barrel of an S&W .357 Magnum.

“I just wanted you to see how bad planning feels.” Engelhardt (a local cop) holstered his revolver. “Got a call about a half hour ago from Mrs. Hirsch, who lives across the way here. She’s got an irritable bladder condition and happened to see a large man walking on the roof of this building and another large man entering through the front door.”

“Here I thought we were being real stealthy.”

“Hard to sneak by an irritable bladder.”

“I’m going to have that needlepointed and put on my office wall.”

Bottom Line: The initial crime being investigated in An Obvious Fact leads to some unexpected places and some unexpected people, including the woman Henry was so struck by decades earlier that she became the namesake for his Thunderbird, and by extension, of Walt’s own granddaughter. There is a lot going on here: rival motorcycle gangs, ATF undercover agents, a rookie cop who finds the perfect mentor in Walt Longmire, an evil millionaire, drugs, and a little espionage thrown in as icing on the cake. It’s hard not to love this one.

Craig Johnson

The Old Man - Thomas Perry

It’s hard to explain why an author sometimes drops off your radar for decades before you come back to them. And that happens to me sometimes even with a writer as good as Thomas Perry, someone whose novels I enjoyed reading and was impressed by before not picking up another one for about thirty years. Thankfully, Perry’s 2017 novel The Old Man finally caught my eye long enough for those good memories to kick back in long enough for me to pick up the book for a closer look.

I was hooked from the first paragraph:

“An old man should have a dog.” Dan Chase’s daughter had told him that ten years ago, after his wife died. The part that surprised him was the term “old man.” He had just turned fifty then. But he supposed she was only giving him advance notice, time to get used to the idea and find a suitable dog. After a man’s wife died, he had to do something not to die too.

Dan Chase sounds like a family man at loose ends, one whose daughter is worried about his emotional health, and based on this paragraph you might think that you’ve picked up a tearjerker, one of those books that punch all the right buttons for older readers looking for stories about people like themselves. Well, you would be wrong; this is a Thomas Perry novel, after all, and all kinds of hell are about to break loose.

Dan Chase has a past. Thirty-five years ago, as a young army intelligence offer, Dan was sent to Libya to deliver several million dollars to an intermediary tasked with getting those funds to a rebel army badly in need of U.S. assistance. But as it turned out, that man was not interesting in giving up one dime of the money to help anyone but himself, so Dan risked his life by going back into Libya to reclaim the money and return it to the government. Unfortunately for Dan, his superiors did not want anyone to learn just how badly the mission had gone, so they decided to cover their own bad judgement by branding Dan a thief and a traitor to his country. They wanted him dead.

By now Dan Chase (one of the old man’s many aliases) has been hiding and/or on the run for close to four decades. He lives in Vermont with not one, but two, big dogs where he appears to be nothing more than a typical retiree enjoying his daughter and grandsons. As far as that goes, that’s who he is. But Dan Chase has never let his guard down, so when two Libyan assassins show up at his house one night, they don’t stand much of a chance against him and his dogs.

But the chase is on again, and Dan knows that it’s not just the Libyans after him. His own government, to one degree or another, is still smack dab in the middle of it all.

Bottom Line: The Old Man is a first rate thriller that moves the reader from point A to point Z in thrilling fashion as the people chasing our hero get closer and closer to catching him. But it is much more than that. Perry takes the time to develop several memorable characters along the way while detailing the evolving relationships these characters have with Chase. The Old Man is as close to a character-driven thriller as can be written without slowing down the basic premise of the story. I’m excited now to go back and read all those Thomas Perry books I’ve missed over the years…money in the bank.

Thomas Perry

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse - Various Authors

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, published in 2019, is the third book in a series of similar collections, having been preceded by Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse in 2008 and Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse in 2015. 

As I began this 524-page compilation of 34 apocalyptic short stories by various authors, I doubted that I was up to reading the entire collection, figuring that the similar nature of the stories would ultimately lead to my loss of interest in reading so many of them at once. After all, how many ways are there for the world to end? Well, here are some of the ones that these guys came up with:

• Economic Crash caused by running out of oil
• Global Warming leading to a nuclear winter
• Virus leading to a zombie apocalypse
• Nuclear War
• An uncontrollable fungus
• An unstoppable flu 
• A quickly mutating virus
• A takeover by computers and robots
• Alien Invaders
• Meteor Impact
• A mutated rabies virus
• Destruction of the ozone layer
• Flooding of all land masses

You will notice that there are only thirteen end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios listed, and that even some of these are similar, so most of them are used more than once. That, however, is where the real creativity of the selected writers becomes obvious. Some authors focus on the cause of the apocalypse, some on the aftermath, some on how survivors are coping and adapting, and a couple (my least favorites) are just generic sci-fi thrillers focusing on the fighting between survivors. There are even a couple of surrealistic stories that, honestly, made almost no sense at all to me as I struggled through them. 

I use a numbering system to help me judge the overall quality of short story collection by assigning each story from one to five points immediately after finishing them. Short story complications, by their nature, are almost always uneven, but with eight 5-star stories, thirteen 4-star stories, eight 3-star stories, and five 2-star stories, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse comes in with a solid 3.7 stars overall based on the average rating of the individual stories.

Among my favorites are: “Snow” by Dale Bailey, “So Sharp, So Bright, So Final” by Seanan McGuire, “The Elephants’ Crematorium” by Timothy Mudie, “The Eyes of the Flood” by Susan Jane Bidelow, and “The Last Garden” by Jack Skillingstead. 

Bottom Line: Wastelands: The New Apocalypse is an entertaining, and often thought-provoking, collection of short stories with a common theme. There is something here for every kind of science fiction fan in addition to the kind of character-driven storytelling that will appeal to readers who do not necessarily share an enthusiasm for short stories of this type. This collection is so much fun, in fact, that I’m tempted now to find the first two volumes in the series.

The Book Chase September 2021 Reading Plan

Despite my recent difficulties in concentrating on reading as easily as I normally do, it's time for me to take a look at what I have on hand for September reading. Coming in to this new month, I suspect that my reading by the end of the month may bear little resemblance to this list, but here goes anyway:

Beyond Words covers a question I've often wondered about, a tricky question at that: Are animals more like us than we want to admit? Carl Safina, using decades of field observations and some relatively new discoveries about the brain, attempts to answer that question here. I'm about 75 pages into this 411-page book right now (the section on elephants), and I'm fascinated by what I've read so far. The book's subtitle is "What Animals Think and Feel." 

I want to read The Skeleton Road for two big reasons: I've been a Val McDermid fan for a long time, and I've enjoyed other mysteries/thrillers (particularly those of another favorite of mine, Gerald Seymour) using the 1990s Balkan Wars as a backdrop. I realize I'm taking a bit of a chance with this one because it is book 3 in McDermid's six-book Karen Pirie series, but I decided not to wait. I'm hoping it works as a standalone until I can investigate the rest of the series.

Blacktop Wasteland is the novel that made S.A. Cosby's reputation in early 2020. As some will remember, I've recently read and reviewed Cosby's followup to this one, and I really liked it. The plot does sound a little more conventional than that of Razorblade Tears. It concerns a former getaway driver who gets tempted into doing just one more job. He's the "best getaway driver east of the Mississippi," after all. This one got raves last year from everyone that counts in the publishing world.

I've been fascinated by The Hole in the Wall Gang just about forever, and I brought this Butch Cassidy biography home with me from a South Dakota bookstore I visited during my July road trip to the Northwest. There is a whole lot of speculation as to whether Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did or didn't die in a shootout with Bolivian soldiers, but this one focuses on the "character" of the two men as much as anything else. It amazes me that they were still trying to catch Butch well into the first decade of the twentieth century.

I borrowed The Old Man from Amazon Prime a while back but lost it on my Kindle until recently. You can borrow 10 Prime Books at a time with no deadline to return them, so this is not the first time I've pulled this stunt. Thomas Perry is an exceptional writer of spy thrillers, and this one is really good. I'm over halfway through it, and it's the one I'm coming closest to losing myself in right now. It's about an American agent who has been on the run from the US government for decades because someone badly needs a scapegoat.

I'm in the mood for another nostalgic visit to the home office of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, so I've got Not Quite Dead Enough ready to go. This is the tenth book in the Nero Wolfe series. At the same time, I've unearthed an old 1952 hardback by Ellery Queen (without a dust jacket) called The King Is Dead that I might try to work into September also. I have no idea what it's even about, but I can't remember the last time I read an Ellery Queen novel (maybe never), and I'm curious to see what the book is like. 

Another old friend I hope to visit in September is Wyoming's Walt Longmire. Other than the brand new one, this is the only Longmire novel in the seventeen- book series that I haven't read. This one takes place in the general area of Sturgis during that town's annual motorcycle rally. According to the book flap, Bear (maybe my favorite character in the whole series) won't stop repeating (per Arthur Conan Doyle), "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." I've been saving this one; now's when I need it.

I do have four titles on hold at my library, and I'm hoping that at least one of those turns up in September. The one that frustrates me most is Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro because I had that one on hold for four months prior to leaving on my July trip...and you guessed it. It came in just a couple of days into my drive, and I had to release it to others on the hold list. I'm currently something like number 65 on the list of people wanting it. I also have Christy Lafteri's Songbirds on hold but I started out as number 4 on the list, and a couple of week later I'm still number 4. I also put Louise Penny's new Gamache novel, The Madness of Crowds, on hold, but I'm likely to buy that one well before it becomes available from the library.

The one I'm hoping shows up is The Reading List: A Novel by Sara Nisha Adams. I've made it to number 3 on the list now, so there's a good shot. It's described this way: "An unforgettable and heartwarming debut about how a chance encounter with a list of library books helps forge an unlikely friendship between two very different people in a London suburb." Well, if anyone's heart needs to be warmed right now, it's mine.

So there you have it. I'm cautiously optimistic about my September reading, but only time will tell.

And Be a Villain - Rex Stout

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series is the first detective series I remember getting myself hooked on. The good news back then (the mid-sixties) was discovering that the series had started years before I was born (with 1934’s Fer-de-Lance), so there were already lots of Nero Wolfe books for me to enjoy. Even better, Stout kept writing new ones every couple of years right up until his death in 1975, so for a long time there was always another new Nero Wolf story to look forward to. And as I’ve just been reminded, author Robert Goldsborough added another sixteen Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books between 1986 and 2021, meaning I have even more Nero Wolfe material to explore now than I ever imagined. 

As I began And Be a Villain, I had vivid memories of the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin characters and the amusing relationship that developed between them over the years. Theirs was/is much more than an employer/employee relationship; the men respect each other, care for each other, and are real friends. That, in fact, is part of what makes their verbal sparring so much fun. But even though this is not the first time I’ve read And Be a Villain, I remembered very little about it’s actual plot, so reading it now was almost like reading it for the first time.

Nero Wolfe is almost literally an “armchair detective” — and he’s a good one. Wolfe is a large man (I picture him as someone approaching a weight of 300 pounds) who refuses to leave his New York City apartment for any reason. Archie Goodwin, considerably younger than Wolfe, and a whole lot more agile, does all of the leg work involved in a Nero Wolfe investigation. In the meantime, Wolfe happily follows his own schedule of meals at specific times and two daily sessions with his beloved orchids. 

This time around, popular radio talk show host Madeline Fraser has had the unthinkable happen during one of her live broadcasts. A guest has dropped dead on-air after taking a sip of  from a soda provided by one of the show’s sponsors. All the police know for certain is that someone slipped cyanide into one of the bottles, and that this particular guest drew the unlucky bottle. It is exactly the kind of case that appeals to Wolfe, and because he has a large tax bill due just when his cash flow is at a low point, he offers his services to the radio network and the show’s sponsors on a contingent basis. If he solves the case before the police do it — or if the police solve it only because of a Wolfe-provided clue — he cashes their $20,000 check. If he fails, they get the check back.

But when Wolfe gathers up all the principals involved with Madeline Fraser’s radio show, he makes his first discovery: they are all lying — maybe not all for the same reason, but each and every one of them is holding something back. And that’s a fatal mistake, because now Nero Wolfe is ticked.

Bottom Line: And Be a Villain (1948) is the thirteenth Nero Wolfe mystery, and by this time fans of the series were familiar with the Wolfe and Goodwin characters. Feature films based on the Rex Stout characters had been produced by 1948, and television was going to make Nero Wolfe a household name in various TV series over the coming decades. The Nero Wolfe novels are usually not very long, but they are always satisfying. Fans of character-driven mysteries will particularly enjoy them, I think, but the mysteries are always solidly constructed ones that readers will also enjoy trying to solve before Wolfe gives them all the answers. 

Rex Stout