Too Many Cooks/Champagne for One (50 page)

“Let me pass,” she said. “I’m going home.”

I have seldom felt sorry for that pair, but I did then, especially Cramer.

“Not right now,” he said gruffly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to answer some questions.”

One item. You may remember my mentioning that one day, the day after the murderer of Faith Usher was convicted, I was discussing with a friend what was the most conceited remark we had ever heard? It was that same day that I caught sight of Edwin Laidlaw in the men’s bar at the Churchill and decided to do a good deed. Besides, I had felt that the amount on the bill we had sent him, which he had paid promptly without a murmur, had been pretty stiff, and he had something coming. So I approached him, and after greetings had been exchanged I performed the deed.

“I didn’t want to mention it,” I said, “while her mother was on trial for murder, but now I can tell you, in case you’re interested. One day during that commotion I was talking with Celia Grantham, and your name came up, and she said, ‘I may marry him someday. If he gets into a bad jam I’ll marry him now.’ I report it only because I thought you might want to take some dancing lessons.”

“I don’t have to,” he said. “I appreciate it, and many thanks, but we’re getting married next week. On the quiet. We put it off until the trial was over. Let me buy you a drink.”

There you are. I’m one good deed shy.

Enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout’s own archives, here are rarely seen memorabilia.

Champagne for One

Authors and editors often rely on one another when deciding on a title for a novel. Fortunately for Marshall Best, Stout’s longtime editor, his author was able to come up with something that worked perfectly without the help of his “title department.” Could you imagine this classic story titled
Champagne for Faith Usher
?

Fer-de-Lance

The League of Frightened Men

The Rubber Band

The Red Box

Too Many Cooks

Some Buried Caesar

Over My Dead Body

Where There’s a Will

Black Orchids

Not Quite Dead Enough

The Silent Speaker

Too Many Women

And Be a Villain

The Second Confession

Trouble in Triplicate

In the Best Families

Three Doors to Death

Murder by the Book

Curtains for Three

Prisoner’s Base

Triple Jeopardy

The Golden Spiders

The Black Mountain

Three Men Out

Before Midnight

Might As Well Be Dead

Three Witnesses

If Death Ever Slept

Three for the Chair

Champagne for One

And Four to Go

Plot It Yourself

Too Many Clients

Three at Wolfe’s Door

The Final Deduction

Gambit

Homicide Trinity

The Mother Hunt

A Right to Die

Trio for Blunt Instruments

The Doorbell Rang

Death of a Doxy

The Father Hunt

Death of a Dude

Please Pass the Guilt

A Family Affair

Death Times Three

Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas but left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles and worked as a sight-seeing guide and itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds from his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel,
Fer-de-Lance
, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them
Too Many Cooks
,
The Silent Speaker
,
If Death Ever Slept
,
The Doorbell Rang
, and
Please Pass the Guilt
, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program
Speaking of Liberty
, and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery,
A Family Affair
. Ten years later a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in
Death Times Three
.