Whodunit?

On page 9 of And Be a Villain by Rex Stout, Archie (Nero Wolfe’s right-hand man) makes a quip about the Rides of March.  A radio producer immediately get excited and starts to offer Archie $10 for the rights to use the phrase, then pauses and ask his assistant, “What percentage of our audience ever heard of the Ides of March?”  “‘One-half of one,’ she said as if she were quoting a published statistic.”

Clever, because of course one immediately thinks of the title of the work in which this exchange occurs, and wonders what percentage of the readers of a Nero Wolfe mystery have ever hear the phrase And Be a Villain?  Then, Amusingly Clever when one realizes that to solve the mystery all you have to do is wait until someone shows up who smiles and smiles, and you’ll instantly know the identity of the murderer.  Sure enough, on page 42, a smiling man shows up.  Mystery solved.

But, then a funny thing happens.  He didn’t do it.  So, what’s up with the title of the book?  I have no idea.  Other than that, it was a decent enough Wolfe story.  I think I would have enjoyed it more, though, if I wasn’t certain about the identity of the murderer who wasn’t really the murderer.

I read that book on the heels of reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links.  That was a very satisfying Hercules Poirot story.  Comparing Poirot and Wolfe is an interesting parlor game.  Which one is more clever?  In a battle of wits, who would win?  I want to say Poirot because I have always had a fondness for him, but honestly, Wolfe’s large (nothing about Wolfe is little) gray cells may be a match for Poirot’s little grey cells.  [Archie is way better than Hastings, though—I’ve never really been fond of Hastings, and in this book, he is downright annoying.]

I read Christie on the heels of reading Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock, included in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s.  It’s a good story, very well told.  No mystery here; we know who murdered whom.  But, the central problem is interesting.  Suppose you knew that a wealthy and powerful man murdered someone, that you were the only one who could place the murderer at the scene of the crime and that if anyone ever finds out that you know this, then you’ll end up being blamed for the murder.  Now suppose you work for the murderer and the murderer is looking for an unknown man whom he saw near the crime scene so that he can place the blame on this unknown man and that you know that said unknown man was you.  Now, add the extra twist that you are put in charge of discovering the identity of the unknown man.  Good luck with that one.  The Big Clock is ticking down to zero.

About the middle of the Christie book, I toyed with the idea of spending all month reading one crime novel by the each of the whole range of the greats, but alas after three of them in a row, I decided to move on to other genres.

However, I did read one more detective story while reading the above. I read the first collected volume of Alan Moore’s Top Ten.  That was a fascinating experience.  I loved Hill Street Blues when it was on TV.  Indeed, I’d put it in the top 5 shows ever.  (Along with Twin Peaks, Doctor Who, and a couple of others whose status in the top 5 varies over time.)  Now imagine a Hill Street Blues in a world in which everyone has superpowers.  That’s Top 10.  Seriously, reading the comic book is exactly like watching an episode of the TV show.  There is the same Police Precinct, with the wandering camera, following characters as they wander through the station.  The same overlapping sort lines.  The same range of quirky cops.  There is even the gruff cop who gets a call from his mother while on the job.  I have no idea, to be honest, if I really liked Top 10 because I liked thinking about Hill Street Blues the whole time I was reading it.  And speaking of the TV show; why are only the first two seasons out on DVD?