Kay Hudson

Murder, Stage Left is Robert Goldsborough’s twelfth entry in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series. Judging by Wolfe’s current reading (Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), this one is set around 1963. (Goldsborough jumped forward into the computer age for a few books, but has since returned to a more Wolfean era—the books can be read in any order.)

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In Murder, Stage Left, the mystery revolves around a Broadway production, and finds Archie posing as a writer for a non-existent Canadian theater magazine to interview the members of the cast. This backfires when the director is murdered and Archie’s now-vanished alter ego becomes a suspect. Since the cast knows Archie as “Alan MacGregor,” Saul Panzer steps in to help with the investigation while Archie watches from the wings. The mystery follows the format of all the Wolfe tales, and the dialog occasionally reminded me of Damon Runyon, but as always I enjoyed the novel and Goldsborough’s continuation of Rex Stout’s series.

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Still in the 1960s, The Battered Badge finds Wolfe and Goodwin in the unusual position of coming to the aid of Inspector Cramer, the cigar-chewing homicide detective who maintains a semi-adversarial role throughout the series. This time, however, Cramer finds himself relieved of duty and replaced as head of the homicide squad by George Rowcliff, a detective who Wolfe really doesn’t like. The specter of dealing with Rowcliff in the future so discomfits Wolfe that he takes on investigating the murder that seems to have derailed Cramer’s career.

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As much fun as it was to see Cramer squirm a bit, and even more to see him collaborating (at arm’s length, but still) with Wolfe and Goodwin, the mystery itself fell a little flat. A couple of characters changed their minds on important issues simply because Wolfe told them to (pointing out the errors in their thinking), and the ending was a bit rushed (although it did see Wolfe leave the brownstone, riding white-knuckled in the rear seat as Archie drove). But these books are fun even if they don’t always hit all the high notes.

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Proving that the time line is the least of Goldsborough’s concerns, Death of an Art Collector is set in the late 50s (Frank Lloyd Wright, who died in 1959, makes a brief, and notably arrogant, appearance, and the opening of the Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum figures in the plot). The mystery in this one doesn’t run deep, and it’s almost a toss-up as to whether Wolfe solves it or it solves itself, but I continue to enjoy Goldsborough’s handling of Archie and Wolfe, Wolfe’s books of the moment (The Ugly American, for one), and Fritz’s amazing menus.

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Mr. Goldsborough turns 83 this year, but he has a new book out, Archie Goes Home. Good for him, and inspiration for us all.