: Three at Wolfe’s Door
Author: Rex Stout
This is a collection of three Nero Wolfe novellas. The first, “Poison a la Carte,” is a tedious business about a poisoning at a dinner Wolfe attends. The suspects are a bewildering collection of female servers and the solution isn’t particularly Wolfe-like (he basically figures out a way to trick the murderess to confess — no brilliant deducting here). The next story, “Murder for Three” is better — a woman returns to her vehicle to find there’s a dead woman inside and hires Archie (Nero’s partner) to help her — but the ending is strange, as Wolfe unmasks the murderer (so he says) but can’t prove anything. The third, “The Rodeo Murder,” has a character so irritating I could hardly stand to read the story, and unfortunately the “solution” to this one turns out to be secret knowledge only Wolfe knows (cheating, in my book). Overall not great. This has tempered my enthusiasm of Wolfe novels for a while.
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