How, then, does Rex Stout continue to enchant readers of both sexes and all political persuasions? In part by treating men and women alike as objects of critical scrutiny. More important, however, Stout simultaneously confers on the reader-any reader, male or female-so flattering a sense of membership in the vivid quasi family of Wolfe’s menage that the honored adoptee eagerly overlooks, forgives, or treasures the characteristics that define and preserve that orderly universe: Wolfe’s misogyny, Archie’s women-as-objects chauvinism, even Stout’s formulaic plots.

These three witness-centered novellas offer three radically different perspectives on the center of that universe. In “The Next Witness,” the agoraphobic, gynophobic Wolfe endures the discomfort of leaving home and suffers the intolerable sensation of finding himself seated next to a “perfumed woman.” In contrast, “When a Man Murders…” presents the Nero Wolfe most characteristic of the series, the at-home Wolfe who retains his distance from the human specimens that appear before him.

Except in one respect, “Die Like a Dog” is also stock Stout. A murder occurs. So what? The mystery might have been written to illustrate the maxim that nobody cares about the corpse and to refute the theory that the puzzle element accounts for the genre’s appeal. The exception is the charming Labrador retriever variously called Jet, Bootsy, and-tellingly, I think-Nero, perhaps the most fleshed-out nonseries character Stout ever created and a dog relegated to none of mystery’s hackneyed canine roles. Not the not-quite-victim I had expected, neither is this dog a transparently human character in canine guise.