Trouble in Triplicate Rex Stout Series: Nero Wolfe [15] Published: 1993 Tags: Cozy Mystery, Vintage Mystery, Early 20th Century
Cozy Mysteryttt Vintage Mysteryttt Early 20th Centuryttt
SUMMARY: A repackaged Nero Wolfe mystery--the perfect companion for anyone who savors a good murder served up with true flair. Features an introduction by noted writer Randy Russell and never-before-published memorabilia from the life of Rex Stout.
Rex Stout
Trouble in Triplicate
Introduction
Nero Wolfe gives me the creeps. I warn my friends to stay away from him. He is anything but ideal.
He grows those damn flowers, for one thing. They’re orchids brought indoors from the nether reaches of the rain forest, as I understand it. In blossom, orchids look like veined slices of flesh, slivers of pale tissue, of muscle limp in humidity. They’re fed on feces and filtered sky. Orchids are a rare delicacy when grown indoors in New York City, on the roof of a brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street. I suspect Nero Wolfe of eating them.
Of course, he’s always eating. Nero Wolfe is a monster screaming to be fed. The ravenous Wolfe, whose body exists only to be endlessly fed, is the plant from another planet. But which one? Nero Wolfe is also the imperial, if closeted, mind. Rather than bodiless, he has been given a body grown too large, grown to universal uselessness. I think the planet he’s from exists within the solar system of our own thought processes. He’s the huge embodiment of the human mind.
Locked inside his own Draculan loathing of direct sunlight, of the outdoors (as if exposure would blister him), Nero Wolfe is the mystery reader’s brain in a jar. He’s a brain with a voice, but a voice of mere reasonings afloat in the solution of crimes.