Someone looking for a chance to spend time with Wolfe and Archie at their most vivid could hardly pick a better volume than this one. Short detective fiction is often very frustrating. Restricted to a few thousand words, even the best of authors choke. Characters strongly drawn in the longer fictional forms become thin. Plots made intricate by twists and turns over the course of two hundred pages turn out to be obvious and feeble when confined to twenty. Maybe my third-grade teacher was right. Maybe Mr. Rex Stout was perfect. There are none of the weaknesses of your run-of-the-mill mystery story here.

What you will find are four very good stories, two of which have curious histories. “Easter Parade,” for instance, was originally published in Look magazine with color pictures to accompany the text. The fair-play clues to the puzzle were supposed to be in the photographs. Although I have not seen these photographs, I know from report that there is a hardcover edition of And Four to Go that includes them, but in black and white. Having read the story without them, I can say that they are not strictly necessary. Stout was too careful to leave all the responsibility for planting clues up to some camera.

Then there is “Murder Is No Joke,” the only one of these four stories not set during a holiday. A version of that one appears in Death Times Three-with a little difference. The difference is the female lead, Flora Gallant in both, who appears as an old and ugly woman in the book you are now holding, but as a young and beautiful one-and subplot romance for Archie-in the slightly longer version in the other volume.