Too Many Cooks

She ejaculated and jerked. Tolman ejaculated and bent over and reached for his handkerchief. I arose and reassured them, “It’s rite all kight, it doodn’t stain.” Then I went over and picked up his morning paper and sat down where he had been.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but, by the age of nine, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty” and as a member of several national committees. After the war, he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. All together, his Nero Wolfe novels have been translated into twenty-two languages and have sold more than forty-five million copies. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death, he published his forty-sixth Nero Wolfe novel, A Family Affair.

•  A NERO WOLFE MYSTERY  •

Here are special advance preview chapters from THE BLOODIED IVY, the new Nero Wolfe novel by Robert Goldsborough.

THE

BLOODIED IVY

Robert Goldsborough

ONE

Hale Markham’s death had been big news, of course. It was even the subject of a brief conversation I had with Nero Wolfe. We were sitting in the office, he with beer and I with a Scotch-and-water, going through our copies of the Gazette before dinner.

“See where this guy up at Prescott U. fell into a ravine on the campus and got himself killed?” I asked, to be chatty. Wolfe only grunted, but I’ve never been one to let a low-grade grunt stop me. “Wasn’t he the one whose book—they mention it here in the story: Bleeding Hearts Can Kill—got you so worked up a couple of years back?”

Wolfe lowered his paper, sighed, and glared at a spot on the wall six inches above my head. “The man was a political Neanderthal,” he rumbled. “He would have been supremely happy in the court of Louis XIV. And the book to which you refer is a monumental exercise in fatuity.” I sensed the subject was closed, so I grunted myself and turned to the sports pages.

I probably wouldn’t have thought any more about that scrap of dialogue except now, three weeks later, a small, balding, fiftyish specimen with brown-rimmed glasses and a sportcoat that could have won a blue ribbon in a quilting contest perched on the red leather chair in the office and stubbornly repeated the statement that had persuaded me to see him in the first place.

“Hale Markham was murdered,” he said. “I’m unswerving in this conviction.”

Let me back up a bit. The man before me had a name: Walter Willis Cortland. He had called the day before, Monday, introducing himself as a political science professor at Prescott University and a colleague of the late Hale Markham’s. He then dropped the bombshell that Markham’s death had not been a mishap.

I had asked Cortland over the phone if he’d passed his contention along to the local cops. “It’s no contention, Mr. Goodwin, it’s a fact,” he’d snapped, adding that he had indeed visited the town police in Prescott, but they hadn’t seemed much interested in what he had to say. I could see why: Based on what little he told me over the phone, Cortland didn’t have a scrap of evidence to prove Markham’s tumble was murder, nor did he seem inclined, in his zeal for truth, to nominate a culprit. So why, you ask, had I agreed to see him? Good question. I must admit it was at least partly vanity.