Rex Stout's twenty-ninth Nero Wolfe novel, published in 1966.
Orrie Cather asks Archie to retrieve his detective's license from the apartment of his mistress, Isabel Kerr, but Archie finds Kerr's body instead, clocked with an ashtray. When Orrie is taken into custody as the prime suspect, neither Wolfe, Archie, nor Fred Durkin can state for certain whether Orrie is innocent or not, but Saul Panzer's reasoning convinces Wolfe to take the case. Wolfe's investigation of the dramatis personae connected to Isabel - her sister Stella Fleming, Stella's husband Barry, her "keeper" Avery Ballou, Ballou's wife Minerva, her best friend Julie Jaquette, and her doctor Theodore Gamm - reveals no leads until Ballou reveals that he has been blackmailed by a man he believes is Orrie. Wolfe reveals not only that Orrie is not the blackmailer, but one of the other suspects is, and that suspect is likely the murderer. Now with a client and a need to draw the killer out, Wolfe enlists Julie's help, but he and Archie must keep watch else another woman find herself meeting the same fate as Isabel.
A Nero Wolfe Mystery adapted the novel as their second season premiere.
Tropes in this work: (Tropes relating to the series as a whole, or to the characters in general can be found on Nero Wolfe and its subpages.)
- Baby Trap: Isabel claimed pregnancy in an attempt to force Orrie to marry her, though Orrie doubts she was genuinely pregnant. Whether she was or not never comes up.
- Character Name Alias: The blackmailer used two aliases in dealings with Avery Ballou: "Robert Service Kipling" over the phone, and "Milton Thales" as a mailing address. "Robert Service Kipling" came from the books in Isabel's apartment, thereby identifying the purpose of the call. "Milton Thales" came from Thales of Miletus
, an ancient Greek mathematician, which Wolfe deduces to identify the blackmailer as mathematics professor Barry Fleming. - Leave Behind a Pistol: Indirectly. Instead of confronting Barry with the evidence that he is the blackmailer and murderer, Wolfe, Archie, and Julie reveal it to his wife Stella, leading her to confront him. Barry ends up writing a confession before a .22 slug passes through his temple; whether fired by his own hand or his wife's, Archie decides with a coin flip.
