Literature / Murder by the Book

The fourteenth Nero Wolfe novel, written in 1951.

Inspector Cramer visits Nero Wolfe to make sense of a list of names found in the pocket of murder victim Leonard Dykes. Wolfe is unable to make any sense from it, but a month later Wolfe is hired by mid-western businessman named John R. Wellman to investigate the hit-and-run death of his daughter. Joan Wellman worked for a publishing company and had read and rejected a novel written by a “Baird Archer,” one of the names on Dykes' list.

Archie’s investigation leads him to the woman who typed Archer’s novel, Rachel Abrams, but she is murdered as well. The investigation focuses on the law firm Dykes worked at, with it becoming apparent that Dykes had decided to write a book about his law firm and that something in it got him and two other people (soon to be three) killed.

Contains examples of:

• Above Good and Evil: The killer, as part of the Motive Rant delivered to Wolfe as part of Jim Corrigan's suicide note, at one point delivers a rather sneering Nietzschean monologue about how, since he was able to overcome his moral qualms about murder in order to kill three people for his own purposes and found it increasingly easy, clearly he's beyond petty judgements about right and wrong or good and evil. Ultimately subverted, however: Corrigan didn't write this note and was in fact one of Conroy O'Malley's victims, but it's heavily suggested that O'Malley was drawing from his own experiences. Furthermore, while O'Malley is still rather cocky and sneering after Wolfe confronts him, his smugness rapidly dissolves when John Wellman, the father of one of the innocent victims killed as part of O'Malley's Serial Killings, Specific Target gambit, stands before him and asks that O'Malley look him in the eye and shake his hand. O'Malley is unable to do either.
• Ambition Is Evil: Played with. Corrigan almost certainly sold out O’Malley just so he could become senior partner, but what O’Malley did was absolutely unbecoming an attorney and worthy of disbarment.
• Amoral Attorney: Zigzagged. A lot of the intrigue of the case involves a law firm. The former senior partner, O’Malley has just been disbarred after he was caught bribing a juror. And one of the others, Corrigan, was the one who ratted him out to take his job, for which O’Malley kills him. The other partners of the firm aren’t necessarily portrayed as bad men but are pretty stiff and obstructive with Wolfe by the end.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Archie observes that one of the firm stenographers, Claire Burkhart, looks to only be in high school, and she does sound a bit shallow when commenting about the murders.
• Best Served Cold:O’Malley was willing to wait months to kill Corrigan while murdering three other people just to eliminate complications that might put him in danger of being suspected for killing Corrigan..
• Complexity Addiction: The murderer, arguably, when you consider that O'Malley could have just let Dykes keep trying to publish his novel and then made it look like Corrigan killed himself out of fear of Dykes revelations, or framed Corrigan for killing Dykes and killed him then without going after Joan and Rachel. This is perhaps justified, as judging by the tone of his Motive Rant he appears to have gone a bit mad with the thrill of murder.
• Crazy-Prepared: Played for Laughs. Archer writes all of the women's names on slips of paper, saying he’ll take the one he draws out on a date. The name he draws out is that of Sue Dondero, who has clearly caught his eye most, before putting the slips in his pocket. When accused of rigging the drawing, Archie takes slips of paper with everyone's names on them out of his pocket, but he mentions that he may show Sue an additional set of paper slips in his other pocket.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: An interesting version in that the first three murders are partially committed for the purpose of framing the fourth victim for their murders, to provide a reason for his fake suicide.
• Genius Bruiser: While he’s never actually in a fight, Emmet Phelps, the firm's expert on precedents and research, is describes as a broad-shouldered man who looks like he should be wearing the uniform of a military officer.
• Grand Romantic Gesture: Both done for the case and Archie’s personal pleasure. He presents orchids to the firm's female employees and invites them for dinner at Wolfe’s in order to get them talking, but at the end of the night he offers to send them additional orchids every month and makes a show of drawing one of their names from a hat to take on a date.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: The second victim, Joan Wellman, works for a publishing company and reads a Write Who You Know book efore sending it back with a rejection. She receives a message from the supposed author (actually his murderer) saying he wants to revise the book and will pay Joan and anyone else who's read it for input and advice. Joan ends up dead very soon after telling him that she's the only one who read the book. Interestingly, she mentions the book's existence (although not its contents) in a letter to her parents specifically because his questions reminded her of it.
• He Knows Too Much: Dykes, Joan, and Rachel were all killed because they had knowledge about how Corrigan had gotten O’Malley disbarred, and if Corrigan turned up murdered, they might be able to use that against O’Malley.
• I Shall Taunt You: A particularly sadistic version is speculated upon by Wolfe, although it isn’t confirmed if he’s right or not. Wolfe theorizes that before killing Corrigan and making it look like a suicide, O’Malley tied him up and then read the fake suicide note to give Corrigan plenty of time to process that he was going to die for his betrayal, that he’d gotten three other people killed, and that his name would be disgraced.
• The Millstone: Fred Briggs was nearly eighty before he made partner at the firm and Archie describers him as seeming useless and stupid.
• Missed Him by That Much: Rachel Abrams is thrown out of a window to her death just as Archie is entering the building to come see her.
• Mood Whiplash: Done deliberately. When Archie invites over the the women from the law firm there’s several pages of Food Porn and telling jokes. Then Archie gets around to the murder and brings in the parents of two murder victims to appeal to them for information.
  Archie: It must be faced that I have doused all hope of continued revelry.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The killer, after Wolfe delivers The Summation, is initially rather aloof and contemptuous and, as discussed under Above Good and Evil, is implied to have developed some rather Nietzschean ideas about morality as a result of their actions. Then John Wellman, father of one of the victims, asks to look him in the eye and shake his hand. The killer's smugness and aloofness to the idea of conventional morality quickly dissolves into guilt.
• Odd Friendship: During the investigation, Archie gets along well with Dykes' sister (who's a lot older than him and married) during the case. Gets in some possible romantic tones when he comments that maybe in twenty years he’ll be old enough that the age difference won’t matter and her husband might be dead and then maybe he’ll look her up again.
• Oh, Crap!: During Wolfe’s summation, Louis Kustin seems to realize the direction he’s going and asks to speak with him in private before he continues:
  Wolfe: So you’re beginning to see something, now that I’ve cleared away some of the rubbish? And you’d like to point at it. I’ll do the pointing, Mr. Kustin.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Cramer actually coming to Wolfe for help on a case isn’t something that gets seen very often.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Both the Wellman and Abrams families (although Mrs. Abrams has two younger daughters).
• Papa Wolf: Wellman is determined to see his daughter avenged, and picks the right way of going about it when he hires Wolfe to find the killer.
• Pen Name: The list of names (including Baird Archer) in Dykes' pocket were names he was considering as pseudonyms for his novel.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target: Played with; the murder victims were all individuals who had a connection with Baird Archer's unpublished novel, leading everyone to suspect that someone is murdering them all because of what they read in the book. However, it actually overlaps with this and Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit; the murderer is in fact killing these people not so much because he wants to keep the manuscript and its contents secret, but because he wants to kill the person who actually wants to keep the manuscript and its contents secret, and frame him.
• Sexy Secretary: Many of the firms secretaries and stenographers (particularly Eleanor Gruber and Sue Dondero) get quite a bit of Eating the Eye Candy description from Archie.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Archie describes Blanche as a “three shades of blonde sourpuss” at their first meeting but later says she looks nice with a little makeup and a good dress on the dance floor.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Joan Wellman gets a glowing description as a chaste, friendly, and hard-working girl from her father when he hires them to investigate her murder and Archie admits that he's a bit surprised that his investigation only turned up glowing and positive information reinforcing that impression.
• The Stoic: Louis Kustin, the firm's main trial lawyer, is described as a sleepy-eyed man with a bored voice, at least until he gets really stirred up at Wolfe and Archie.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: A variant. Wolfe finds it suspicious how O’Malley quickly brought up to Archie and Wolfe how he’d supposedly been in Atlanta for a while, during the times the murders took place.
• Villainous Breakdown: The killer at the end. O'Malley is pretty cocky initially after Wolfe's accusations — but then his surviving former law partners refuse to represent him, and John Wellman, the father of one of his innocent victims, walks over and demands that he look him in the eye and shake his hand. His cockiness rapidly disappears.
• Write Who You Know: An in-universe example; it transpires that Baird Archer's Put Not Your Trust is a thinly-veiled Roman a clef regarding the scandalous goings on at the law firm of Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin and Briggs. Specifically, regarding the disbarment of Conrad O'Malley.