History Literature / TooManyWomen

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Archie lays one of these on both Wolfe and Inspector Cramer when he gets sick of their increasingly petty arguments, since he recognises that both are just frustrated about the case having stalled and are

* AssholeVictim: From what we learn, Waldo Moore appears to have been a rather lazy lothario who spent most of his time at Naylor-Kerr seducing women, picking fights and causing gossip, meaning that he wasn't hugely popular with his workmates. [[spoiler: Kerr Naylor also ends up being this.]] In both cases, Archie lampshades with some frustration that finding a suspect for either victim isn't exactly the problem in this case.
* BlackmailBackfire: It's a Wolfe novel, so there's a pretty good chance that this would be behind everything. [[spoiler: Specifically, Kerr Naylor has been blackmailing Jasper Pine with his murder of Waldo Moore to try and get Pine's job. This doesn't work out so well for him.]]
* BlatantLies: When Wolfe and Archie learn from Saul Panzer that Hester Livsey met with [[spoiler: Kerr Naylor]] before his death and come to suspect that she knows more about the murders than she's letting on, Livsey concocts an alibi with Summer Hoff that challenges Panzer's story. The alibi is transparently false and over-detailed, but cannot be disproven without exposing Panzer to the authorities, who are at this point still likely to take Livsey's word simply out of spite towards Wolfe. Wolfe is so insulted that Livsey would lie so transparently to his face that he [[spoiler: concocts a false narrative that suggests that Livsey has revealed that she knows who the killer is to Archie, thus putting her in danger and forcing her to come clean.]]
* CryingWolf: Naturally, Inspector Cramer leaps to automatic suspicion of everything Wolfe says and does, but two examples in particular stick out; he refuses to believe that Saul Panzer lost a tail or that Fritz Brenner failed to pass on a message to Wolfe or Archie because both are just that good. However, for once both actually ''did'' happen.
* DemotedToExtra: Fred And Orrie have arguably their smallest roles out of the books which they appear in here.
* DisgustingVegetarianFood: Kerr Naylor appears to exist mainly on seeds.
* GossipyHens: The stock department of Naylor-Kerr is apparently infested with them, with Gwynne Ferris being the main culprit. It doesn't take long for Archie to show up for gossip to start spreading about the real reasons why he's there. [[spoiler: They're weaponised by Wolfe and Archie to break Hester Livsey's fake alibi for her meeting with Kerr Naylor, by making it seem like Livsey has revealed that she knows the identity of the murderer to Archie.]]
* GossipEvolution: In addition to the above, gossip tends to quickly get exaggerated at Naylor-Kerr. [[spoiler: At the end, Archie is greatly amused to note the many exaggerations that Gwynne Ferris and her friends have added to the hints that Archie gave Gwynne that Hester Livsey told him she suspected who the killer was.]]
* GreenEyedMonster: Lots of it about; as noted elsewhere, there's a lot of besotted men who tend to get overprotective of the women they're interested in and driven to violent rage whenever another man appears to be attracting their attention. [[spoiler: In fact, it turns out to be the motive behind the first murder.]]

** Kerr Naylor is not a very pleasant man, being rather smug, condescending, deliberately unhelpful, arrogant and petty. [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Archie's also not overly thrilled with his extreme vegetarian diet either]]. [[spoiler: He graduates to AssholeVictim when he gets murdered, and as it's revealed that he's been blackmailing a known murderer we can also add "stupid" and "over-confident" to the list.]]
** Emmet Ferguson, a Naylor-Kerr executive who shows up ''purely'' to be an obnoxious, obstructive dick and antagonise Archie during a board meeting [[spoiler: to determine whether Wolfe will also investigate Kerr Naylor's murder]], also belongs here. His interactions with Wolfe and Archie leave them both wishing that they were ethically-loose enough to frame a man for murder, as they have the perfect candidate. That he turns out to be one of Naylor's few allies in the business isn't a huge surprise.

* ObnoxiousInLaws: Kerr Naylor is Pines wife’s brother and their relationship is mutually antagonistic.

* StalkerWithACrush: There appear to be some low-level high-functioning examples of this trope within the stock department of Naylor-Kerr, as each of the main women has a besotted man who just cannot seem to get his head around the fact that she's really not that interested in him. These include Rose Bendini's estranged husband, Benjamin Frankel for Gwynne Ferris, and Summer Hoff for Hester Livsey. But the king of them is probably [[spoiler: Jasper Pine, who had an affair with Livsey and snapped when she broke it off with him, leading him to murder Waldo Moore and Kerr Naylor when he found out and tried to blackmail him.]]

* MeatVsVeggies: The conflict itself doesn't really come up, but Kerr Naylor seems to subscribe to an extreme fundamentalist position on the "veggie" side; among other things, he apparently believes that meat-eating caused World War II.