The tenth novel in the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout.
Jasper Pine, CEO of Naylor-Kerr Industries, has a problem. During a recently survey of staff turnover, one of the department heads — Kerr Naylor, son of the company's founder — has submitted a report claiming that Waldo Moore, an employee believed to have killed in a fatal hit-and-run accident, was actually murdered. As this has naturally spread gossip like wildfire among his staff, Pine wants the rumours either squashed or the perpetrator caught before it begins to negatively impact his business, and has approached Nero Wolfe to solve the matter once and for all. As this happens to coincide with a period of tension between Wolfe and Archie Goodwin over various personal matters, Archie sees it as a good opportunity to earn some easy money and get away from Wolfe for a while by going undercover at Naylor-Kerr as an efficiency expert to dig into the rumors. But multiple surprises await Archie at Naylor-Kerr, including a stock department staffed almost exclusively by beautiful women, interpersonal relationships filled with scheming and jealousy, and the increasing likelihood that Waldo Moore was not the victim of an accident after all...
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.)
- Asshole Victim: 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. 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.
- Blackmail Backfire: It's a Wolfe novel, so there's a pretty good chance that this would be behind everything. 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.
- Blatant Lies: When Wolfe and Archie learn from Saul Panzer that Hester Livsey met with 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 Sumner Hoff that challenges Saul's story. The alibi is transparently false and over-detailed, but cannot be disproven without exposing Saul 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 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.
- Crying Wolf: 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.
- Demoted to Extra: Fred and Orrie have arguably their smallest roles out of the books which they appear in here.
- Disgusting Vegetarian Food: Kerr Naylor appears to subsist mainly on seeds.
- Driven to Suicide: Jasper Pine leaps from his office window after his wife Cecily confronts him about his two murders. We never get to hear exactly what she said.
- Gossipy Hens: 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. They're weaponized 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.
- Gossip Evolution: In addition to the above, gossip tends to quickly get exaggerated at Naylor-Kerr. 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.
- Green-Eyed Monster: 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. In fact, it turns out to be the motive behind the first murder.
- Jerkass:
- Kerr Naylor is not a very pleasant man, being rather smug, condescending, deliberately unhelpful, arrogant and petty. Archie's also not overly thrilled with his extreme vegetarian diet either. He graduates to Asshole Victim when he gets murdered, and as it's revealed that he's been blackmailing a known murderer we can also add "stupid" and "overconfident" 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 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.
- While several of the men who show up throughout the story tend to be rather fixated on defending a particular woman, Summer Hoff tends to be the most obnoxious, belligerent and rude about it.
- Knight in Shining Armor: The men working in or connected to the stock department of Naylor-Kerr appear to have a serious complex around this trope when it comes to the women they're interested in, with the women in turn not being entirely deserving of such chivalry. The amount of misguided protectiveness and aggravation that Archie has to deal with, particularly from Summer Hoff, gets to the point where Archie dryly notes that the company motto should probably be changed to "Protect Your Woman" (or "Protect Your Woman Even If She's Not Yours")
- Ladykiller in Love: It's ambiguous, but hinted that Waldo Moore really was willing to give up his casanova ways and settle down with Hester Livsey.
- Meat Versus Veggies: 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.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Kerr Naylor is Pine's wife’s brother and their relationship is mutually antagonistic.
- Posthumous Character: Waldo Moore has been dead for four months by the time the events of the novel start.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: 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 just lashing out at each other.
- Stalker with a Crush: 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 Rosa Bendini's estranged husband Harold Anthony, Benjamin Frankel for Gwynne Ferris, and Sumner Hoff for Hester Livsey. But the king of them is probably Jasper Pine, who had an affair with Livsey and snapped when she broke it off with him, leading him to murder first Waldo Moore and then Kerr Naylor when he found out and tried to blackmail him.
- Two-Timer Date: Discussed and invoked; we don't see the results, but the novel ends with Archie gleefully setting up a Three-Timer Date with Rose Bendini, Hester Livsey and Gwynne Ferris and cheerfully admitting to Wolfe that he's got no idea how he's going to get away with it. Being The Charmer, the reader is left with the assumption that Archie will manage to talk his way out of it somehow (or alternatively that he's in for one hell of an evening).
