1 |
the Stagge books will continue whatever else their authors are doing for Uncle Sam. A good book can do as much for the country's morale as all the public relation work." |
2 |
And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, and there shall be none to bury her. |
3 |
far more upset at the carbon monoxide poisoning of Sir Basil...than they are at the mutilation murder of the young woman. In fact, the Hunt Club holds an elaborate funeral for the horse, in which all of them dress royally in their riding habits and stand around solemnly while Sir Basil is buried in the owners' front lawn. |
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on a false a***umption that everyone, including Westlake and a county cop, Inspector Cobb, makes without once considering a glaringly obvious alternative possibility. |
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stretching credibility very thin. |
6 |
didn't fit and needed pressing |
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on its second or third day. |
8 |
There was nothing wrong with his long bony face and broad forehead, but he simply didn't have the air of a man who might make a sizable contribution to Nero Wolfe's bank balance. |
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nearly to his shoes. |
10 |
Where's my wife? |
11 |
I seldom feel sorry for people Wolfe has got in a corner....but I had to move my eyes away from Austin Hough. His long bony face was distorted he looked more like a gargoyle than a man. |
12 |
I couldn't tell her, |
13 |
but I wanted her to know I knew. |
14 |
Of course my wife shouldn't have married me....I was a fool to think that I might still save our marriage, but I did. She wanted things that I couldn't supply, and she wanted to do things that I am not inclined to and not equipped for. She couldn't do them with me, so she did them without me. ...About a year ago she suddenly had a watch that must have cost a thousand dollars or more. Then other things--jewelry, clothes, a fur coat....occasionally she came home after dawn....I descended to snooping.... |
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[W]hat was he going to say? |
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Was he going to explain that he was responsible for her finding a reception committee when she went to get her umbrella? Was he going to admit--I turned that switch off. He had married her, I hadn't. |
17 |
Balls |
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I have seen better-looking corpses, |
19 |
I was afraidof what would happen if I told her [that I knew about her] |
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Now it has happened. |
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She's your wife, not mine, |
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but has a doctor seen her? |
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No, |
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I was filling the ice bags when you rang the bell. |
25 |
No. |
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Send her a bottle of champagne, |
27 |
with the compliments of Archie Goodwin. |
28 |
I have often wondered whether he dumped it in the garbage, or drank it himself, or shared it with her. |
29 |
You beat your naughty wife until she looked worse than a corpse, here's to you! |
30 |
Archie is always the White Knight [in relation to women]....which makes Archie's actions in Too Many Clients (1960) surprising when, after he learns Arthur Hough has beaten his wife, Archie sends Mr. Hough a bottle of Dom Perignon, with his compliments and paid for by him personally--tacit approval of the beating. |
31 |
Archie's celebration of the cuckolded husband's cowardly attack on his wife--yeah, your a real man now, Professor!--went too far for me. |
32 |
I was talking to her! |
33 |
She's your wife, not mine |
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Here you are, big man, you beat up a woman, congratulations! Now what? |
35 |
what say you? |
36 |
bower of carnality |
37 |
Archie here is at his funniest and most visible. Maria Perez is the liveliest foreign girl to appear in the series since Anna Fiore in |
38 |
, and the late Thomas Yeager...is a superb portrait of the businessman type that Rex despised. |
39 |
How the deuce did you get to head a large and successful corporation? |
40 |
foreign girl. |
41 |
My name is Cesar Perez, |
42 |
I am a citizen of the United States of America. |
43 |
high-powered, s***-crazed business***ecutive |
44 |
nonprurient, critical detachment |
45 |
Another point against him was that he had no hat |
46 |
Ninety-eight per cent of men who can pay big fees wear hats. |
47 |
old hat. |
48 |
markedly ingenious. |
49 |
easily among his best. |
50 |
one of Mr. Stout's brighter books |
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[e]xcellent diversion. |
52 |
Stewart's cla***ic education served her splendidly, |
53 |
Informed by lightly worn research, her books were intelligent and full of literary allusion. It might be said that in subject matter and treatment she was a natural successor to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. |
54 |
No livelier man (than Stout) been the subject of a duller book, |
55 |
The art of biography rests in selection, and what you omit may be as significant as what you include. This biography gives the impression of omitting nothing....The biographer's own comments are always jejune or banal. |
56 |
At the risk of outraging an accepted American myth |
57 |
it must be said that [McAleer]absurdly inflates the [Nero Wolfe] stories' merit. On the evidence of the Wolfe saga, Stout was simply not in the same stylistic league with Hammett, Chandler or Ross Macdonald. His prose is energetic and efficient, nothing more. His plots lack the metronomic precision of Ellery Queen's....The truth is that Stout wrote too much too easily, and that like all crime writers dependent on repeated introduction of the same characters--including Doyle and Simenon--his work was subject to the law of diminis***ng returns. The early Wolfe books, those produced up to 1950, are infinitely better than those that followed, with "The Doorbell Rang" and "Death of a Doxy" offering exceptions to this rule....[Stout's] achievement was to create a Superman detective who will be remembered as long as people read crime stories; his limitation was that this figure operates in the context of books that are consistently entertaining, but for the most part just as consistently forgettable. |
58 |
It must be said |
59 |
The truth is |
60 |
remembered as long as people read crime stories. |
61 |
metronomic precision of Ellery Queen |
62 |
and it must be said |
63 |
try to forget |
64 |
silly Julian Symons' article. |
65 |
You also know that Rex Stout is an incomparably better writer than the pathetic and jealous Symons (or any of the grubby merchants he admires), and that this |
66 |
is the motivation of the review....It is typical of the man that he singles out Rex Stout's "s***y" novels as "among the best." I only read one of them, How Like a God, and it was not in the same street as The Doorbell Rang and A Family Affair, or indeed any of the lucidly-written, mature works. It is also nonsense to say that his style was not comparable to, say, Ross Macdonald. To my eye and ear, RM's style is derivative, strained and totally predictable. I can feel him trying. Rex Stout's style was--is--flawless. |
67 |
....do, please, ignore the man's opinions, even if you can't quite ignore his spite. I have met him; he is a boor, and a second-rate writer, and has no sense of style--I mean, he would not know good English if he saw it. The biggest compliment Julian Symons can pay to any book is to dislike it. |
68 |
....Believe me, everyone I know rates the wretched little man as I do. Forget him. You did a good job. Have a happy Christmas. |
69 |
[It] is a mystery story that has imaginative qualities beyond the ordinary....The writing...is good-humored, breezy, colloquial. The characterization is sharp, and reminds me constantly of the fact that Rex Stout was a legitimate novelist before he took up the trade of mystery monger. |
70 |
....Hating the usual run of mystery stories, we were decoyed into reading [Das***ell Hammett's] "The Thin Man" by virtue of a nonchalant Greek detective's knowledge of speakeasy |
71 |
. Somehow the mystery went down easy with a round of old-fas***oneds. Could it be that we were weakening? We swore it could not be true. But maybe we were weakening. For, dipping into Dorothy Sayers' "The Nine Tailors," we were beguiled by her manner of mingling an essay on the ringing of church bells...with a novel about theft and murder. And when Lord Peter Wimsey turned from change-ringing to deduction, we somehow stayed for the show. |
72 |
The show (and we admit it through clenched teeth) is not at all bad. It is not, thank Heaven! pure mystery; that would be too much. Miss Sayers makes the sleuthing go down easy by mixing it up with an antiquarian's interest in fourteenth century Norman apses, in the character of the abbots of Catholic England, in the art of change-ringing, in the history of the casting of bells. |
73 |
[...] |
74 |
Reading Dorothy Sayers, who is an intelligent woman as well as a writer of mystery stories, we wonder how much of our prejudice against the heirs of Sherlock Holmes is justified....More mysterious than her mystery is the way in which she makes the abstruse art of bell-ringing a living, integral part of her story. Sooner or later she will be making chess, the Einstein theory, the art of concocting Welsh rabbits, heraldryor cricketgermane to a mysterious death. She ought to be hired by the schools to mix textbook matter with gumshoe work; then every student would pa***. |
75 |
the Louvre Museum, the Coliseum, the Mickey Mouse of detective stories. In it the mystery writing technique is lifted from the plane of checkers to the plane of chess, and the chess figures come alive. Ideas rather than mechanics move the plot...." |
76 |
intelligent woman as well as a writer of mystery stories |
77 |
Once I lived in humble hovels |
78 |
And wrote a few legitimate novels. |
79 |
Now, tiring of the pangs of hunger, |
80 |
I ply the trade of mystery monger. |
81 |
Murder, mayhem, gun and knife! |
82 |
Violent death, my staff of life! |
83 |
I wrote, though eating not bewhiles, |
84 |
Of fate profound and secret trials. |
85 |
Now--calmed the empty belly's fury. |
86 |
I write of guilt and trial by jury. |
87 |
Suspense, excitement, thrills, suspicion, |
88 |
Sources of excellent nutrition! |
89 |
I took men's souls on bitter cruises, |
90 |
Explored the heart and necked the Muses. |
91 |
But now to me I say: poor critter, |
92 |
Be fed, and let who will be bitter. |
93 |
Clues, deductions, right and wrong, |
94 |
O Mystery! Of thee I mong! |
95 |
we all know what book reviewers are. |
96 |
that if I went on trying to make serious comments about human character and human problems I would never turn out to be a Dostoevsky or a Balzac, so to h**** with it, I quit. |
97 |
"just to write stories and to try to make them as good stories as I could. |
98 |
all I had in mind, as I always have, was to try to make it as good a story as I could. |
99 |
the Salvation Army, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the Boy Scouts, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. |
100 |
Maybe that's what I ought to do, |
101 |
Instead of trying to write good stories, maybe I ought to be a professional crusader. |
102 |
Dennison's main business |
103 |
appeared to be maintaining the availability of prost**ution, gambling and drinking. |
104 |
The new police commissioner p*****vered in his mission to root out prost**utes, bootleggers and gamblers, but in doing so, his detractors claimed, he was diverting limited police resources from keeping other crime in check. Rosewater's newspaper, the |
105 |
, used sensationalized coverage of crime to promote the idea that the city's law and order had been undermined. The came the race riot. |
106 |
The Judge says he will give up the negro BrownHe is in the dungeonThere are 100 white prisoners on the roofSave them |
107 |
wholly vile, wholly evil and malignantly dangerous. |
108 |
Forget it, Jake, it's Omaha |