Might as Well Be Dead

This, of course, is necessary, because, after all, Nero Wolfe is the very definition of a man who relies on his head to fathom crime. He doesn’t venture out of doors. He resists the intrusions of modern life with a steadfastness that, in this day and age of fax machines, cellular telephones, and 112-station cable television sets, is admirable. He prefers his plants and his gourmet meals. No world-weary street-smarts for Wolfe. He employs people to develop those attributes. No, Wolfe exists solely for the chase, which takes place on a uniquely psychological landscape. He listens (a lost ability in these times). He assesses. He deduces. He intuits. He investigates with a draughtsman’s precision and a psychiatrist’s intellectual scalpel.

Consider, for a moment, the title to this particular mystery: “Might As Well Be Dead.” This is a familiar, if not common, phrase. It is usually spoken with a jocularity that implies that the speaker doesn’t take his or her thought completely seriously, for, in reality, it is an awful idea, that events could descend upon an individual with such harshness that their life now resembles the coldness that we assume death to be. So, the phrase, when uttered with a singular sadness and despair, takes on a frightening weight. And that is precisely what spirits Nero Wolfe into this tale.

Before it is over, there will be a few bodies littering the literary horizon, and many things will not be as they first appear. Guilt and innocence will change places a few times. Like the proverbial jigsaw puzzle, facts, events, suppositions and evidence will all coalesce in a clever, provocative way. A Nero Wolfe novel is something akin to watching a chess match, but one where the rooks and pawns are real characters, and the stakes are considerably higher.

It is all handled with wit and verve. In this era where it seems sometimes that body-count is more important than style and where a cruel bloodthirst seems to dominate contemporary crime fiction (alas, I am probably guilty of adding a few titles to the list that fit this description), the reemergence of Nero Wolfe, with his carefully nurtured and coddled plants and dangerous, ever-expanding waistline, is a welcome respite from the harshness that seems to have overtaken the genre-regardless of whether one wants to call it a “mystery” or a novel of “psychological suspense.”

–John Katzenbach

Chapter 1