Too Many Cooks

THERE WAS TROUBLE BREWING….

“They’re ‘The Fifteen Masters.’ These babies are famous. One of them cooks sausages that people fight duels over. They meet every five years on the home grounds of the oldest one of their number. Nero Wolfe is the guest of honor. They’ll do a lot of cooking and eating and drinking, and tell each other a lot of lies, and elect three new members, and listen to Nero Wolfe make a speech—and oh yeah, one of ’em’s going to get killed.”

Bantam Crime Line Books offer the finest in classic and modern American mysteries. Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed.

Rex Stout

The Black Mountain

Broken Vase

Death of a Dude

Death Times Three

Fer-de-Lance

The Final Deduction

Gambit

Plot It Yourself

The Rubber Band

Some Buried Caesar

Three for the Chair

Too Many Cooks

Max Allan Collins

The Dark City

Bullet Proof

A. E. Maxwell

Just Another Day in Paradise

Gatsby’s Vineyard

The Frog and the Scorpion

Just Enough Light to Kill

Loren Estleman

Peeper

Dick Lupoff

The Comic Book Killer

Randy Russell

Hot Wire

V. S. Anderson

Blood Lies

King of the Roses

William Murray

When the Fat Man Sings

The King of the Nightcap

Eugene Izzi

King of the Hustlers

The Prime Roll

coming soon: Invasions

Gloria Dank

Friends Till the End

Going Out in Style

Jeffery Deaver

Manhattan Is My Beat

coming soon: Death of a Blue

                    Movie Star

Robert Goldsborough

Murder in E Minor

Death on Deadline

The Bloodied Ivy

The Last Coincidence

Sue Grafton

“A” Is for Alibi

“B” Is for Burglar

“C” Is for Corpse

“D” Is for Deadbeat

“E” Is for Evidence

“F” Is for Fugitive

David Lindsey

In the Lake of the Moon

Carolyn G. Hart

Design for Murder

Death on Demand

Something Wicked

Honeymoon with Murder

A Little Class on Murder

Annette Meyers

The Big Killing

Rob Kantner

Dirty Work

The Back-Door Man

Hell’s Only Half Full

Robert Crais

The Monkey’s Raincoat

Stalking the Angel

Keith Peterson

The Trapdoor

There Fell a Shadow

The Rain

Rough Justice

David Handler

The Man Who Died Laughing

The Man Who Lived by Night

Jerry Oster

Club Dead

Internal Affairs

Contents

Other Books by This Publisher

Title Page

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

About the Author

Copyright

FOREWORD

I USED as few French and miscellaneous fancy words as possible in writing up this stunt of Nero Wolfe’s but I couldn’t keep them out altogether, on account of the kind of people involved. I am not responsible for the spelling, so don’t write me about mistakes. Wolfe refused to help me out on it, and I had to go to the Heinemann School of Languages and pay a professor 30 bucks to go over it and fix it up. In most cases, during these events, when anyone said anything which for me was only a noise, I have either let it lay—when it wasn’t vital—or managed somehow to get the rough idea in the American language.

ARCHIE GOODWIN

1

WALKING up and down the platform alongside the train in the Pennsylvania Station, having wiped the sweat from my brow, I lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit; after what I had just gone through. But as I was drawing in the third puff I was stopped by a tapping on a window I was passing, and, leaning to peer through the glass, I was confronted by a desperate glare from Nero Wolfe, from his seat in the bedroom which we had engaged in one of the new-style pullmans, where I had at last got him deposited intact. He shouted at me through the closed window:

“Archie! Confound you! Get in here! They’re going to start the train! You have the tickets!”

I yelled back at him, “You said it was too close to smoke in there! It’s only 9:32! I’ve decided not to go! Pleasant dreams!”

I sauntered on. Tickets my eye. It wasn’t tickets that bothered him; he was frantic with fear because he was alone on the train and it might begin to move. He hated things that moved, and was fond of arguing that nine times out of ten the places that people were on their way to were no improvement whatever on those they were coming from. But by gum I had got him to the station twenty minutes ahead of time, notwithstanding such items as three bags and two suitcases and two overcoats for a four days’ absence in the month of April, Fritz Brenner standing on the stoop with tears in his eyes as we left the house, Theodore Horstmann running out, after we had got Wolfe packed in the sedan, to ask a few dozen more questions about the orchids, and even tough little Saul Panzer, after dumping us at the station, choking off a tremolo as he told Wolfe goodbye. You might have thought we were bound for the stratosphere to shine up the moon and pick wild stars.