“I want you to get a snake out of my house. Out of my family.” Thus spoke millionaire Otis Jarrell, offering Nero Wolfe ten thousand dollars in cash as a retainer. If it hadn’t just happened that Jarrell called on Wolfe during a time when relations between the great detective and his faithful assistant Archie Goodwin were less cordial than usual, Archie, victim of Wolfe’s spite, would not have found himself posing as secretary to Jarrell. But it did so happen, and as a result Archie became part of the Jarrell menage in the twenty-room duplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Here he met the “snake” — Jarrell’s handsome, charming daughter-in-law — as well as an assortment of other ladies and gentlemen, including a pretty young girl who danced well and wrote poetry, a lazy brother-in-law who cheerfully lost other people’s money on horses, and an almost too efficient stenographer named Nora. When Archie found Jarrell’s former secretary face down on the floor, with a .38-bullet hole in back of his head, he knew indeed that there was a snake somewhere. The story of how he and Nero Wolfe identified and caught that reptile is herewith set down in Archie’s own lively words.

"Murder Is No Joke,” a workaday whodunit in a couturier’s salon, is a sample, par excellence, of the master’s inimitable ability to relate the unrelated — put the round peg in the square hole, so to speak — and nail two killings on one murderer.

It was the most distinguished group ever to gather in Nero Wolfe’s study: two of America’s foremost novelists, a world-famous playwright, and the heads of three great publishing houses.Somebody, or maybe a league of somebodies, was accusing America’s most celebrated living writers of plagiarism — and getting away with it.Nero had never encountered a case like this before — until the first body was found. And no other investigator could have cracked it, for the solution rested on determining who had written what manuscript, and this required an uncanny eye for literary style.With Nero tracking down nuances while Archie encounters more than his usual quota of cool-looking girls and much cooler corpses, with both of them up to their raised eyebrows in the world of best sellers, smash hits, and the people columnists stay up to quote, Plot It Yourself is one of the freshest, liveliest, wittiest Rex Stout novel ever to challenge a reader.

The lady taxi-driver’s cab was parked in front of Nero Wolfe’s brownstone with a dead fare in the back seat. Someone chose Method Three for Murder.

Nero Wolfe has always considered murder slightly illegal, but in the three stories in this volume It becomes something far worse — a personal affront. He is in fact, “ruffled beyond the bounds of tolerance” — three times For usually murder takes place at a decent distance from his presence, and now in succession violent death arrives (with the blinis and sour cream) at a dinner for gourmets attended by Wolfe himself, one body comes to the famous West 35th Street address by taxi, and a third murder takes place at a luncheon party where Nero and Archie have gone to partake of some blue grouse.Altogether, these three situations are really intolerable, and Wolfe is forced to work his brain even faster, and Archie’s feet and fists even harder, than ever before.Nero Wolfe, embroiled with a passel of rodeo riders at a penthouse party, must determine who knotted the noose around a sunburned neck in the case of The Rodeo Murder.

Nero Wolfe has always considered murder slightly illegal, but in the three stories in this volume It becomes something far worse — a personal affront. He is in fact, “ruffled beyond the bounds of tolerance” — three times For usually murder takes place at a decent distance from his presence, and now in succession violent death arrives (with the blinis and sour cream) at a dinner for gourmets attended by Wolfe himself, one body comes to the famous West 35th Street address by taxi, and a third murder takes place at a luncheon party where Nero and Archie have gone to partake of some blue grouse.Altogether, these three situations are really intolerable, and Wolfe is forced to work his brain even faster, and Archie’s feet and fists even harder, than ever before.Shapely blond, brunette, and titian cupbearers — in flowing robes — attend gourmets’ banquet cooked by Nero Wolfe’s own chef, in prelude to Poison à la Carte.

If one of Nero Wolfe’s adventures had not already been called Too Many Woman, that might have been the title of this one. For sex, to which Archie Goodwin is less a stranger than Nero, rears its quite pretty head throughout this new full-length novel.When the big businessman, who lived in New York’s fashionable East 60s but maintained an expensive love-nest in one of New York’s worst neighborhoods, is murdered, Nero is called in. In fact he is called in three times, the first two times by very — wrong people. Hence before he can start to unravel the murder, he has to solve the unique problem of ditching the wrong clients. Rut ditching can be fun, especially the way Archie does it, and this book will supply new fun and challenge to mystery connoisseurs.

Under suspicion for murder and too angry to deny it, harried Hattie Annis offered 42 grand to Nero Wolfe to make the cops eat dirt. If she was innocent, you can ask her whether he earned his fee.

“Here’s the gun I’m not going to use to kill my husband.” That’s what she said. But he was killed, and with that gun, or with one just like it... and Archie Goodwin had tampered with the gun himself.

Chances are you are already a Nero Wolfe fan before you hold this new volume in your hands. We need not repeat to connoisseurs of the civilized — although not unbloody — chronicles of crime that the sedentary orchid-fancier and his leg-man Archie are the veritable Beluga in the field of mayhem and murder stories.

For many years the redoubtable twosome has been involved with dark deeds of many kinds, but in The Final Deduction they for the first time tangle with the deepest-hued of all — kidnaping combined with the murder which so often accompanies it. The problem — and the fee — are worthy of Nero’s genius and Archie’s footwork. The facts are not concealed, and we invite you to see if you can arrive at “the final deduction” by the time it is revealed on the last pages of this top-drawer exercise in entertainment and detection.

Kill Now, Pay Later:

In which Nero Wolfe vindicates his favorite bootblack — for no fee — and Archie Goodwin protects the bootblack’s daughter.

It was preposterously inconvenient. The outer door was locked as usual, yet there she lay — on Nero Wolfe’s carpet, in Nero Wolfe’s office, strangled by Nero Wolfe’s own necktie!

In Rex Stout’s latest full-length mystery, the victim is a mental freak — a man capable of successfully playing a dozen simultaneous chess games against first-rate players while he himself is out of sight of any of the boards. It is while thus engaged that he is killed. A millionaire — his opponent in more realms than chess — is accused, and Nero Wolfe is given what appears to be the most hopeless case he and Archie Goodwin have ever tackled. You need know nothing about chess to follow this tale, but some understanding of beautiful mothers and daughters will help.

We believe that Gambit will surely be counted among the two or three finest full-length mysteries produced by Rex Stout, and, hence, one of the great works in the whole genre.

What is it about Nero Wolfe, the food-loving and orchid-fancying misogynist, that draws the most attractive, wealthy, and desperate females to his office? Could it possibly be his leg-man, Archie Goodwin? Archie, at least, is in for another reward in this latest of Nero’s cases, and readers who have followed Archie’s hairbreadth escapes from entrapment in the past will be left wondering at the end of this one. But not about who is guilty of the murders that follow Lucy Valdon’s first visit to West 35th Street. It’s a matter of maternity that brings her, and the trail that is blazed by a few handmade horsehair buttons has the rare effect of leading Nero out of his habitat and forcing him to set up shop outside. There, after grueling hardships, he accomplishes his purpose with his usual aplomb and to the entire satisfaction of the reader.

In Blood Will Tell:

In which Archie mysteriously receives a tie in the mail and Nero finally receives a fee for solving the murder of the too curious Greenwich Village wife.

Murder Is Corny:

In which the farmer’s daughter involves Archie Goodwin in a murder charge and Nero finds himself again at work for no fee.

Twenty-five years ago, in one of Rex Stout’s most famous mystery novels, Too Many Cooks, Nero Wolfe was aided in the solution of a murder by a twenty- year-old Negro.

Now, in A Right to Die, Stout’s latest full-length novel, this same Negro is a man of forty-five and a professor of anthropology. He comes to Nero and to Archie Goodwin with a pressing problem concerning his son and a young, beautiful, and wealthy white girl. Both the son and the girl are active in a civil-rights group. Their entanglements with each other and with the group lead to two murders, and Nero and Archie, in their search for the murderer, become fascinatingly involved in America’s most immediate domestic problem. They unearth a murder motive unique in mystery fiction, and encounter some of the most interesting people ever invented by the master of the modern mystery, Rex Stout.

This is, in the considered opinion of his publishers, the finest detective story ever written by Rex Stout and therefore one of the very best ever written by anyone. As a new peak for the old master, it provides an occasion to celebrate an outstanding career, as well as a new challenge to the wits of his fans.

A very rich woman comes to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, claiming that she is being harassed by the FBI. She reports that agents are following her and members of her family, her wires are being tapped, and her privacy is being otherwise invaded. She demands that Wolfe help her to find relief and offers him the largest retainer he has ever seen.

Wolfe, with some hesitation, takes the case and quickly encounters a murder about which members of the FBI may know more than is apparent. He also soon finds himself in a direct encounter with FBI agents under highly questionable circumstances.

Never before has Rex Stout written a book more perfectly plotted or one with a denouement so skillfully arrived at.

The only man who has ever given Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin any real trouble is Rex Stout himself. In this, his latest full-length novel, Stout sets before his famous detecting pair a seemingly insoluble problem.

Orrie Cather, one of Nero Wolfe’s occasional employees, is in jail, suspected of murdering a lovely young thing. The lovely young thing has been the well-kept possession of a certain wealthy and influential man who has reasons for not wishing his name dragged into the case.

The wealthy man offers to share his wealth with Nero — providing Nero will keep his name from ever being connected with the murder. Nero, at the same time, must get Orrie out of jail. He could easily do this by using his client’s name. It seems impossible to do it otherwise.

Problem: How does Nero get Orrie out of jail? How does he keep his client’s name out of the press? And how does he find the true murderer?

He does it with the avid and skilled assistance of one Julie Jacquette, a swinging songstress from the Ten Little Indians.

That, at least, is partly how he does it...

She was twenty-two years old, a Smith graduate, charming, intelligent, appealing. When she buttonholed Archie Goodwin, she had a very simple request. She hadn’t the faintest idea who her father was, had never seen him or heard of him, and wanted In learn who and where he was. She also, it turned out, had something in excess of a quarter of a million dollars mysteriously received from that father, but she didn’t really consider that part of the mystery at all. Archie, of course, took the problem to Nero and Nero took the problem on after he discovered that the girl’s mother had apparently been murdered and that the possible antecedents of the girl stretched back toward certain men of great power and influence, and into realms as diverse as international banking, national television, and public relations. To solve it, Nero and Archie have to be at the top of their form, and they are. This is the first new Nero Wolfe novel in nearly two years — an unusual interval for the productive Rex Stout, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in December 1966.