Where There's a Will is the eighth Nero Wolfedetective novel by Rex Stout. Prior to its publication in 1940 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., the novel was abridged in the May 1940 issue of The American Magazine, titled "Sisters in Trouble." The story's magazine appearance was "reviewed" by the FBI as part of its surveillance of Stout.
Where There's a Will was the last Wolfe novel published before World War II. Stout did not write any others during the war, resuming the series with The Silent Speaker in 1946; he did, however, continue to publish shorter works featuring the character.
Plot summary
Carl Mueller illustrated "Sisters in Trouble," the abridged version of Where There's a Will that appeared in the May 1940 issue of The American Magazine
The famous Hawthorne sisters — April, May and June — visit Nero Wolfe in a body to ask his help in averting a scandal. After the shock of their brother Noel's death three days before, they have been dealt another shock at learning the terms of his will. May, a college president, insists that Noel had promised to leave $1 million to her school; however, the will leaves each sister nothing but a piece of fruit and passes almost all of Noel's estate to a young woman named Naomi Karn. The sisters want to hire Wolfe to persuade Naomi to turn over at least half of the inheritance so that Noel's widow Daisy will not bring a case to court that would cause a sensation.
Daisy's unexpected arrival interrupts the conference. She wears a veil at all times to cover the disfiguring scars left after Noel accidentally shot her with a bow and arrow. She discovered that Noel was having an affair with Naomi and now hates the entire Hawthorne family as a result. Wolfe assures her that he will consider her interests in addition to those of the sisters and attempt to negotiate with Naomi on their behalf.
Later that day, Inspector Cramer interrupts another meeting with the news that Noel had in fact been murdered. He had been killed by a shotgun blast while hunting on his country estate; it was assumed that he had tripped and discharged the weapon, but further analysis of the evidence has led the police to discard this theory. Archie is called away to help Fred Durkin keep an eye on a man whom Fred had been tailing - Eugene Davis, a partner at the law firm that drew up Noel's will, who had been seen in a bar with Naomi. Davis is now drunk and passed out in a run-down apartment.
On Wolfe's orders, Archie travels to the Hawthorne mansion on 67th Street, where he finds Wolfe, the family and other associated individuals gathered to meet with the local police. Archie finds, to his surprise, that there are apparently two Daisy Hawthornes in the house. One is meeting with Wolfe and accusing April of the murder, based on the fact that a cornflower was found next to the body and April had had a bunch of them with her. The other is speaking to Naomi in the living room. The one meeting with Wolfe turns out to be the real Daisy, and Wolfe later determines that the other was actually April in disguise, trying to get information out of Naomi about the will and the relationship between her and Noel.
Later in the day, Archie finds Naomi strangled to death, her body hidden in an alcove next to the living room. Wolfe slips out of the house without telling Archie and has Orrie Cather drive him back to Wolfe's brownstone on 35th Street. After being confronted by the Hawthornes, Daisy spitefully claims to the police that April is the murderer, and she is arrested by the authorities. Meanwhile, June's daughter Sara tells Archie that someone has stolen her camera. The film it contained had already been sent off to be developed, and Wolfe and Archie later retrieve the pictures. After examining them, Wolfe warns Sara that her life will be in danger if she returns to the estate and has her stay at the brownstone. Cramer threatens to arrest Wolfe as a material witness to Naomi's murder, but Wolfe counters by threatening to turn evidence of the murderer's guilt over to a local newspaper instead of the police.
With all of the principals assembled in his office, Wolfe accuses Davis of switching Noel's actual will (which left generous bequests to Daisy, his sisters and May's college) with a forgery that leaves nearly the entire estate to Naomi, in a plot to win her affections, and of killing Noel and Naomi. When Glenn Prescott, another of the law firm's partners, agrees with this theory, Davis angrily accuses him of the murders. Wolfe then reveals his evidence: one of Sara's pictures, which shows Prescott wearing a wild rose in his lapel, a flower that he could not have obtained in the city. He had picked it at the scene of Noel's murder, discarding the cornflower he had worn (later found near the body), and had only remembered after Sara had taken the photograph. Prescott is placed under arrest, and Archie decides to keep the material witness warrant as a souvenir.
The unfamiliar word
"Nero Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic," said Michael Jaffe, executive producer of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery.[1] Nero Wolfe's erudite vocabulary is one of the hallmarks of the character. Examples of unfamiliar words — or unfamiliar uses of words that some would otherwise consider familiar — are found throughout the corpus, often in the give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie.
Caracoles, chapter 5. Seated in the red chair, Naomi Karn begins her conversation with Nero Wolfe with an evasive maneuver. Wolfe wiggles a finger at her and states, "Let's don't start with caracoles."[2]
Cast of characters
Nero Wolfe — Famous fat detective
Archie Goodwin — His assistant
April Hawthorne — Beautiful actress
May Hawthorne — Her intellectual sister, president of Varney College
June Hawthorne — The oldest sister
John Charles Dunn — June's husband, U.S. Secretary of State
Andrew Dunn and Sara Dunn — Their children
Celia Fleet — April's secretary
Daisy Hawthorne — Veiled widow of Noel Hawthorne, brother of the three famous Hawthorne girls
Glenn Prescott — Eminent attorney who drew Noel Hawthorne's will
Eugene Davis — His partner
Naomi Karn — The woman of the case
Inspector Cramer — Of the New York homicide squad
Fritz Brenner — Wolfe's chef and major-domo
Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Orrie Cather and Johnny Keems — Detectives in Wolfe's employ
Reviews and commentary
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor Hertig, A Catalogue of Crime — Endless talk over how to keep a kept woman from inheriting millions which only she thinks have been left her and then — after deceased is shown to have been murdered — more talk about who did it. Wolfe spots the criminal by looking closely at six small photographs (poorly reproduced in the book) and applying his knowledge of floriculture."[3]
Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors — While [World War II] was on, Stout, who had organized the Writers' War Board and became its chairman, was placed on something called the "General Watch List." Hoover himself, according to a heavily censored page marked Confidential, requested Byron Price, director of Censorship, Federal Trade Commission Building, Washington, to include Rex Stout of Brewster, New York, on "General Watch List No. 49." The FBI watched what Stout wrote and somehow turned his fiction into suspicious fact. Because, for example, of a story that appeared in the May 1940 issue of American Magazine called "Sisters in Trouble," he was labeled what might be called "prematurely anti-Nazi." A highly imaginative document from Los Angeles (correspondent's name censored) to the FBI's Communications Division in Washington claimed that the story was "either a deliberate attempt to convey a meaning other than the solution of a mystery story — or else the whole thing is full of coincidences. Note the almost exclusive German cast of characters, particularly Fritz Brenner. Could Fritz refer to the German Consul in San Francisco and could Brenner have any reference to the Brenner pass? Could 'Nero' refer to Rome by any chance? While for the purposes of the story, April, May and June are the names of three sisters, couldn't it also mean that for three months, or until July, somebody's back was to the door — maybe the door to the Balkans or the Mediterranean?" When it served its purposes, agents of the FBI could turn into literary critics, finding, however ludicrous, damning symbols in fiction.[4]
Adaptations
Un incidente di caccia (Radiotelevisione Italiana)
Where There's a Will was adapted for a series of Nero Wolfe films produced by the Italian television network RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana). Directed by Giuliana Berlinguer from a teleplay by Vladimiro Cajoli, Nero Wolfe: Un incidente di caccia first aired July 13, 1969.
The series of black-and-white telemovies stars Tino Buazzelli (Nero Wolfe), Paolo Ferrari (Archie Goodwin), Pupo De Luca (Fritz Brenner), Renzo Palmer (Inspector Cramer), Roberto Pistone (Saul Panzer), Mario Righetti (Orrie Cather) and Gianfranco Varetto (Fred Durkin). Other members of the cast of Un incidente di caccia include Paola Mannoni (Mary), Gianna Piaz (Clotilde), Esmeralda Ruspoli (Amelia), Antonio Pierfederici (Glenn Prescott), Mariolina Bovo] (Diana Karn), Edmonda Aldini (Daisy Hawthorne), Pier Paola Bucchi (Sara Dunn) and Claudio Gora (John Charles Dunn).
Publication history
Teaser for "Sisters in Trouble" in The American Magazine (April 1940)
The photographs that help Nero Wolfe solve the mystery appeared in the first edition of Where There's a Will (1940)[lower-alpha 1]
In his limited-edition pamphlet, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I, Otto Penzler describes the first edition of Where There's a Will: "Red cloth, front cover and spine printed with black; rear cover blank. Issued in a mainly black, white and orange pictorial dust wrapper … The first edition has the publisher's monogram logo on the copyright page."[6]
In April 2006, Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine estimated that the first edition of Where There's a Will had a value of between $4,000 and $7,500.[7]
1944, New York: Lawrence E. Spivak, Bestseller Mystery #44, abridged as Where There is a Will, paperback
1946, New York: Avon #103, 1946, paperback; photos can be found between pages 162 and 163, Sold for .25¢
1966, New York: Avon #G1285, fourth printing, paperback
1971, London: Tom Stacey, 1971, hardcover
1992, New York: Bantam Crimeline ISBN0-553-29591-8, 1992, paperback, Rex Stout Library edition with introduction by Dean R. Koontz
1995, New York: Bantam Books ISBN0-553-76301-6 March 1995, trade paperback
2006, Auburn, California: The Audio Partners Publishing Corp., Mystery Masters ISBN1-57270-551-5 October 28, 2006, audio CD (unabridged, read by Michael Prichard)
↑ "Not only are the pictures so small that they are useless in providing a clue to the reader, but the leafless trees were a mistake for an event that was supposed to have happened in July of 1939," wrote Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald in The Nero Wolfe Companion (Number 2, 1989, Salisbury, North Carolina, p. 48). Rex Stout received many letters of complaint, biographer John McAleer reported. "The blooper had been Farrar & Rinehart's. Bundling up a representative selection of letters received, Rex sent them to John Farrar with a covering letter that was but faintly civil." (McAleer, John, Rex Stout: A Biography, 1977, Little, Brown and Company; ISBN0-316-55340-9, p. 280)
Related Research Articles
The Golden Spiders is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. It was first published in 1953 by The Viking Press.
Too Many Cooks is the fifth Nero Wolfe detective novel by American mystery writer Rex Stout. The story was serialized in The American Magazine before its publication in book form in 1938 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The novel was collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces, published in 1969 by the Viking Press.
Not Quite Dead Enough is a Nero Wolfe double mystery by Rex Stout published in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The volume contains two novellas that first appeared in The American Magazine:
Some Buried Caesar is a detective novel by American writer Rex Stout, the sixth book featuring his character Nero Wolfe. The story first appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine, under the title "The Red Bull", it was first published as a novel by Farrar & Rinehart in 1939. In 2000 it was included in the list of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.
Over My Dead Body is the seventh Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. The story first appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine. The novel was published in 1940 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.
Fer-de-Lance is the first Nero Wolfe detective novel written by Rex Stout, published in 1934 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The novel appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine under the title "Point of Death". The novel was adapted for the 1936 film Meet Nero Wolfe, and it was named after a venomous snake with the same name. In his seminal 1941 work, Murder for Pleasure, crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft included Fer-de-Lance in his definitive list of the most influential works of mystery fiction.
The League of Frightened Men is the second Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. The story was serialized in six issues of The Saturday Evening Post under the title The Frightened Men. The novel was published in 1935 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The League of Frightened Men is a Haycraft Queen Cornerstone, one of the most influential works of mystery fiction listed by crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen.
The Rubber Band is the third Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. Prior to its publication in 1936 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., the novel was serialized in six issues of The Saturday Evening Post. Appearing in one 1960 paperback edition titled To Kill Again,The Rubber Band was also collected in the omnibus volume Five of a Kind.
The Red Box is the fourth Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. Prior to its first publication in 1937 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., the novel was serialized in five issues of The American Magazine. Adapted twice for Italian television, The Red Box is the first Nero Wolfe story to be adapted for the American stage.
Black Orchids is a Nero Wolfe double mystery by Rex Stout published in 1942 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. Stout's first short story collection, the volume is composed of two novellas that had appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine:
If Death Ever Slept is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1957 and collected in the omnibus volume Three Trumps.
Too Many Clients is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1960, and later collected in the omnibus volume Three Aces.
The Final Deduction is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1961 and collected in the omnibus volume Three Aces.
Death of a Doxy is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by Viking Press in 1966.
"Cordially Invited to Meet Death" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first published in abridged form as "Invitation to Murder" in the April 1942 issue of The American Magazine. It first appeared in book form in the short-story collection Black Orchids, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1942.
"Counterfeit for Murder" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first serialized as "The Counterfeiter's Knife" in three issues of The Saturday Evening Post. It first appeared in book form in the short-story collection Homicide Trinity, published by the Viking Press in 1962.
"Black Orchids" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first published in abridged form as "Death Wears an Orchid" in the August 1941 issue of The American Magazine. It first appeared in book form in the short-story collection Black Orchids, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1942.
"Not Quite Dead Enough" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first published in abridged form in the December 1942 issue of The American Magazine. It first appeared in book form as the first of two novellas in the short-story collection Not Quite Dead Enough, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944.
"Booby Trap" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first published in the August 1944 issue of The American Magazine. It first appeared in book form as the second novella in the short-story collection Not Quite Dead Enough, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944.
"Home to Roost" is a Nero Wolfe mystery novella by Rex Stout, first published as "Nero Wolfe and the Communist Killer" in the January 1952 issue of The American Magazine. It first appeared in book form in the short-story collection Triple Jeopardy, published by the Viking Press in 1952. This novella and the 1949 novel The Second Confession are notable expressions of Stout's contempt for both Communism and McCarthyism.
References
↑ Quoted in Vitaris, Paula, "Miracle on 35th Street: Nero Wolfe on Television," Scarlet Street, issue #45, 2002, p. 36
↑ Where There's a Will, Farrar & Rinehart edition, page 74
↑ Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN0-06-015796-8
↑ Mitgang, Herbert, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors (1988, Donald I. Fine, Inc.; Hardcover ISBN1-55611-077-4), p. 222
↑ Townsend, Guy M., Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980, New York: Garland Publishing; ISBN0-8240-9479-4), pp. 20–21. John McAleer, Judson Sapp and Arriean Schemer are associate editors of this definitive publication history.
↑ Penzler, Otto, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I (2001, New York: The Mysterious Bookshop, limited edition of 250 copies), p. 16
↑ Smiley, Robin H., "Rex Stout: A Checklist of Primary First Editions." Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine (Volume 16, Number 4), April 2006, p. 33
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
