Book 9. Gambit (Nero Wolfe #37)

Gambit by Rex Stout. Time for some comfort food. To say that I agree with Woodhouse is an understatement. While it is a great joy to read a Wolfe Novel for the first time. If it is somehow less enjoyable to read the second or third time, I cannot perceive it. If you’ve never read a Mystery and not cared “who dun it,” you’ve never had the pleasure of being told a story by Archie Goodwin. Take this passage from Chapter One of Gambit:   

….I told her. “He’s seated in front of the fireplace, on a chair too small for him, tearing the pages out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad. Even if he hears what you say, his mental processes are stultified. Could you come back later? After Lunch he may be human.

She was staring up at me. “He’s burning up a dictionary?”

Right. That’s nothing. Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a toss-up.”