Robert Goldsborough, Murder,
Stage Left
The Mysterious Press/Open Road © 2017
eISBN 978-1-5040-4110-2
This is Goldsborough’s 12th excursion into the
world of Nero Wolfe; like most of the others, it is a valiant effort, but it
fails on at least four counts.
To set the stage…Nero Wolfe is
hired by a major producer and director of Broadway plays, Roy Breckenridge, who
fears that there is some hidden issue—some simmering problem among the cast—of his
most recent hit play (Death At Cresthaven). Wolfe accepts the job (although it is unclear
to me why), and his assistant, Archie Goodwin goes undercover, masquerading as
a writer for a Toronto-based theater magazine.
He has brief (and not particularly useful) interviews with all the cast
members (it is, fortunately, a small cast) and the stage manager. (There are apparently no costume or make-up
people associated with the play, and any backstage crew or front-of-the-house people
are excluded, although why they would be excluded is, again unclear. These interviews occur before a matinee
performance and continue in the interval before the evening performance. And, during the evening performance,
Breckenridge is murdered—arsenic in his Coca Cola.
The bulk of the book is spent on
individual interviews with the case and the stage manager, during which one of
them says something—or, as Wolfe points out at the end doesn’t say something--that reveals to him whodunit. (During these interviews, Archie is not
actually present—his role as a journalist is being concealed from the cast, and
Saul Panzer fills in for him. Also
present is Lewis Hewitt, upper-class orchid fancier, whose intervention induced
Wolfe to take the case to begin with.)
So what are the failures? First, as has generally been the case,
Goldsborough does not manage to capture wither the voices of the major
characters. When a new author is
carrying on a lengthy series, one which most of his readers are likely to be
familiar with, this is an issue. The
primary failure is with Archie. He is at
too flippant for one thing, not only with Wolfe but also with the other series
characters, and his role as burr under the saddle to Wolfe’s inherent laziness does
not really show up.
Second, the initial justification
for an investigation disappears with Breckenridge’s death. Granted that the murder probably reduces the
importance of that, but I, as a reader, was expecting the solution would
somehow circle back to Breckenridge’s concerns.
In Archie’s interviews with the cast and crew, no hint of anything
really emerges, and I, at any rate, was left with the feeling that Goldsborough
just forgot about it.
Third, in his interviews with the
people involved in the play, there is never any sense that Wolfe has made any
progress. If anything, at the end of
those interviews, we seem to be further from a solution than closer. The interviews themselves are not well
handled; Wolfe does not ask any particularly penetrating questions, and, in
fact, leaves any number of issued unexplored.
(I will note that Goldsborough has fallen into a habit of having Wolfe
interview those involved individually, whereas one of the strengths of the
original books, by Rex Stout, was Stout’s exceptional construction of scenes
involving a large number of participants.
But, finally, the solution seems implausible,
and almost forced. As noted, it depends
on what one of the people associated with the play does not say, and the inference that Wolfe draws from that seems
altogether forced. Fortunately, that
person immediately confesses (which I thought was out of character, as
well).
For me, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe
books are among the most satisfying in American PI fiction, largely because of
Archie Goodwin’s narrative voice. I
could forgive that, to some extent, if Goldsborough managed his plots
better. (And, I’ll confess, I’ll almost
certainly go on reading them, but without much in the way of expectations.)
