Robert Goldsborough, Archie Goes Home
Copyright © 2020 Robert Goldsborough
Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN9781504059886
I approached Archie Goes Home with a good deal of trepidation. While I am a major fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books (I’ve read them all multiple times, and am reading my way through the books again), I’ve never thought that Goldsborough has managed to emulate the voices of his characters—especially Archie Goodwin (out narrator) and Nero Wolfe. I have also generally found his plots to be less than captivating. But this may be a new low. And a major part of that is Goldsborough’s writing (although the plot is not all that great either).
The book opens with Archie
receiving a phone call from his Aunt Edna, calling him from the small town in
which he grew up. Edna wants his to know
that the retired president and principal owner of the Farmer’s State Bank and
Trust, Logan Mulgrew, has been found dead in his home.., apparently a suicide. Edna, however, and a reporter/columnist Verna
Kay Padgett for the local newspaper (the Trumpet)
are convinced it’s murder. Edna wants
Archie to come and look into it.
And of course, he does. As it happens there are a number of people
who might have been perfectly happy to see Mulgrew dead, and might have helped him
along. There’s the man who started a
competing bank (about which Mulgrew started a rumor that the new bank was
undercapitalized and sure to fail), which did fail after he lost almost all his
depositors. There’s the dairy farmer many
of whose cattle died, and n whose loan Mulgrew foreclosed. (The reporter describes this to Archie as
being deaths from “some sort of cow disease.)
There’s the woman who served as a home health care worker for Mulgrew’s
wife, who was widely suspected of having an affair with him, and who moved to
Charleston, WV. And the father of one of
the bank’s employees who, it is widely believed, was raped (referred to as
sexual assault in the book), became pregnant, and left town to get an abortion
(and is currently working in Cleveland.
But the scene of the crime is, or
at least seems to be, completely compatible with suicide—Mulgrew was found
lying on a sofa, with what is likely the weapon next to him, with a bullet hole
in his forehead, and his fingerprints—and no others—on the gun. (No mention is made of the dermal residue
test (a/k/s the GSR) to determine whether someone has fired a gun, although the
test was in use as early as 1933 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunshot_residue).
At this point, I took a break,
because I had some things to consider; some of these are substantive, some deal
with Goldsborough’s writing.
First, making telephone calls
(which we used to call “long-distance”) between rural Ohio and NYC seems way
too easy. Having checked, I discovered
that the “area code” system of designating places when makes a long-distance
call originated in 1947. So no
problem? Well, no, problem. To make or receive a direct-dial l.d. call,
the phone systems in both the originating location and the location being
called needed the correct switching equipment.
Which was expensive, so smaller cities and towns needed the intervention
of an operator both to make and to receive a call. As late as 1969, when I was in college in the
small town of Greencastle, Indiana, I could not make a call to my parents—in Indianapolis—without
operator assistance. Indy had the
equipment; G’castle did not.
Second, as noted above, it’s not
clear whether a GSR was performed, so the evidence for Mulgrew having fired the
fatal shot is perhaps weak. The police
did test for fingerprints on the gun, and found only Mulgrew’s prints, so,
there’s that at least.
Third, no reporter working on a
small-town newspaper in the 1950s would have referred to the deaths of an
entire herd of cows as “some sort of cow disease.” Knowing what that disease was would have been
very important for other farmers, and, fortunately for them, one of the best
veterinary science schools in the country—Ohio State University—was just up the
road. Not identifying the disease would be a serious problem for other
farmers, and a serious oversight for the local newspaper.
Fourth (and this is mostly a
matter of Goldsborough’s style), we are treated with three discussions of
possible murderers that are nearly identical.
Here’s one example:
“…Mulgrew spread the word far and wide that the new
bamk was undercapitalized and that anyone who put money in it was in danger of
losing everything..” (p. 24)
“…starting rumors that it was undercapitalized, and
that depositors were likely to lose every cent they deposited…”(p. 44)
“…rumormongering on the part of Logan Mulgrew…the new
bank was undercapitalized…” (p. 144)
Fifth, while Goldsborough refers
to actual cities in Ohio (and West Virginia—Charleston)—Columbus, Steubenville,
Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Warrick—and at least one fictional town—Selkirk—he
does mention the name of Archie’s home town.
Late in the book we are able to infer
that it’s Chillicothe. Related to this,
Archie and Saul Panzer refer to the small towns as “burgs.” This might be plausible for Saul, a life-long
New Yorker, it’s not for Archie. In my
experience, people who describe towns as “burgs” mean it in a derogatory
sense. And Archie, who grew up there,
would almost certainly not use a
derogatory term to describe it.
Each bit of that is trivial, but
it adds up to one thing after another that took me out of the story and made me
conscious of the writing instead.
And Archie’s investigation seems
to be accomplishing nothing. Almost
everyone he talks to agrees that Mulgrew was a nasty piece of work, but he
really makes no progress. A lot of
people may have motive. But he does not
conclusively establish opportunity for anyone.
I did, however, form a very definite opinion about one of the people
with whom Archie speaks. About a third
of the way through the book, the way Goldsborough writes about that character changed
rather abruptly—from treating the character as a pleasant, likeable person to
one who is abrupt and whiny.
The major twist in the story is
that Wolfe shows up, having been driven to Ohio by Saul Panzer. He announces his intention to solve the
murder, if it is a murder, and return (with Archie following) as quickly as
possible. Archie reports to him in
detain (and, while I was afraid Goldsborough was about to recapitulate Archie’s
conversations with his suspects, we were spared that). And there is basically no additional
investigation after that. There’s the
ritual gathering of the suspects in Archie’s mother’s living room, and Wolfe
announces his conclusion. Which is based
on two people having attended the same university at the same time and having
used the same expression in a conversation with Archie. Yep, that was it.
I have not been a fan of
Goldsborough’s attempts at continuing the series. Some of the early books were adequate, some
were not. But the more recent efforts
have been lowering the bar, so to speak.
And this one still fails to clear even the lowered bar.
