Rex Stout, And Be A Villain

 Rex Stout, And Be A Villain
Copyright © 1948 Rex Stout
Bantam Crime Line reprint
ISBN 0-553-23931-7

I have been re-reading Rex Stout’s And Be a Villain, and I have found myself concluding that the case Wolfe makes against the putative murderer is one of the weakest in the series of Nero Wolfe mysteries.  It is impossible to deal with this without exposing much of the plot, and especially the denouement, so you are warned:  HERE BE SPOILERS.

And Be a Villain has, as a significant plot device, a blackmail scheme, which works as follows:  The criminal mastermind sets stooges up as the writer/provider of one or another weekly newsletter.  The two we actually learn of are Track Almanac (Cyril Orchard), which provides tips for horse racing bettors, and What is Happening (Beulah Poole), political commentary.  These sell for $10 per week (that would be around $120 per week, adjusted to today’s general level of prices).  The mastermind’s other minions begin a smear campaign (e.g., accusing a prominent physician with numerous and repeated improprieties with his female patients), and offer to put an end to these accusations in exchange for a 0ne-year subscription to the newsletter.  And the one-year limit is strictly adhered to (although the victims don’t know with certainty that it will be adhered to).  So a total tab of $520 ($6240, adjusted to today’s prices).  As Wolfe points out, this is, for someone with a large income, a mere inconvenience.

Almost inevitably (it seems), one of the newsletter authors—Cyril Orchard—is murdered (cyanide poisoning in the soft drink bottle), poisoned while appearing as a guest on a nationally syndicated radio program hosted by Madeline Fraser. At first, the police—and Wolfe—assume that the poison was intended for .Frazier, because of the details of a specific on-air advertising gimmick involving a soft drink.  But when Poole is also murdered (shot), and Wolfe deduces the blackmail operation, we have to conclude that the poisoned soft drink was in fact intended for Orchard.  And that reduces the potential murderer suspects to the people at the table and involved in passing the soft drinks around during the commercial spot.  And, of the people at the table, the only one with a reputation to be defended and an income large enough to find the blackmail amount a mere annoyance is Fraser.  But what blackmailable secret could she have? She’s from a small town in Michigan, and has been a public figure for several years.  There is one thing—her husband, Lawrence Koppel (the brother of Fraser’s close friend and business manager, Deborah Koppel) committed suicide—apparently.  He was a photographer in a small town, and apparently not a very successful one, apparently prone to bouts of depression.  Given the timeline, it appears that he w\could easily have chosen to commit suicide in the depths of the Great Depression.  So he would have had access to cyanide; he was apparently depressed; and he left a letter, with his best friend, expressing his intention to commit suicide.

And how do you get a blackmail hook from this?  A letter sent to at least one of the people who worked with Fraser, which said that she was lucky that the handwriting on Koppel’s suicide letter had not been examined by an expert.  (This would seem to have involved somewhat more than a casual knowledge of the blackmail victim’s life.   But perhaps I am being picky.)  The letter was still in the possession of his best friend (after around 15 years, and there’s no mention of other examples of his handwriting for comparison—which is a significant oversight in the narrative), and, when retrieved and analyzed, the experts “called it [the letter] one of the cleverest forgeries they had ever seen.”  Frankly, if I were a prosecuting attorney, I would not want to go into court with my primary piece of actual evidence being, according to my experts, an extremely clever forgery.  Just imagine what a good defense attorney (say, Perry Mason) could have done with that.  Even given the death of Debby Koppel (also cyanide poisoning) and the discovery of a cache of cyanide in one of Fraser’s slippers—pretty sloppy work there, if you ask me—it’s pretty hard to see a strong case.  Even if the verdict of the jury was Guilty.  For me, this is one of the least satisfying, least convincing of the Wolfe novels.