After I finished my previous post, I decided to focus on Rex Stouts. So here are images of 7 Nero Wolde novels (written, of course, by Rex Stout). He wrote 32 Nero Wolfe novels (if I counted correctly), and at this point finding the books with dust jackets has become difficult--and pricey. Therse are the ones I have.
In the photography class I'm taking at the Indianapolis Art Center, our most recent assignment is to create a series of images which are shot using the same lighting, the same exposure choices, and the same image sizes, but with different, but related images. What I chose to do was to shoot the dustjackets of a number of mystery novels. Why that choice? No particular reason. Anyway, here they are.
Bad For Business: A Tecumseh mystery (1 of 3)
Rex Stout, (c) 1940.
I think all three of the Fox booksare better than they are generally considered
to be. Fox is a nicely conceived
character (even if his name is fairly obviously borrowed from Nero Wolfe. The owner a gourmet food company, Arthur
Tingley, is murdered in his office, and his niece is assaulted. His adopted son (but there’s a surprise
coming about him), a financier with an interest in a rival food company, and a
VP in yet another food company have been on the premises. Fox, a PI whose home base is in upstate New
York (but all the of his recorded cases—the others are Double For Death and The
Broken Vase—take place in New York City.
I think all three of the Fox books are well above average. [As are the
other non-Wolfe bools--The Hand in the Glove (Dol Bonner—who appears sporadically
in the Wolfe bools); The Red Threads (Inspector Cramer, and The Sound of Murder
(Alphabet Hicks). The crucial clue takes a while for Fox to recognize, but
overall the story is taut and moves right along.
As I read this book--which is totally excellent--I had an experience that I have had occasionally. A little less than half-way through, I said to myself "I know who did it." Not "I think I know." But "I know." Usually, when I have that reaction, I'm wrong. This time, I was right. And *knowing* that I knew whodunit made no difference to me in terms of wanting--needing--to get to the end of the book.
Is Faking A Kidnapping
Worth It:
Althea and Jimmy Vail in
The Final Deduction, by Rex Stout
I must begin
by warning you that this essay contains serious “spoilers,” so if you are not
familiar with the plot of The Final
Deduction, you should stop reading now and do something more useful than
read a deconstruction of the plot of a mystery novel.
Nero Wolfe’s
involvement begins when Althea Vale hires him to assure the safe return of her
husband, Jimmy Vail, who has been kidnapped.
Both of them have had very puplic lives prior to their marriage. Althea Purcell was an actor in a major hit on
Broadway; she walked away from the theatre to marry a wealthy man, Harold
Tedder (presumably in the late 1930s, as, at the time this episode begin
(around 1960), she had a son and daughter, both in their early 20s. Harold Tedder had died, apparently sometime
in the early to mid 1950s, leaving his considerable wealth solely to her. Jimmy Vail had been a nightclub comedian—highly
successful—in NYC. They married, and he
walked away from his career, much as she had walked away from hers.
The
kidnapping has been orchestrated by a Mr. Knapp, and his arrangements are
thorough and fairly ingenious. And the
ransom demand is $500,000. (It’s worth
knowing, I think, that, adjusted for general inflation, such a ransom today
would be around $6 million Keep in mind
that Althea has hired Wolfe to recover her husband, not to identify and bring
to justice the kidnapper(s). He asks
for, and receives, a retained of $50,000.
From this point on, I will be
discussing aspects of this affair that will be spoilers. So if you have not
read this mystery, or if you have read it and expect to read it again, please
stop reading now.
As Wolfe
begins to earn his fee, he becomes convinced that the kidnapping might be less
than it seems, that the Vails have staged the kidnapping, and anticipate claiming
a $500,000 deduction from their taxable income.
We never actually learn what their income is, but, as both have walked
away from their careers, their income is based on the fortune inherited by
Althea when her first husband died. This
has always seemed to me to be a fairly tricky, and risky, scheme. As I have thought about this, I began to look
at the potential rewards of pulling this fraud off successfully (spoiler: they
do not pull it off).
So. What are the potential rewards? Put simply, it’s the anticipated tax
saving. That saving will depend on the
(marginal) income tax rates and on whether ransom payments are, in fact, are
deductible. But against that is the risk
of being charged with and convicted of tax fraud, a risk that extends to Althea’s
personal secretary, Dinah Utley. (I do
not recall, and, during my most recent re-reading of the book, I could not find
any indication of what share of the loot Utley would receive. Presumably it would have to me a significant
percentage of the take.)
The
following table [Federal
Income Tax Brackets for Tax Year 1959 (Filed April 1960) (tax-brackets.org)]
shows the income tax rates, by income range, for 1960.* The amount of the (fraudulent) tax saving
follows directly by looking at the tax brackets and rates. We are not told what the household income is,
but the maximum tax saving would accrue only if the family taxable income is
greater than $1 million (roughly the equivalent of $12 million accounting for
inflation. The maximum tax saving (ignoring state and local income taxes, which
would have been negligible in 1969) would be 91% of $500,000--$455,000 (the
equivalent of $5.5 million at today’s general price level), minus Utley’s share. Or, at most, about half of one year’s income.
Federal Income Tax Brackets, 1960
Income
Bracket Marginal Tax
Rate
$0 - $3,999 20%
$4,000 -$ 7,999 22%
$8,000 -$11,999 22%
$12,000 – 15,999 26%
$16,000 - $23,999 34%
$24,000 - $27,999 43%
$28,000 - $31,000 47%
$32,000 - $35,999 50%
$36,000 - $39,000 53%
$40,000 - $43.000 56%
$44,000 - $51,999 59%
$52,000 - $63,999 62%
$64,000 - $75,999 65%
$76,000 - $79,999 69%
$80,000 - $99,999 72%
$100,000 – $119,000 75%
$120,000 – $139,999 78%
$140,000 - $159,000 81%
$160,000 - $179,000 84%
$180,000 - $199.000 89%
$200,000 -$299,000 90%
$500,000 + 91%
But there is
a second consideration. Would the ransom
be an allowable deduction from their taxable income? My take on this is that it might not be
deductible. Two factors matter. The first is whether proven ransom payment
constitutes a deductible a expenditure.
I have found this very difficult to establish. What I have been able to find pertains to business ransom payments (e.g., payments
to get “ransom wear” cleaned from computer systems. Or, in some cases, documentable kidnapping
and safe return of a business’s employee.
What is clear in these cases is that the relevant law enforcement agency
(or agencies) be able to document the denial of service that makes up the
ransom demand or the captivity of an employee.
This entails, at the least, law enforcement agencies being informed of
the event and being able to monitor the amount of the payment. I have been unable to determine** whether
what we might call private kidnapping
and ransom payment constitutes a deductible event under current law and
practice. But the implication of what I
have been able to discover about current practice does not present a clear case
for the deductibility of ransom paid for private kidnapping.
In addition,
I would suggest that that if ransom payments are deductible, the taxing
authority would require proof that
the kidnapping had occurred and that the payment had been made. In the case of the kidnapping of Jimmy Vail,
no attempt was made to inform the police that a kidnapping had occurred. In the
absence of some sort of proof that a kidnapping and ransom payment had actually
occurred, I seriously doubt that any taxing authority accept a claim of
deductibility of a ransom. And, if the “ransom
payment” is not deductible, the Vails would have undertaken a risk for no
reward
Let me make
this clear: Rex Stout is my favorite
author of mystery novels, I own copies
of all of them; I have read all of them multiple times. And, if one can ignore the technical issues
surrounding the kidnapping and subsequent murder, The Final Deduction is at the very least engrossing. But I am not sure that the premise of the
story really holds up.
*A
digression. Two things are striking
about the tax table for 1960 and the current tax table. First of all, there were 22 tax bracket in
1960— compared with7 tax brackets in 2020.
Second, the maximum tax rate
in 2020 was only 37%. Clearly, the
risk-reward ratio for a fraudulent kidnapping would be a lot less enticing
today.
**I spent
about 3 hours trying to determine either the state of current tax law and practice
or the state of law practice as it was in 1960, without success.
Life—and Pay—as Fritz Brenner
While the focus of the books is inevitably on the case and
the investigation, and, of course, on the relationship between Nero Wolfe and
Archie Goodwin), life in the old brownstone on West 35th St. centers
on The Meals. And in giving
consideration to them, we need to give consideration to the life—and especially
to the working schedule—and compensation—of Fritz Brenner. In particular, I asked myself, was Fritz
compensated as well as it appears he should have been—what would a chef as good
and as experienced as Fritz reasonably have expected to earn?
Let’s try to answer that question. (Briefly, anticipating the answer, Fritz was
doing all right.)
What can we say with certainty? That Wolfe and Fritz have known each other
from long before Archie began working for Wolfe. That Fritz is (according to Wolfe, in Too Many Cooks), competent, if not
inspired. That, at the time of In the Best Families (published in
1950), Fritz was making $1,000 per month.
That Fritz does the shopping for the household. That Fritz is strongly opposed to having a
woman in the place. And probably
more. But we can also infer what his
working schedule must look like.
Wolfe breakfasts at 8:00 (or 8:15); lunch is at 1:00 (or
1:15), and dinner is at 7:15 (or 7:30).
Archie eats breakfast at somewhat irregular times, but usually around 8,
and usually lunches with Wolfe. We don’t
know when, where, or if Theodore eats.
If Fritz is going to prepare the food for that schedule, here’s
what it seems to me that his day must look like:
7:00 – 9:30: In the
kitchen to prepare breakfast for Wolfe and for Archie. At about 9 (after Wolfe heads for the plant
rooms), he retrieves the tray from Wolfe’s room and finishes any
after-breakfast clean-up. (At some time
in this interval, he fixes and eats his own breakfast, and fixes breakfast for
Archie.)
11:30 – 2:30: In the
kitchen to prepare lunch. When Wolfe and
Archie finish their meal (by about 2:00), he clears the remaining dishes from the
dining room and finishes cleaning up.
(At some time in this interval, he eats his own lunch.)
5:30 – 9:00: In the
kitchen to prepare dinner. He finishes
clearing in the dining room after Wolfe and Archie are done, and finishes up in
the kitchen by 9:00. (Again, he finds
time to heat his own meal.)
That’s nine hours per day to prepare and clean up after the
three meals served. We’re not told when
he shops, but my guess is that he spends two hours on Monday morning shopping,
probably at multiple stores (in the European fashion). So, for Monday through Friday, we have a
47-hour work week. We also know that
Fritz has Sundays off (or mostly off; sometimes it appears that he prepares
breakfast, as is hinted at by Archie’s
reference to his “Sunday morning crescents”).
We don’t know about Saturday, but my suspicion is that he prepares
breakfast, and leaves things ready for lunch and dinner, but also has most of
Saturday off.
If all this is correct, then Fritz has a roughly 50-hour
work week. How would this compare with the
work week of an executive chef in a restaurant, on the assumption that the
restaurant does lunch and dinner (as, for example, it seems Rusterman’s
does). Suppose the restaurant opens at
11, serves lunch from noon until 2 and dinner from 5:30 until 10, Monday
through Saturday (or, perhaps, Tuesday through Sunday—a fair number of
restaurants in Chicago seem to be closed on Monday). The executive chef may not do all that much
line cooking, but must determine the menu (especially weekly specials),
order the food and supplies and attend
to its delivery, schedule the rest of the staff, supervise the kitchen, and so
on. This looks like a 12-hour day, 6
days a week, or 72 hours a week.[1] So, in that respect, Fritz’s work week was
perhaps somewhat shorter than that of an executive chef in a first-class
restaurant.
But Fritz’s working day was longer, from 7 AM until 9 PM
(with occasional later duties if Wolfe had clients and others in after
dinner)—14 hours a day in which he would have, at best, 2 hours off between
breakfast and lunch and 3 off between lunch and dinner. Having worked, long ago, the occasional split
shift, I would argue that those 5 hours would not provide much time for
personal activities.
And for this, let’s assume that the $1,500 per month figure
noted above represented his compensation (adjusted, of course, for changes in
the general level of prices). In current
terms, this translates to about $15,000 per month, or $180,000 per year. But we need to take account of the fact that
his compensation included two major pieces of in-kind pay: Housing and food. So we need to take account of the value he
received from that.
For most of the time, Fritz had a large room in the basement
(let’s call it the equivalent of a studio apartment, or a small one-bedroom
apartment; it’s clearly more space than, for example, Archie had[2]). Based on some speculation about the floor
plans of the brownstone[3],
I would put Fritz’s space at about 500 square feet, perhaps 25% to 30% larger
than Archie’s. What I’m finding[4]
is current rents of about $2,500 per month for that sort of space in midtown
Manhattan. So the value of his living
space would be about $30,000 per year (that would be taxable income today, and
was, according to the tax code, taxable income then—but it was basically
ignored).
And then there’s the food.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics[5]
estimates that average household expenditures on food (both at home and away)
in 2014 was about $6,000. Now, that’s
for the entire household. However, the
quality of food served in the brownstone would clearly be higher than that of
the average household in the U.S., so I’m going to count the entire amount in
estimating the value of meals-at-home for Fritz--$6,000. (Again, this would be now, and was then,
taxable income, but it was generally ignored until sometime in the 1990s.)
So my estimate of the value of Fritz’s annual compensation,
including the value of housing and food, would be about $216,000, or about
$18,000 per month. Or, based on my estimate
of a 50-hour work-week, and assuming that Fritz got 4 weeks of paid vacation,
$90 per hour. Was Fritz well-paid, or
was he underpaid?
Well, we know that at the time of Too Many Cooks, Philip Lazio was making $60,000 per year, and Jerome
Berin was offered as much as $40,000 per year to replace him. In today’s terms, that would be about $1
million per year for Lazio and about $675,000 for Berin. That seems fairly reasonable for world-class
chefs; one estimate[6]
suggests that Mario Batali makes about $3 million a year, and Bobby Flay makes
$1.5 million (for both of them, that includes their earnings from
television). (At least Lazio and Berin
were being paid close to what one would expect.)
But cooking for 2 people (or 3, counting himself, or 4 if
Theodore eats in the kitchen with Fritz) is not as demanding as running a large
restaurant. So a comparison with private
chefs is perhaps more relevant. A quick
check[7]
suggests that the average annual pay for a private chef in the top 10% of private
chefs in the U.S. is about $150,000. So,
as I am rather pleased to discover, it appears that Fritz is being paid what he
deserves—as much as the best and most experienced private chefs in America.
[1] We knew fairly well a
couple who ran a restaurant in Chicago for about 15 years. They did not do lunches, but their work day
was generally from about 2 PM until about 11 PM. She ran the kitchen and he ran the front of
the house; she ordered the food and planned the menu and specials; he ordered
all the beverages. She supervised the
kitchen staff; he supervised the table servers, bartenders, and other
front-of-the house personnel. The
kitchen staff was usually 3-4 line chefs; the front was staffed, on weekends,
with 5 wait staff, 5 bus, 2 bartenders, and 1 hostess. They were closed on Sundays. So their typical work week was 54 hours a
week, and that was without lunch service.
[4] http://www.nakedapartments.com/nyc/studio-apartments-manhattan
[5] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
