''And Be a Villain'' (British title ''More Deaths Than One'') is a
Nero Wolfe
Nero Wolfe is a brilliant, obese and eccentric fictional armchair detective created in 1934 by American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe was born in Montenegro and keeps his past murky. He lives in a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street in Ne ...
detective novel
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as s ...
by
Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout (; December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975) was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and ...
, first published by the
Viking Press
Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquire ...
in 1948. The story was collected in the omnibus volumes ''Full House'' (Viking 1961) and ''Triple Zeck'' (Viking 1974).
Plot introduction
A radio show guest is poisoned on the air during a plug for the show's sponsor, a soft-drink manufacturer. The negative publicity, and the low bank balance at tax time, brings Nero Wolfe into the case — and into his first recorded encounter with a shadowy master criminal.
''And Be a Villain'' is the first of three Nero Wolfe books that involve crime syndicate leader Arnold Zeck and his widespread operations. The others in the Zeck Trilogy are ''
The Second Confession'' and ''
In the Best Families
''In the Best Families'' (British title ''Even in the Best Families'') is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by the Viking Press in 1950. The story was collected in the omnibus volumes ''Five of a Kind'' (Viking 1961) and ' ...
''. In each book, Zeck — Wolfe's
Moriarty — telephones Wolfe to warn him off an investigation that Zeck believes will interfere with his crime syndicate. Each time, Wolfe refuses to cooperate, and anticipates that there will be consequences.
The title is from Act I, Scene V, line 114 of
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
's ''
Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts ...
'', in which the prince says of his murderous uncle
King Claudius
King Claudius is a fictional character and the main antagonist of William Shakespeare's tragedy ''Hamlet''. He is the brother to King Hamlet, second husband to Gertrude and uncle and later stepfather to Prince Hamlet. He obtained the throne of ...
, "That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." Remarking on the change from Stout's title to ''More Deaths Than One'' for the British edition, Rev. Fredrick G. Gotwald wrote, "It seems strange that the name was changed in a country from which the original came."
Plot summary
Cyril Orchard, the publisher of the weekly
horse racing
Horse racing is an equestrian performance sport, typically involving two or more horses ridden by jockeys (or sometimes driven without riders) over a set distance for competition. It is one of the most ancient of all sports, as its basic p ...
sheet ''Track Almanac,'' is poisoned with
cyanide
Cyanide is a naturally occurring, rapidly acting, toxic chemical that can exist in many different forms.
In chemistry, a cyanide () is a chemical compound that contains a functional group. This group, known as the cyano group, consists of ...
during a live soft drink commercial on a popular radio talk show. A media sensation, the case attracts the attention of Nero Wolfe, who is facing a crippling
income tax bill, and Archie Goodwin is dispatched to convince the producers and sponsors to hire Wolfe to investigate the crime. The police have identified several suspects, including the show's host Madeline Fraser; her business manager, friend and former sister-in-law Deborah Koppel; her on-air side-kick Bill Meadows; Tully Strong and Nathan Straub, representatives of the show's sponsors; script-writer Elinor Vance; Nancylee Shepherd, the head of Fraser's fan-club; and F.O. Savarese, an assistant
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
of
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
and the show's other guest.
Although his initial investigations seem unpromising, Wolfe eventually learns that a separate bottle of the beverage being advertised was provided for Fraser, identified with tape around the neck. When pressed, the producers admit that Fraser is unable to drink the beverage she was advertising because it gives her indigestion, and instead drinks iced coffee from the bottle instead. As the marked bottle was the one containing the poison, this suggests that Fraser was the intended victim instead of Orchard.
Wolfe passes this information on to Inspector Cramer, seeing this as an opportunity to claim his fee without further work. When the press -- prompted by Archie -- criticises him for his lack of effort, however, he is stung into further action but, to Archie's surprise, begins investigating a different murder. Beula Poole, the publisher of an independent political and economics journal, has been shot dead in her offices days before. Although there is no apparent connection between the crimes, Wolfe is skeptical that two independent publishers would be murdered within weeks of each other without any link. His investigations reveal that the magazines were in fact the front for a sophisticated blackmail operation which targeted its victims using the threat of slander to compel them to purchase subscriptions for a year. This, in turn, brings Wolfe into contact with Arnold Zeck, the shadowy and powerful criminal mastermind behind the operation, who warns Wolfe not to interfere in his affairs.
After the blackmail story is published Walter Anderson, the president of the soft drink company, tries to end Wolfe's investigations by paying him off and announcing that his company is withdrawing sponsorship from Fraser's show. With no further leads, Wolfe sends Archie to Fraser and her entourage with a fake letter implicating Elinor Vance in order to try and shake a response out of the suspects. During the meeting, Deborah Koppel dies after eating a piece of candy laced with cyanide. Discovering the letter on Archie, the police threaten to charge him with obstructing justice, but they are interrupted by a phone call from a rival radio station. Wolfe has announced that he knows the identity of the murderer and threatens to reveal it on-air that night.
To avoid humiliation, the charges against Archie are dismissed and Wolfe is permitted to reveal the identity of the murderer in his office. Once the suspects have arrived, Wolfe presses Anderson to reveal the reason he tried to terminate his contract with Wolfe and Fraser's show. Anderson had discovered that Madeline Fraser had received blackmail letters, and it is revealed that Fraser was being accused of murdering her husband years before. However, while the blackmail syndicate had previously created false claims about their victims to slander them, in this case they had unwittingly stumbled upon the truth – Fraser ''had'' in fact murdered her husband. Fraser murdered Orchard and Poole to conceal her secret, and Koppel when she began to suspect the truth. Fraser is arrested and charged with murder. The novel ends with Wolfe receiving a phone call from Zeck, congratulating him on solving the case — and warning him not to interfere in the crime lord's affairs.
The unfamiliar word
"Readers of the Wolfe saga often have to turn to the dictionary because of the erudite vocabulary of Wolfe and sometimes of Archie," wrote Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald.
"Like all of us, Wolfe has his favorite words, phrases, and sayings," wrote
William S. Baring-Gould William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913–10 Aug 1967) was a noted Sherlock Holmes scholar, best known as the author of the influential 1962 fictional biography, ''Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's ...
. "Among the words, many are unusual and some are abstruse."
Examples of unfamiliar words — or unfamiliar uses of words that some would otherwise consider familiar — are found throughout the corpus, often in the give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie. ''And Be A Villain'' contains several examples, including the following:
*Temerarious. Chapter 15.
*Chambrer. Chapter 17. (This verb might well have been apt in the middle of the 20th century, but not toward the beginning of the 21st.)
*Fructify. Chapter 19.
*Dysgenic. Chapter 20.
Cast of characters
*Nero Wolfe — The private investigator
*Archie Goodwin — Wolfe's assistant, and the narrator of all Wolfe stories
*Cyril Orchard and Beula Poole — Publishers of high priced newsletters, both murder victims
*Madeline Fraser — The host of a radio talk show and one of Wolfe's clients
*Deborah Koppel — Miss Fraser's manager and sister-in-law
*Bill Meadows — Miss Fraser's "sidekick" on the radio
*Elinor Vance — Scriptwriter for the show
*Tully Strong — Secretary of the show's Sponsors' Council
*F. O. Savarese — Mathematics professor who appeared on the radio show during which the first murder occurred
*Nathan Straub — Member of an advertising agency that represents the show's sponsors
*Nancylee Shepherd — Teenage organizer of a very successful Madeline Fraser fan club
*Walter Anderson — President of the firm that makes Hi-Spot
*W. T. Michaels — A medical doctor and victim of extortion
*Lon Cohen — A reporter at the ''Gazette''
*Inspector Cramer, Lieutenant George Rowcliff, and Sergeant Purley Stebbins — Representing Manhattan Homicide
Problematic probability
In Chapter 8, Professor Savarese provides a formula for the normal curve, touting it as a tool that could be used in crime detection. Unfortunately, the typesetting process let the professor down. Over time, different editions of ''And Be a Villain'' represent the formula differently, changing (for example) exponents from 2 to 3. Furthermore, the equation contains a mysterious "V" which is in fact just the leftmost portion of a radical sign. A more accurate discussion of the probability density function can be found at
Normal distribution
In statistics, a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a real-valued random variable. The general form of its probability density function is
:
f(x) = \frac e^
The parameter \mu ...
.
Reviews and commentary
*
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun (; November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and ...
and Wendell Hertig Taylor, ''
A Catalogue of Crime
''A Catalogue of Crime'' is a critique of crime fiction by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, first published in 1971. The book was awarded a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972. A revised and enlarged edition ...
'' — A first-rate sample of the author's art, this tale brings us face to face with the radio advertising of a beverage which the lady who promotes it cannot abide. Hence hanky-panky with the bottle of substitute liquid and resulting doubt as to whom the dose was intended for. Archie is spectacular in word and deed.
[Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. ''A Catalogue of Crime''. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ]
* ''
The New York Times Book Review
''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...
'' (September 26, 1948) — The income tax has made such a dent in Nero Wolfe's bank balance that he finds it necessary to look for work instead of waiting for it to come to him as is his usual custom. He selects a case upon which the New York Police Department has been working for six days without getting anywhere, and he sends Archie Goodwin out as his envoy to persuade the people involved that it would be to their interest to employ Wolfe. The case has to do with what happened on a radio program sponsored by the manufacturers of a beverage called Hi-Spot. Cyril Orchard, a guest on the program, drank a glass of Hi-Spot and dropped dead. The other persons present drank the same beverage, but there was no cyanide in their glasses. So much, and nothing more of any consequence, is known to the police. Nobody admits to remembering who poured Orchard's drink or who handed him the glass. Archie's patience is sorely tried when weeks pass by with scarcely any progress being made. It seems to him that Wolfe is not even trying, but he is mistaken. Wolfe is thinking, and when that giant intellect goes to work let the malefactor beware. The story is enlivened by Archie's expert needling of his employer and by Wolfe's lively passages at arms with the bigwigs of the Homicide Department.
* ''
Saturday Review of Literature
''Saturday Review'', previously ''The Saturday Review of Literature'', was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971. Under Norman Cousins, it was described as "a compendium of reportage, ess ...
'' (October 9, 1949) — Poisoning, in radio studio, of beverage maker's guest, provides action and needed funds for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Nero "takes crazy dive into two-foot tank" and snares blackmail killer in hurricane off-stage finish of major adventure.
Publication history
*1948, New York: The
Viking Press
Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquire ...
, September 27, 1948, hardcover
:In his limited-edition pamphlet, ''Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I'',
Otto Penzler
Otto Penzler (born July 8, 1942) is a German-born American editor of mystery fiction, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.
Biography
Born in Germany to a German-American mother and a German father, Penzler moved to The B ...
describes the
first edition
The bibliographical definition of an edition includes all copies of a book printed from substantially the same setting of type, including all minor typographical variants.
First edition
According to the definition of ''edition'' above, a b ...
of ''And Be a Villain'': "Gray cloth, front cover and spine printed with red lettering and green rules; rear cover blank. Issued in a black, white, red and green dust wrapper. ... With this title, The
Mystery Guild
Bookspan LLC is a New York–based online bookseller, founded in 2000.
Bookspan began as a joint endeavor by Bertelsmann and Time Warner. Bertelsmann took over control in 2007, and a year later, sold its interest to Najafi Companies, an Arizon ...
began to publish the Nero Wolfe books. The cover of its
ook clubedition is smooth, while the trade edition is heavily textured."
:In April 2006, ''Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine'' estimated that the first edition of ''And Be a Villain'' had a value of between $300 and $500. The estimate is for a copy in very good to fine condition in a like dustjacket.
*1948, New York: Viking (
Mystery Guild
Bookspan LLC is a New York–based online bookseller, founded in 2000.
Bookspan began as a joint endeavor by Bertelsmann and Time Warner. Bertelsmann took over control in 2007, and a year later, sold its interest to Najafi Companies, an Arizon ...
), November 1948, hardcover
:The far less valuable Viking book club edition may be distinguished from the first edition in three ways:
::* The dust jacket has "Book Club Edition" printed on the inside front flap, and the price is absent (first editions may be price clipped if they were given as gifts).
::* Book club editions are sometimes thinner and 1950s and newer Viking BCEs are taller (usually a quarter of an inch) than first editions, but the BCE of ''And Be a Villain'' (and perhaps some other pre-1950s Viking Nero Wolfe BCEs) is the same height as the first edition.
::* Book club editions are bound in cardboard, and first editions are bound in cloth (or have at least a cloth spine).
[Penzler, Otto, ''Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I'', pp. 19–20]
:Another distinguishing characteristic of the Nero Wolfe Viking first editions is the appearance of a listing of other books by Rex Stout preceding the title page. Such a listing does not appear in the BCEs.
*1948, New York:
Book League of America
The Book League of America, Inc. was a US book publisher and mail order book sales club. It was established in 1930, a few years after the Book of the Month Club. Its founder was Lawrence Lamm, previously an editor at Macmillan Inc. The compa ...
, December 1948, hardcover
*1948, Toronto:
Macmillan
MacMillan, Macmillan, McMillen or McMillan may refer to:
People
* McMillan (surname)
* Clan MacMillan, a Highland Scottish clan
* Harold Macmillan, British statesman and politician
* James MacMillan, Scottish composer
* William Duncan MacMillan ...
, 1948, hardcover
*1948, London: Collins (White Circle) #223c, 1948, paperback (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1949, London:
Collins Crime Club
Collins Crime Club was an imprint of British book publishers William Collins, Sons and ran from 6 May 1930 to April 1994. Throughout its 64 years the club issued a total of 2,012in "The Hooded Gunman -- An Illustrated History of Collins Crime ...
, February 21, 1949, hardcover (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1950, New York:
Bantam #824, September 1950, paperback
*1955, New York: The Viking Press, ''Full House: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus'' (with ''
The League of Frightened Men
''The League of Frightened Men'' is the second Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. The story was serialized in six issues of ''The Saturday Evening Post'' (June 15–July 20, 1935) under the title ''The Frightened Men''. The novel was publish ...
'' and ''
Curtains for Three
''Curtains for Three'' is a collection of Nero Wolfe mystery novellas by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1951 and itself collected in the omnibus volume ''Full House'' (Viking 1955). The book comprises three stories that first appeared ...
''), May 15, 1955, hardcover
*1958, London: Fontana #255, 1958, paperback (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1964, London: Panther, 1964, paperback (as ''And Be a Villain'')
*1973, London:
Tom Stacey
Tom Stacey FRSL (11 January 1930 – 24 December 2022) was a British novelist, publisher, screenwriter, journalist and penologist. He was a prominent member of White's.
Early life
Stacey attended Wellesley House School (1938–1943), originall ...
, 1973, hardcover (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1974, New York: The Viking Press, ''Triple Zeck: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus'' (with ''
The Second Confession'' and ''
In the Best Families
''In the Best Families'' (British title ''Even in the Best Families'') is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by the Viking Press in 1950. The story was collected in the omnibus volumes ''Five of a Kind'' (Viking 1961) and ' ...
''), April 5, 1974, hardcover
*1975, Tiptree, Essex: Severn House Publishers, 1975, hardcover (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1976, London: Penguin, ''The First Rex Stout Omnibus'' (with ''
The Doorbell Rang
''The Doorbell Rang'' is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by the Viking Press in 1965.
Plot introduction
Nero Wolfe is hired to force the FBI to stop wiretapping, tailing and otherwise harassing a woman who gave away 1 ...
'' and ''
The Second Confession''), 1976, paperback (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1984, New York: Bantam March 1984, paperback
*1992, London: Little, Brown and Company (UK) Limited , hardcover (as ''More Deaths Than One'')
*1994, New York: Bantam Crime Line May 1994, paperback, Rex Stout Library edition with introduction by Martin Meyers and Annette Meyers (Maan Meyers)
*2005, Auburn, California: The Audio Partners Publishing Corp., Mystery Masters December 10, 2005, audio CD (unabridged, read by Michael Prichard)
*2011, New York: Bantam Crimeline February 23, 2011,
e-book
An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...
*2016, New York: Bantam Books, ''The Zeck Trilogy'', December 13, 2016, e-book
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:And Be A Villain
1948 American novels
Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout
Viking Press books