Murder by the Book (1951)

Murder by the Book is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout published in 1951 by the Viking Press, and collected in the omnibus volume Royal Flush (1965).

Plot summary

Inspector Cramer takes the unprecedented step of approaching Nero Wolfe for his help on a stalled murder investigation. Leonard Dykes, a clerk for a law partnership, was found dead in the East River. The police find in Dykes' apartment a list of men's names and Cramer wishes to have Wolfe's opinion on it. Other than suggesting Dykes may have been trying to invent an alias, Wolfe cannot help.

Six weeks later, the father of Joan Wellman approaches Wolfe. Joan, a reader for a fiction publisher, was killed in a hit-and-run incident late at night in Van Cortlandt Park. Wolfe reads a letter that Joan had written to her parents, realizing that the name Baird Archer, an author whose novel Joan was reading for her employer, appears on the list found in Leonard Dykes' apartment.

Archie Goodwin explores the link between Archer's novel and the two murder victims. To that end, Archie arrives at the office of Rachel Abrams, the stenographer who typed the manuscript, mere minutes after she is thrown out of a window to her death as a third victim. In the moments before the police arrive, Archie confirms that Baird Archer was one of her clients. Wolfe decides to investigate Dykes. Archie arranges a meeting with the female employees of Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin and Briggs, the law firm that employed Dykes. During the meeting, tempers flare. The former senior partner of the firm, Conroy O'Malley, is mentioned. O'Malley was disbarred for bribing a jury foreman to fix a case. Some blame Dykes for exposing him to the Bar Association; it becomes clear that all four of the partners have motives to betray O’Malley.

Soon after, the four lawyers —James Corrigan, Emmet Phelps, Louis Kustin and Frederick Briggs— approach Wolfe, keen to avoid further scandal. The men agree to send Wolfe all correspondence relating to Dykes. When they receive the packet, Wolfe and Archie discover an odd notation, apparently in Corrigan's handwriting, which corresponds to a verse in the Book of Psalms. The start of the same verse—"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help"—was the title of Baird Archer's novel. This persuades Wolfe that Archer was a pen name of Dykes and his novel a roman à clef based on O'Malley's downfall.

Archie flies to Los Angeles to persuade Dykes's sister Peggy to help them trap her brother's murderer. Archie drafts a letter to the New York City law firm that Peggy signs, asking for advice over the legal rights of her brother's novel. He hires a local private detective to pose as a literary agent. Arrived in Los Angeles, James Corrigan tries unsuccessfully to acquire the manuscript, resorting to violence and attempted theft to read it. Archie tails Corrigan back to New York.

That evening, Wolfe receives a rambling phone call, apparently from James Corrigan, that ends abruptly with the sound of a gunshot. The police assess that Corrigan has committed suicide. The next day Wolfe receives an unsigned suicide note, typed, confessing to reporting bribery by O'Malley and committing all three murders to keep his secret. The police take it as typed by Corrigan, sufficient to judge his death as suicide and accept him as the triple murderer.

Wolfe has a breakthrough and summons the major witnesses to his office. There, he reveals that the supposed suicide note was flawed in one crucial respect; it claims that Corrigan was aware of the plot of Dykes's novel, when Corrigan clearly was not. Wolfe makes clear that Conroy O'Malley murdered Corrigan. O'Malley wanted revenge on Corrigan for reporting his bribery. O’Malley read Dykes's manuscript, deciding its plot was based on his own disbarment. O’Malley committed the other murders both to frame Corrigan and to set the scene to murder Corrigan with an appearance of suicide. After holes in O’Malley’s original alibi are discovered, Cramer charges O’Malley with murder, and the trial convicts him.

Reviews and commentary

Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review (October 28, 1951) — For some years now Nero Wolfe has flourished best in novelettes ... The shorter exploits, annually collected in volumes of three, have been models of the middle-length detective story; but some of us have still yearned nostalgically for the days of such Wolfe novels as Too Many Cooks and The League of Frightened Men. It's a pleasure at last to report that in Murder by the Book Rex Stout restores Nero Wolfe to his proper place in the long detective novel. A man has been murdered presumably because of a novel which he wrote and which has completely disappeared; there is apparently as total an absence of clues as ever confronted a fictional detective. And the story is not so much one of detection, as of the ingenious efforts of Wolfe and the incomparable Archie Goodwin to find some conceivable starting point from which detection can be carried on. It's an odd and interesting approach; the solution is at once plausible and surprising (if not quite deductively watertight). Wolfe and Archie are both in top form and Stout has rarely done a better novelistic job of putting flesh on assorted minor characters.

Stuart M. Kaminsky — I am a huge Stout fan. I've got a collection of the Wolfe novels and re-read them. I just finished reading Murder by the Book, definitely one of my favorites in the series. Check Stout's scenes of Archie in Los Angeles. They rank right up there with Chandler, and the characters — major and minor — are vivid and memorable, not to mention the great give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie.