The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars."

Well, these are the 1965 dollars and the equivalent amount today would be almost one million. We meet the obese genius, Nero Wolfe, and the suave and manly Archie Goodwin - Wolfe's intrepid secretary and right-hand man - in the detective's office, where a rich widow, Mrs. Bruner, has just signed the check. She is hiring Wolfe to do what "perhaps no other man alive can do" - take on the FBI. With this cool setup The Doorbell Rang (1965) begins, Rex Stout's 41st novel in the Nero Wolfe series.

Mrs. Bruner had sent 10,000 copies of the book The FBI Nobody Knows (an actual 1964 book, currently available on Amazon) to cabinet members, senators, representatives, executives, district attorneys, and other public personages. As a result, she is now followed day and night by FBI agents and her family as well as the employees of the Bruner Corporation are harassed. Thus Mrs. Bruner hires Wolfe to compel the FBI to stop the intimidation.

Mr. Wolfe takes the case, no doubt enticed by the huge check. During the investigation a connection is discovered to an unsolved murder of a free-lance writer who had collected material for an article on the FBI. It will not be a spoiler when I write that Wolfe succeeds: the denouement involves quite a clever masquerade. I also like quite an interesting coded conversation between Wolfe and Archie. Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn plays some role in the story and the passages like

"'I've decided women under fifty are - what are they?'
'Well, jejune's a good word.'
'Too many Js.'"

must have served as an inspiration for Archy McNally's dialogues from Lawrence Sanders' novels.

Rex Stout's problems with FBI are widely known. The Bureau had him on a list of 'persons of interest' because the author had always been committed to liberal causes, participated in anti-fascist activities before World War 2, and later continued as an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism. Rex Stout always was a fierce critic of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Doorbell Rang is certainly not among the stronger installments in the series but it provides a better way to spend time than watching commercial garbage on TV. A marginal recommendation.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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