The Final Deduction by Rex Stout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"As I helped myself to clams I held my breath because if you smell them, mixed with shallots, chives, chervil, mushrooms, bread crumbs, sherry, and dry white wine, you take so many that you don't leave enough room for the duckling roasted in cider with Spanish sauce as revised by Wolfe and Fritz, leaving out the carrot and parsley and putting anchovies in."

Ms. Althea Vail, a rich socialite and a retired actress, offers Nero Wolfe an exorbitant fee if he manages to get her kidnapped husband back, alive and unharmed. She disobeys the kidnappers' orders received in a ransom letter. In a somewhat unusual twist, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin accomplish an impressive feat of detection already by page 16 of the novel. The Final Deduction (1961) is the 35th installment in the celebrated series by Rex Stout. (Interestingly, the paperback I have gives the date of copyright as 1955, which is hardly possible as a 1961 Heron sedan appears in the story.)

The plot involves another serious crime and poor Archie Goodwin has to endure extensive interrogations by state police and the district attorney. Yet all that pales in comparison with what happens on page 56 of the Bantam House paperback:

"I had my coat on and the door open. He crossed the sill, and as I followed I shut the door. As we descended the stoop I asked, 'The car?' and he said no, and at the bottom he turned right, toward Ninth Avenue."

Yes, as incredible as it may seem, Wolfe walks away from his house!!!

Another cool passage in the novel involves a situation when Wolfe knows what Archie will do before, in fact, Archie knows what he will do. The "perfect harmony" of knowing each other well is a recurring theme in this novel. There is also some language humor as in the following fragment:

"As I rolled the paper in Wolfe's voice came at my back.
'Dendrobium chrysotoxum for Miss Gillard and Laelia purpurata for Doctor Vollmer. Tomorrow.'
'Right. And Sitassia readia for you and Transcriptum underwoodum for me.' I hit the keys."

With its unusual focus on Wolfe-Goodwin relationship The Final Deduction avoids the cloying familiarity of characters in a long-running series of novels: it could have been one of the better books in the series. Alas I find the denouement totally ridiculous: the way Wolfe arrives at his final deduction and exposes the murderer is, to put it mildly, implausible. One of the weakest Rex Stout's endings that I can remember. So the rating for this quite interesting read is only

Two-and-three-quarter stars.


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