Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

It’s a truism about Nero Wolf that he doesn’t like to leave his house even though he does leave it in two of the first four novels. This time, the whole book takes place outside the Brownstone and the reader gets to see just how strong a phobia being out of his own controlled environment is for the detective. We also get to see the extra burden this places on Archie Goodwin.

 

This is one of the very best Nero Wolfe novels. The event that gets Wolfe out of his house is the invitation to give a speech to the fifteen greatest chef’s in the world on the wonders of American cooking. But that’s just the excuse, the real reason—and it so Wolfe—is that one of the chefs has cooked a dish of sausages that was one of the great culinary treats of Wolfe’s life and he wants to try and get the recipe out of him so he can enjoy it in his own home. Keep that motivation in mind, because his desire for that recipe—plus his absolute need to get back on the scheduled train to return to NYC as soon as his speech is finished, is Wolfe’s driving motivation throughout the whole story.

 

And what a story it is. Just about every chef in attendance has a reason to hate one of their number—a truly despicable man who has stolen one’s wife, one’s job, and one’s assistant, plus a recipe from just about everyone else. So it’s a cinch that he’s going to be killed because there are so many possible murderers. And when that happens, it’s both a pleasure and a horror, because the men most likely to be the killer are people we like. Wolfe is trying hard to stay out of it (remember, he wants nothing to interfere with his train ride home to NYC) but when the chef with the sausage recipe gets charged with the murder, Wolfe sees a chance to obtain a treasure money literally cannot buy.

 

So Wolfe takes on the task of clearing the chef and this leads to the single best chapter I have read to date in all of Rex Stout’s books. In chapter eleven, he works with a—let’s call them a skeptical audience of African American waiters and chefs’ assistants—and slowly draws out startling revelations that totally break all of the reader’s preconceived notions of the case. Any one of these revelations would have been wonderful, but the totality is awesome. After which, Wolfe, having achieved his objective of clearing the chef, is ready to quit the case again without discovering the murderer, because staying on might cause him to miss his ride home. But then the murderer makes a particularly egregious error and this excellent novel gets kicked up another notch as we barrel toward the conclusion.

 

A final note about this book, it seems impossible to not mention the extraordinary and intricate planning Stout must have undertaken to make this book work. First there is the food. I’m not a foodie—pizza or hamburgers generally keep me happy—but Stout knows his cuisine and as the reader, you will believe that the greatest chefs in the world are preparing these meals. But what is even more impressive, Stout must have mapped out what every waiter and assistant cook did in bringing these meals to life as well, because the details just keep flowing at appropriate moments, that so-and-so served this, and so-and-so prepared that, in a way that makes the entire environment both mystifying and totally believable.

 

This may well be Stout’s single best Nero Wolfe novel.