Champagne for One by Rex Stout

Champagne for One by Rex Stout

One of the very impressive things about Rex Stout is the truly wide assortment of ways he comes up with for people to murder each other in his stories, In Champagne for One, it’s poison, but no one can figure out how the poison was administered—no one but Nero Wolfe, that is.

 

The setting is a little bit complicated. Archie Goodwin is asked to attend an annual event to honor the deceased first husband of a fabulously rich New Yorker. The deceased husband had done a lot of work with helping unmarried women who find themselves in a family way give birth and restart their lives. Once a year, four of those women are invited to his (now his wife’s) home for a sort of society affair in which they are paired with men of good birth for an evening of civil conversation. Archie doesn’t fit the description but gets dragged into the affair at the last moment when one of the intended guests gets laryngitis. One of the women dies by cyanide poisoning when drinking a glass of champagne. Because she was known to be contemplating suicide, everyone wants to believe that she killed herself. But Archie saw her take the drink and knew she had not added anything to it.

 

That’s the set up—tremendous political pressure for Archie to change his statement and Wolfe getting dragged in half against his will. Add to that a secret client who needs to keep his own relationship with the dead woman from becoming public knowledge and a whole host of suspects who are rather angry that this whole difficult affair won’t just go away.

 

And then Wolfe pulls the first of two cats out of his bag—he thinks of an angle that no one else is pursuing that surprised me even though we’ve had all the same information paraded before us that Wolfe has had. The second act is how he catches the murderer.

 

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I would never have figured this out if Wolfe/Stout hadn’t told me, but after he revealed the secret I certainly felt like I should have.