If Death Ever Slept by Rex Stout

If Death Ever Slept by Rex Stout

This novel is a little slow to get started as is often the case when Nero Wolfe accepts a non-murder case. Archie gets sent to pose as a secretary and live with a millionaire’s family to gather information that incriminates the man’s daughter-in-law as the person leaking his secrets to business rivals. Now, aside from the fact that Wolfe doesn’t usually accept cases where there is a predetermined solution, it just wasn’t all that interesting. There are a lot of chapters of Archie getting to know the millionaire’s family before we have our first hint at the typical Wolfe crime—murder.

 

After that, things begin to improve a little, but it’s really not until well after the second murder that I began to feel like we were genuinely in a Nero Wolfe mystery. Strangely enough, that feeling came only shortly before Wolfe returned his client’s money and left the case. Overall, while I really liked the ending, I thought this was perhaps the weakest of the Nero Wolfe mysteries I’ve read so far.