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The Nine Mile Walk
A collection of cases solved by armchair detective, Nicky Welt
190 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
148 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
About the author
Harry Kemelman
64 books148 followersHarry Kemelman was an American mystery writer and a professor of English. He was the creator of one of the most famous religious sleuths, Rabbi David Small.
His writing career began with short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine featuring New England college professor Nicky Welt, the first of which, "The Nine Mile Walk", is considered a classic.
The Rabbi Small series began in 1964 with the publication of Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, which became a huge bestseller, a difficult achievement for a religious mystery, and won Kemelman a 1965 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The Rabbi Small books are not only mysteries, but also considerations of Conservative Judaism.
His writing career began with short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine featuring New England college professor Nicky Welt, the first of which, "The Nine Mile Walk", is considered a classic.
The Rabbi Small series began in 1964 with the publication of Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, which became a huge bestseller, a difficult achievement for a religious mystery, and won Kemelman a 1965 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The Rabbi Small books are not only mysteries, but also considerations of Conservative Judaism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
November 19, 2025
Collection of eight stories featuring Nicky Welt, professor of English at a New England college. Even at time of publication (1967) stories like these, of "pure" detection -- that is, a genius taking the facts he hears from others, piecing together the likely events and identifying the culprit -- were becoming rarer. Thing is, these are very clever entertainments, so if you like that sort of thing, this is a thing you will like.
Anyway, the title story is probably the cleverest. Welt's friend, the county district attorney who narrates all of the stories, and Welt bicker about pulling accurate inferences from something as simple as a 10-12 word sentence. After a while, the narrator offers, "A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain" as an example and Welt begins the process of drawing inferences. (Wikipedia has a link to the story under the entry for Kemelman.)
I also especially like the last story, "The Man on the Ladder," for Kemelman's use of dialog between the characters. Like the stories other than the title story, this one proceeds more like the usual detective story. All of these stories are well-written and thought out, while also giving a frequently wry and amusing view of life in a university town.
Anyway, the title story is probably the cleverest. Welt's friend, the county district attorney who narrates all of the stories, and Welt bicker about pulling accurate inferences from something as simple as a 10-12 word sentence. After a while, the narrator offers, "A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain" as an example and Welt begins the process of drawing inferences. (Wikipedia has a link to the story under the entry for Kemelman.)
I also especially like the last story, "The Man on the Ladder," for Kemelman's use of dialog between the characters. Like the stories other than the title story, this one proceeds more like the usual detective story. All of these stories are well-written and thought out, while also giving a frequently wry and amusing view of life in a university town.
September 13, 2019
COUNTDOWN: Mid-20th Century American Crime
BOOK/Short 80 (of 250)
In the author's introduction, Kemelman tells us that it took fourteen (14!) years and numerous tries to complete the short story, "The Nine Mile Walk" that was published in "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" in 1947. Or rather, it took the author 1 day ensure "the story flowed" and that it would require "little or no revision." Kemelman adds, "...I consider the genre [detective fiction] itself important because it is the one modern form primarily dedicated to giving pleasure to the reader. We are apt to forget these days that that is the principal purpose of literature." I second that!
HOOK = 3 stars:>>>>>"I had made an ass of myself in a speech I had given at the Good Government Association [written 2 years after the end of WW2 and the Holocaust, it feels like this association is named in jest, or perhaps in hope] dinner, and Nicky Welt had cornered me at breakfast at the Blue Moon, where we both at occasionally, for the pleasure or rubbing it in." <<<<< is the opening line and typical of light comic touches throughout Kemelman's work.
PACE = 3: This short doesn't kick off with a slam-bang intro, but within a page we're into a discussion of logic in the courtroom.
PLOT = 4: A character says "Give me any sentence of ten or twelve words and I'll build you a logical chain of inferences that you never dreamed of when you framed the sentence." The response is, "A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain." We're off and running into, well, 'what-lawyers-do-in-court' and the logic/writing is just a beautiful thing.
CAST = 3: Nicholas Welt is a Professor of English Language and Literature and that's about all we know. The second cast member has just become a candidate for County Attorney, and we know little of him. But oh, we know HOW they think and it is fascinating.
ATMOSPHERE = 4: Train time schedules. Walking distance. Maps. Everything we encounter is enmeshed into the story just right.
SUMMARY = 3.4. A story of logic with a nice twist and perhaps an introduction into how lawyer's are going to "go after you" while you give testimony in court. And a good look into the way the upcoming Rabbi Small novels will unfold.
BOOK/Short 80 (of 250)
In the author's introduction, Kemelman tells us that it took fourteen (14!) years and numerous tries to complete the short story, "The Nine Mile Walk" that was published in "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" in 1947. Or rather, it took the author 1 day ensure "the story flowed" and that it would require "little or no revision." Kemelman adds, "...I consider the genre [detective fiction] itself important because it is the one modern form primarily dedicated to giving pleasure to the reader. We are apt to forget these days that that is the principal purpose of literature." I second that!
HOOK = 3 stars:>>>>>"I had made an ass of myself in a speech I had given at the Good Government Association [written 2 years after the end of WW2 and the Holocaust, it feels like this association is named in jest, or perhaps in hope] dinner, and Nicky Welt had cornered me at breakfast at the Blue Moon, where we both at occasionally, for the pleasure or rubbing it in." <<<<< is the opening line and typical of light comic touches throughout Kemelman's work.
PACE = 3: This short doesn't kick off with a slam-bang intro, but within a page we're into a discussion of logic in the courtroom.
PLOT = 4: A character says "Give me any sentence of ten or twelve words and I'll build you a logical chain of inferences that you never dreamed of when you framed the sentence." The response is, "A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain." We're off and running into, well, 'what-lawyers-do-in-court' and the logic/writing is just a beautiful thing.
CAST = 3: Nicholas Welt is a Professor of English Language and Literature and that's about all we know. The second cast member has just become a candidate for County Attorney, and we know little of him. But oh, we know HOW they think and it is fascinating.
ATMOSPHERE = 4: Train time schedules. Walking distance. Maps. Everything we encounter is enmeshed into the story just right.
SUMMARY = 3.4. A story of logic with a nice twist and perhaps an introduction into how lawyer's are going to "go after you" while you give testimony in court. And a good look into the way the upcoming Rabbi Small novels will unfold.
October 29, 2022
The title-story is one of the best mysteries ever written. The magnificent Nicky Welt challenges his friend: “Give me a sentence of ten or twelve words and I’ll build you a logical chain of inferences that you never dreamed of when you framed the sentence.“
And so the story unfolds because Nicky is true to his word and deduces nothing less than a complete murder out of this: “A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.“ I doubt that even Sherlock Holmes would have been able to do that much with such a clue. - This is insanely great. (And I think the story would have been even better without the actual murder.)
And all the other stories are great to excellent. With one exception: Time and time again, a real stinker. Second best The bread and butter case. Here Professor Welt is able to find the real murderer because he could see that the prime suspect of the police had his own ethics. “People like Terry get their ideas of morality and ethics, as do the rest of us, from the books they read and the plays they see.“ Very true, except that it is movies and TV. And I suspect that was the case even in 1962 when the story was written.
I also liked The man on the ladder very much. Although it is an example of the limits of the short story (it is the longest in the collection but not long enough). Because if a man falls from a ladder and there are only 2 or at most 3 suspects and a dog it is quite evident who did the deed. In a novel there would have been room enough to introduce red herrings to make the solution surprising. But it is long enough to give Kemelman opportunity to describe the world his protagonists live in, something he would get famous for when he introduced his Rabbi Small.
9/10
And so the story unfolds because Nicky is true to his word and deduces nothing less than a complete murder out of this: “A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.“ I doubt that even Sherlock Holmes would have been able to do that much with such a clue. - This is insanely great. (And I think the story would have been even better without the actual murder.)
And all the other stories are great to excellent. With one exception: Time and time again, a real stinker. Second best The bread and butter case. Here Professor Welt is able to find the real murderer because he could see that the prime suspect of the police had his own ethics. “People like Terry get their ideas of morality and ethics, as do the rest of us, from the books they read and the plays they see.“ Very true, except that it is movies and TV. And I suspect that was the case even in 1962 when the story was written.
I also liked The man on the ladder very much. Although it is an example of the limits of the short story (it is the longest in the collection but not long enough). Because if a man falls from a ladder and there are only 2 or at most 3 suspects and a dog it is quite evident who did the deed. In a novel there would have been room enough to introduce red herrings to make the solution surprising. But it is long enough to give Kemelman opportunity to describe the world his protagonists live in, something he would get famous for when he introduced his Rabbi Small.
9/10
October 28, 2019
Nicky Welt is one of fiction's most underrated detectives and Harry Kemelman uses him deftly to solve puzzles almost exclusively through the application of logical reasoning. This is a collection for fans of the true mystery story, designed to challenge the reader to unravel the case before all is revealed.
April 9, 2018
Focuses on the mental puzzle of murder, delightful read!
May 9, 2024
Before the Rabbi David Small books, there was Nicky Welt. I'd read the Rabbi Small series before coming to this earlier work. I can see Mr. Kemelman's formation of logic as the tool to solve puzzles in these stories. The prose seems a bit stilted, somewhat weightier than his later writing, but I'm glad I read these. I definitely prefer Rabbi Small, but these are a building block to those later stories.
Want to read
March 1, 2019Synopsis: a collection of cases solved by armchair detective, Nicky Welt. Taken from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
September 2, 2017
The short stories from Ellery Queen Magazine that started Mr. Kemelman on the road to be a leading author of detective fiction. They are about an English Professor who sits and listens to his friends and lawyers talk about their cases. As they toss possible suspects and sequences of events he just pays attention. And in the style of many early amateur sleuths he then points out the flaws and errors so far presented. If asked he can offer alternate options but often just ends his part of each conversation with a solution. They are always correct. Kemelman was asked to provide a fuller story on this character but could not get one to work. Instead after many years he combined other writings into the Rabbi Small stories. These are full novels of detection and community service where the rabbi deals with the issues around his fellow congregation members and the crimes committed in his neighborhood.
September 14, 2009
Pretty good crime fiction
April 20, 2014
These short stories featured in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine provide a good introduction to Harry Kemelman’s craft.
March 26, 2022
"The Nine Mile Walk: The Nicky Welt Stories" is a collection of eight short stories penned by American author Harry Kemelman (better known as the author of the Rabbi Small series) for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1947 and 1967.
All the stories feature Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Welt, Snowdon Professor of English Language and Literature at an unnamed American university. Welt is an irascible man with a pedagogical manner, dismissive of anything but hard reasoning, is always accompanied by the slightly dim-witted narrator (an unnamed County Attorney), and lives by himself in a boarding house with a landlady who worships him. Reminds you of someone? Yes... Welt is something of a Sherlock Holmes analogue.
Written in the classic tradition of the armchair detective stories of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, the focus on all the stories lies squarely on the problem, and the principal players involved in the problem. Kemelman does not really bother with setting or characterization much, which ensures that there is absolutely zero fluff in the stories. In all but the first story, Nicky, through his association with the attorney, is presented with the facts of a baffling crime or an open-and-shut case (or is sometimes present on the scene), and through logical inferences alone, comes up with the correct, albeit surprising, solution.
The first story, "The Nine Mile Walk", is one of the classic short stories of detective fiction, owing purely to its structure, where an academic discussion of logical reasoning leads to the solution of a crime to which the reader was not privy in the beginning. The logical structures are more often than not plausible, and even when it's a bit shaky, Kemelman's engaging prose carries the story through.
All in all, a solid 8/10.
All the stories feature Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Welt, Snowdon Professor of English Language and Literature at an unnamed American university. Welt is an irascible man with a pedagogical manner, dismissive of anything but hard reasoning, is always accompanied by the slightly dim-witted narrator (an unnamed County Attorney), and lives by himself in a boarding house with a landlady who worships him. Reminds you of someone? Yes... Welt is something of a Sherlock Holmes analogue.
Written in the classic tradition of the armchair detective stories of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, the focus on all the stories lies squarely on the problem, and the principal players involved in the problem. Kemelman does not really bother with setting or characterization much, which ensures that there is absolutely zero fluff in the stories. In all but the first story, Nicky, through his association with the attorney, is presented with the facts of a baffling crime or an open-and-shut case (or is sometimes present on the scene), and through logical inferences alone, comes up with the correct, albeit surprising, solution.
The first story, "The Nine Mile Walk", is one of the classic short stories of detective fiction, owing purely to its structure, where an academic discussion of logical reasoning leads to the solution of a crime to which the reader was not privy in the beginning. The logical structures are more often than not plausible, and even when it's a bit shaky, Kemelman's engaging prose carries the story through.
All in all, a solid 8/10.
June 3, 2020
I'm about to read the Rabbi novels of Harry Kemelman, which I first read 30 years ago after the Lanigan's Rabbi TV series came out. (I'm dating myself.) Prepatory to that I decided to read all of Kemelman's short stories, which feature university professor Nicky Welt collected in The Nine Mile Walk and other stories. It's available on eBay, where I picked up my copy.
The stories are over 40 years old, so we're getting a glimpse at life as it was in the 1970s. All of the stories, except for The Nine Mile Walk, are written to the same formula - but it's a fun formula. We don't get much character development for the narrator or Nicky Welt, but that's not what these stories are. They are intellectual exercises.
The stories aren't really "fair play" - we aren't really shown the clues that Nicky Welt uses to solve the crimes, but again since they all have the same formula you pretty much know whodunit. Originally these stories appeared over time in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and if you're reading one of these stories every six months or so, the formulaicness might not have been so obvious. But having said that, I think the stories are ingenious, and they're fun to read.
The stories are over 40 years old, so we're getting a glimpse at life as it was in the 1970s. All of the stories, except for The Nine Mile Walk, are written to the same formula - but it's a fun formula. We don't get much character development for the narrator or Nicky Welt, but that's not what these stories are. They are intellectual exercises.
The stories aren't really "fair play" - we aren't really shown the clues that Nicky Welt uses to solve the crimes, but again since they all have the same formula you pretty much know whodunit. Originally these stories appeared over time in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and if you're reading one of these stories every six months or so, the formulaicness might not have been so obvious. But having said that, I think the stories are ingenious, and they're fun to read.
March 28, 2019
Interesting as well as fascinating collection of armchair whodunits involving Nicolas "Nicky" Welt and his friend the storyteller and County Attorney. The Straw Man is a kidnapping with a twist. The 10 o'clock Scholar is about recognition and prestige and the loss and humiliation if such honors are withheld; the same is true with The Man in the Ladder which has something to do with fame and royalties and the entitlement that goes with them, then there is blackmail. There are other stories here that some the reader may easily solve or at least have a strong conviction as to who the killer is given certain indications and clues. An altogether well~crafted collection.
December 31, 2018
After the title story came up in conversation once a few months back, my dad insisted that I had to read these stories and brought our copy in from our family archive. Now that I've read them (though I skipped the story he read aloud to the family as "family reading"), I can definitely recommend them; while there are a number of mystery novels and stories that I have on the whole enjoyed, I don't read much in the genre, so I have little basis for comparison. But to my fairly-uneducated palate, they seem to stand in the good company of Doyle and Dick Francis.
January 6, 2024
La historia titular es de los mejores relatos cortos de misterio que he leído y hay muchísimo que se puede aprender del género en ella. Un soplo de aire fresco.
Sobre el resto, hay un par más de relatos que merecen la pena, pero en general tienen premisas más simples o no son tan interesantes estructural o narrativamente, si bien no hay ninguno que definiría como malo. Mi favorito de ellos ha sido The Whistling Tea Kettle.
Recomiendo a cualquier persona que sea fan del género leer la primera, y si gusta el personaje y el estilo, seguir con el resto.
Sobre el resto, hay un par más de relatos que merecen la pena, pero en general tienen premisas más simples o no son tan interesantes estructural o narrativamente, si bien no hay ninguno que definiría como malo. Mi favorito de ellos ha sido The Whistling Tea Kettle.
Recomiendo a cualquier persona que sea fan del género leer la primera, y si gusta el personaje y el estilo, seguir con el resto.
June 20, 2020
Harry Kemelman introduces one of his versions of Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Jane Marple - a keen observer who solves crimes by watching, listening and logic. Nicky Welt would probably be an insufferable companion, but his powers of perception are amazing. The stories are well thought out and the writing style clear
August 17, 2020
This is a group of very enjoyable short stories. Welt is not a detective or policeman -- he's just a man with keen skills of observation and an abundance of common sense! Kemelman wrote this book and a series of "The Day the Rabbi..." mysteries. I thoroughly enjoy his writing and just wish that he had lived to write many more stories.
February 8, 2021
Most of the stories are easily workable but the use of deductive logic is present in every story the revelations wouldn't be earth shattering for any long time reader of detective fiction but the "Nine mile walk" for its sheer extrapolations given from a single sentence is amazing, along with '"end play" and "straw man".
June 25, 2025
A Quick and easy read by one of my favorite Authors. Harry Kemelman was the author of the Rabbi Small Mysteries. These Mysteries involved an Orthodox Rabbi helping a Roman Catholic Police Chief solve Murders. This book, hoever, was a series of short stories about a Professor Nickki Welt who used logic to solve Murder mysteries also.
November 25, 2018
The story is based on the idea that there are a number of inferences that may be made from any sentence. I didn't agree with them all. Because of that is felt like the entire story was proven false and that effected how I rated the story.
January 19, 2023
Short, but intrepid mysteries
A series of short mysteries which logic solves each and every time. Nothing terribly tricky about any of these, but their explanations are superb. Definitely worth a read!
A series of short mysteries which logic solves each and every time. Nothing terribly tricky about any of these, but their explanations are superb. Definitely worth a read!
December 20, 2023
Interesting stories
Nicky Welt has a very orderly and methodical approach. He uses logic to describe the crime. His descriptions are well reasoned. The stories were interesting and cleverly thought out.
Nicky Welt has a very orderly and methodical approach. He uses logic to describe the crime. His descriptions are well reasoned. The stories were interesting and cleverly thought out.
October 7, 2025
In this series of stories, there are mysteries occurring that are solved by Nicky Welt, using his brain and his powers of observation, rather than dogged detective work. The book reads quickly and the stories are good.
September 10, 2017
Love short mysteries and these are some of the best.
September 21, 2020
Short stories, which are usually not my preference, but these are really well done. A stroll back in time...
February 19, 2021
Sort of like Encyclopedia Brown for grown-ups. Light on evidence but heavy on logic and guesswork. Entertaining.
August 7, 2021
The title story, while a bit unbelievable, was very creative
December 21, 2024
An excellent collection of short crime stories/ whodunits set in an academic setting in the North Eastern USA. I look forward to starting the author's full length stories featuring a Rabbi /sleuth.
April 5, 2025
The perfect epitome of armchair detective!
May 10, 2025
Usually only a few of the short stories in a collection are really good. Almost all of these were.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews