conversation, that he thinks Tocqueville’s Democracy in America the greatest book ever written on America by a foreigner, and that he favors abolishing the constitutional amendment limiting the President to two terms, thus, by merest chance, taking sides with Ronald Reagan, surely something that does not happen too often.
In Death on Deadline Saul Panzer is given plenty to do and performs up to standard. Lon Cohen also has a strong role, as well he might, since the Gazette itself provides the story line, a powerful plot that surely would have appealed to Rex Stout. Goldsborough’s use of a rare Archie Goodwin “Foreword” to underscore the esteem in which Wolfe holds both Cohen and the Gazette is well justified. As a professional journalist, Goldsborough knows how to handle this material for maximum impact. Certainly, in using it he has played an ace. If readers don’t take to the resumed saga after reading Death on Deadline, the fault is not his. It couldn’t be done better. BG, we might say, follows AG as naturally as the night the day, and he gives us a night resplendent with shooting stars.
Timidity never has been a hallmark of the Nero Wolfe novels. Each, in its own way, broke new ground.
Even as he entertained us, Rex Stout attacked a wide spectrum of social evils. And so it is here, Wolfe’s target being a celebrated czar of the tabloids. Goldsborough spices this challenge with several characteristic Stoutian surprises. Cramer, in an episode reminiscent of the milk carton scene in The Doorbell Rang, visits the plant room to deliver to Wolfe a vital bit of information. Wolfe is nonplussed when the newspaper overlord tries to buy him off with an offer to put him on the payroll as a columnist syndicated worldwide. Wolfe places a sensational, full-page advertisement in The New York Times and threatens to submit a second one. Fritz gets to announce one of the major developments in the case. Archie is observed wearing a digital watch!
A few things in Death on Deadline might have been handled differently. For example, in both Goldsborough novels an attractive ex-wife snows up midway through the book. Should it happen in the next book, I for one shall want an explanation for this hang-up. Goldsborough’s villain, Ian MacLaren, is namesake of the amiable author of the inoffensive Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush. Was this intentional irony or did Goldsborough simply forget? Rex Stout loathed the word grimace, used three times here. But how was Bob Goldsborough to know that? I know it only because Rex once chided me for using it. On one occasion Archie said he had never seen Cramer light a cigar. He did see him light one, in The Rubber Band. In the opening stages of his interview with Harriet Haverhill, the Gazette’s principal stockholder, Wolfe seems a touch too deferential. But then, Harriet is a true Southern lady, so probably she merits this unusual notice. There’s a scene, too, in which Archie, in the line of duty, gets roughed up. Wolfe could have shown more solicitude on that occasion than he does. I see nothing else to complain about.
One can fondle the same phrases and mannerisms just so many times. Bob Goldsborough realizes that. He confronts honestly and openly the limitations and protocols which Rex Stout set for Nero Wolfe’s world, yet he sees to it that Wolfe and Archie achieve freedom and self-expression within those limitations. We hope that he will continue to be circumspectly innovative. The knowledge he shows of Rex Stout’s intentions and methods would, in an earlier era, have caused him to be burned as a warlock. Yet we are confident that he will continue to enlighten us. Surely we want to know what Wolfe thinks of Maggie Thatcher, Bishop Tutu, and the Liberty Weekend. And maybe Archie’s opinion of Roger Clemens. As it is, his handling of his commitment thus far revives an interest in metempsychosis which I haven’t acknowledged since I left India forty years ago. As curator of Rex Stouts papers I thought I had been through them thoroughly. If it weren’t for references that clearly relate to the present day, I would suspect that Death on Deadline was an overlooked Stout manuscript. Goldsborough is about the age now that Rex Stout was when he created Wolfe and Archie. Rex wrote about them for the next forty years. I wish Bob the same period of tenure. I have only one reservation. What if Bob is recruited into the evangelical