Plot It Yourself

In Plot It Yourself, by Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe is hired by a group of authors and publishers to discover the identity of a plagarist and blackmailer: over a period of five years, a number of authors and playwrights have published novels and plays to good response, only to have someone claim that they were the original authors of the storyline, idea, characters, etc., in short story form. When those short stories are found in various offices and other places where the targeted author could have seen the manuscript, most of the authors and publishers have paid the ostensibly wronged party to go away; but finally, they decide that they need to fight this situation and Wolfe is chosen as the best detective to figure it out. He almost show more immediately realizes that the author of the suspicious short stories is one person and that this one person is not any of the claimants but someone else entirely; as soon as he realizes that, though, the blackmailer turns to murder and the claimants start dropping like flies.... This was a fun read in the long-running Nero Wolfe series, one I enjoyed quite a bit, although Archie tells the reader a few times that we, the reader, must have figured out the culprit by now because we have all the clues - and I hadn't figured it out! Not 'til nearly the very end, anyway. Recommended, as always. show less

Now *that's* a Nero Wolfe novel. Plagiarism and murder! He really lays into the publishing industry, too, and it's great fun. Probably in my top 5 Wolfe stories.

Deliciously complex. Rex Stout doesn't give you many chances to figure out the murderer before the intrepid Archie and the corpulent Mr. Wolfe can in any book, but especially in this one you have to be left scratching your head a little as murder after murder takes place with few or no clues to work with. In the end the heroes have to lay a trap for a character whom they think knows the identity of the murderer; a clever twist and one that was probably more difficult to write than the typical set-out-the-clues-and-explain-it-all-at-the-end like you would get with Hercule Poirot. But Stout is appealing to fans of the English mystery genre, I think - the characters never hit the bloody lows you'd find in a Dashiell Hammett novel, but show more instead combine action with intellectual work to neatly wrap up each mystery. This book is a lovely example. show less

I’m a fan of British cosy mysteries. I rarely read any of the American crime/mystery novels, although I do have some experience with the noir and the pulp genre. Plot It Yourself kind of falls in the middle of these genres. It is not violent (à la cosy mysteries) but it feels somewhat grittier.

Plot It Yourself written by Rex Stout was published in 1959. This novel features Stout’s creation Detective Nero Wolfe. It was published in the UK under the title Murder in Style.

Accusations of plagiarism are sending shock waves through the writer-publisher fraternity. A committee of writers and publishers come to Nero Wolfe as a last resort. But even Wolfe is baffled by this case of ‘plagiarism upside down’.

This is my first Nero Wolfe show more book. I know this is not the first book in the series. Starting as I did in the middle of a series of books, there is a good chance I’m missing a lot of background information.

Wolfe seems very inactive here and I don’t mean physically. It takes him forever to figure everything out. By the time he does do something, a couple of dead bodies have already piled up. But Wolfe admits he has bungled the case so maybe Stout wanted his detective to appear inactive in this book.

The final revelation was pretty good but nothing spectacular. I found both Wolfe’s and the criminal’s reactions really weird.

I really didn’t enjoy the way women were portrayed in this book. It is not sexist or anything. But the characters of Alice Porter, Amy Wynn, Jane Ogilvy all feel a bit off in some way.

The character of Archie Goodwin provides a nice balance to Nero Wolfe. I enjoyed their banters.

The police are portrayed as totally incompetent and very, very uncooperative. I wonder if they are like that in all of the Nero Wolfe mysteries.

My first Nero Wolfe mystery was enjoyable. I may read more of them in the future. But I have not become a fan. Overall, Plot It Yourself is a good mystery but not wholly satisfying. show less

A fun episode in the Nero Wolfe series. I loved the tension between publisher and author and who has to take responsibility for plagiarism. I also loved when Wolfe went on a food strike because he made a mistake in the case. Of course, he redeemed himself in the end with a usual Stout plot twist.

Plot It Yourself is a fairly typical Nero Wolfe novel in many ways, one that starts with a case of plagiarism that turns fatal--and admittedly, if that surprises you, you haven't read much Nero Wolfe, or much of the detective genre it's a part of.

But for all the things this book has going against it, the fact is, the night I started reading it, I finished it, even though that took me well past the time when I was supposed to be asleep. Given the number of novels that take me several starts to finish them, or that get abandoned for an interminable time in the middle, that's a high honor.

A group of authors and publishers band together to employ Wolfe to stop a plagiarism scam that has plagued them in the past few years, but was not really understood until just recently. A fun read, if only for the constant, eternaly balance between emenity and need that exists between those who write and those who publish. Fun but not very deep.