Three at Wolfe's Door

Three at Wolfe's Door is another collection of novellas by Rex Stout featuring the great detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin. In "Poison a la Carte," Wolfe agrees to lend his Swiss cook Fritz to a group of gourmands for a special meal, provided he and Archie are invited too; when one of the guests ends up poisoned, Wolfe and Archie must determine whom of the 12 young women hired as wait staff did the evil deed in order to clear Fritz's name. "Method Three for Murder" follows Archie, having quit his job once again, as he takes on a case on his own, although with the help of Nero Wolfe: a young woman arrives at the brownstone in a taxicab in which a dead woman is found. Who the woman is, what her relationship to the show more client was and how she ended up dead in the cab are the questions to be answered here. Finally, in "The Rodeo Murder," a lecherous promoter of rodeos is found lassooed and dead in an area of Lily Rowan's penthouse home, where Archie is a guest at a party held for a group of rodeo performers who are in town for a show; when Archie learns that just about everybody in the house at the time has a motive to do away with the promoter, he and Wolfe start investigating, a process not helped by the frequent lying of one of the suspects.... As always, these are very entertaining, if rather more slight than the novels of the series are. But it's always a treat to spend some time once again with the hefty Wolfe and sardonic Archie, not to mention Fritz, Saul Panzer and the rest of the crew, so recommended! show less

This is a collection of three Nero Wolfe short stories--Poison a la Carte, Method Three for Murder, and The Rodeo Murder--written in the late 1950s.

Always allowing for the time period in which these were written, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin hold up well; they are enough idiosyncratic that they continue to entertain more than 50 years later. The same can’t be said for some of the plots.

The Rodeo Murder is terrible. Cowpokes in The Big City and gettin’ hitched an’ all that sort of pseudo-folksy/Western talk that mercifully died an unremarked death years later. Spunky cowgals an’ all that. The other two are not so bad, really.

But all three suffer, in my opinion, from being short stories rather than books, even short books. show more There’s no space to develop any plot or to show off Wolfe and Goodwin to really good advantage. The plots have to be uncovered too quickly within the space allowed, and Archie and Nero just don’t have time to strut their stuff.

For die-hard Nero Wolfe fans who have read everything else and need their fix. show less

Enjoyable, but not up to the usual standards - only one of the three really was satisfying for me, "Method Three for Murder", wherein the story began with a woman driving up in a cab that was carrying a dead body.

Three great short stories, including one that details the most extensive split between Wolfe and Archie that I've ever seen. Great stuff.

This entry in the Nero Wolfe series contains 3 novellas:

Poison a la Carte
Method Three for Murder
The Rodeo Murder

Of these 3, I liked the first one best (because it involved Fritz's cooking) though I think that the second one had the best mystery plot.

3.5*

This entry in the Nero Wolfe series contains 3 novellas:

Poison a la Carte
Method Three for Murder
The Rodeo Murder

Of these 3, I liked the first one best (because it involved Fritz's cooking) though I think that the second one had the best mystery plot.

I got this from the library, onto my Kindle (I love the 21st century so much!)
I remember liking Nero Wolfe mysteries better. I like the characters, but the mystery? eh. x 3