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Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
Reader Reviews Wolfe Stands the Test of Time, August 12, 2002 Reviewer: curtcow from Short Hills, NJ USA I'm not sure I'd tale the time to sit down to read Stout's old classics, but Michael Prichard's audiobook narration captures both Archie Goodwin and his rotund boss in a way that makes a long summer car trip seem a lot shorter. Tom Pratt, who owns a bunch of fast food restaurants circa 1938, buys Hickory Caesar Grindon, a champion sire of prized Guernsey cows, for $45,000. The Osgoods, Fred and his children Clyde and Nancy, old money riding out the Great Depression on thousands of family owned acres around Crowfield, NY, want to stop the sale to Pratt who intends to barbecue Caesar. Pratt's niece Carolyn tells Archie of a vamp named Lily Rowan, who destroyed Clyde Osgood and has her brother Jimmy in mind for her next conquest. Lily, a precocious presumably promiscuous fixture in future stories, is fascinated by Archie, her "Escamillo" whom she is meeting for the first time. Clyde is found dead in the pasture with Hickory Caesar standing over him. Wolfe's only there because Archie ran his car into a ditch on the way to an orchid exposition, but he decides to stay on to prove the bull didn't kill Clyde. He finds a letter telling of a debt owed to Bronson, a mysterious man of questionable character who came to Crowfield with Clyde. The next day Bronson is found dead in a barn stall with a pitchfork through his chest, a stall Archie was in the day before. Police Captain Barrow believes Archie is holding out, which he is, arrests him as a material witness to murder and throws him in the county jail. A fun sidebar develops when Archie meets Basil, a con man who's mastered a game with three spoons and a pea. Basil shows Archie how to get things done in the lockup, and within a day Archie is organizing the inmates in the Crowfield County Prisoner's Union. Wolfe appears in DA Waddell's office in his "customary unhurried waddle" and browbeats him to release Archie with the notion that he needs him to solve the crimes the DA and Capt. Barrow cannot. They do, of course, and the solution seems so obvious once Wolfe ties together all the facts he saw that others missed. Isn't that what Nero Wolfe is all about? --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition
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