- Rex Stout
- 18+
THERE WAS TROUBLE BREWING….
“They’re ‘The Fifteen Masters.’ These babies are famous. One of them cooks sausages that people fight duels over. They meet every five years on the home grounds of the oldest one of their number. Nero Wolfe is the guest of honor. They’ll do a lot of cooking and eating and drinking, and tell each other a lot of lies, and elect three new members, and listen to Nero Wolfe make a speech—and oh yeah, one of ’em’s going to get killed.”
Bantam Crime Line Books offer the finest in classic and modern American mysteries. Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed.
Rex Stout
The Black Mountain
Broken Vase
Death of a Dude
Death Times Three
Fer-de-Lance
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Plot It Yourself
The Rubber Band
Some Buried Caesar
Three for the Chair
Too Many Cooks
Max Allan Collins
The Dark City
Bullet Proof
A. E. Maxwell
Just Another Day in Paradise
Gatsby’s Vineyard
The Frog and the Scorpion
Just Enough Light to Kill
Loren Estleman
Peeper
Dick Lupoff
The Comic Book Killer
Randy Russell
Hot Wire
V. S. Anderson
Blood Lies
King of the Roses
William Murray
When the Fat Man Sings
The King of the Nightcap
Eugene Izzi
King of the Hustlers
The Prime Roll
Gloria Dank
Friends Till the End
Going Out in Style
Jeffery Deaver
Manhattan Is My Beat
Movie Star
Robert Goldsborough
Murder in E Minor
Death on Deadline
The Bloodied Ivy
The Last Coincidence
Sue Grafton
“A” Is for Alibi
“B” Is for Burglar
“C” Is for Corpse
“D” Is for Deadbeat
“E” Is for Evidence
“F” Is for Fugitive
David Lindsey
In the Lake of the Moon
Carolyn G. Hart
Design for Murder
Death on Demand
Something Wicked
Honeymoon with Murder
A Little Class on Murder
Annette Meyers
The Big Killing
Rob Kantner
Dirty Work
The Back-Door Man
Hell’s Only Half Full
Robert Crais
The Monkey’s Raincoat
Stalking the Angel
Keith Peterson
The Trapdoor
There Fell a Shadow
The Rain
Rough Justice
David Handler
The Man Who Died Laughing
The Man Who Lived by Night
Jerry Oster
Club Dead
Internal Affairs
Contents
Other Books by This Publisher
Title Page
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
About the Author
Copyright
FOREWORD
I USED as few French and miscellaneous fancy words as possible in writing up this stunt of Nero Wolfe’s but I couldn’t keep them out altogether, on account of the kind of people involved. I am not responsible for the spelling, so don’t write me about mistakes. Wolfe refused to help me out on it, and I had to go to the Heinemann School of Languages and pay a professor 30 bucks to go over it and fix it up. In most cases, during these events, when anyone said anything which for me was only a noise, I have either let it lay—when it wasn’t vital—or managed somehow to get the rough idea in the American language.
ARCHIE GOODWIN
1
WALKING up and down the platform alongside the train in the Pennsylvania Station, having wiped the sweat from my brow, I lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit; after what I had just gone through. But as I was drawing in the third puff I was stopped by a tapping on a window I was passing, and, leaning to peer through the glass, I was confronted by a desperate glare from Nero Wolfe, from his seat in the bedroom which we had engaged in one of the new-style pullmans, where I had at last got him deposited intact. He shouted at me through the closed window:
“Archie! Confound you! Get in here! They’re going to start the train! You have the tickets!”
I yelled back at him, “You said it was too close to smoke in there! It’s only 9:32! I’ve decided not to go! Pleasant dreams!”
I sauntered on. Tickets my eye. It wasn’t tickets that bothered him; he was frantic with fear because he was alone on the train and it might begin to move. He hated things that moved, and was fond of arguing that nine times out of ten the places that people were on their way to were no improvement whatever on those they were coming from. But by gum I had got him to the station twenty minutes ahead of time, notwithstanding such items as three bags and two suitcases and two overcoats for a four days’ absence in the month of April, Fritz Brenner standing on the stoop with tears in his eyes as we left the house, Theodore Horstmann running out, after we had got Wolfe packed in the sedan, to ask a few dozen more questions about the orchids, and even tough little Saul Panzer, after dumping us at the station, choking off a tremolo as he told Wolfe goodbye. You might have thought we were bound for the stratosphere to shine up the moon and pick wild stars.