- Title: Too Many Cooks
- wiki: link
Wayback Wednesday takes us back to another mystery with New York’s famous detective Nero Wolfe. Initially released in six issues of The American Magazine, which coincided with a 12-city tour across the Northeast and Midwest, Too Many Cooks was then collected and published for the first time in 1938. The fifth of Rex Stout’s novels has some peculiarities which make it standout of the series. First, not a single scene of the entire story takes place within the confines of the New York City brownstone. Second, Wolfe is shot over the course of events forcing him to solve a crime he had already decided to ignore.
Taking place in a West Virginia resort, Nero Wolfe is the honored guest at the rare meeting of The Fifteen Masters, or Les Quinze Maîtres, a collection of the greatest chefs on the planet. What should be a week of food and celebration turns rotten however when the most despised of the number turns up dead and the prime suspect turns out the be the chef Wolfe meets on the train on the way to the proceedings who he hopes to garner favor from and whose daughter catches Archie’s eye.
Determined to keep to a schedule and leave for New York as soon as the festivities are done, Wolfe refuses payment to solve the case. However, he does work to free the cook by supplying enough evidence to the local police to look elsewhere. Prepared to read his speech at the farewell dinner and return to New York, however, Wolfe is shot and while he still makes his train on time he publicly solves the crime as well.
Wolfe’s keen interest in food is a major theme in the book as the various members of the group prove to be the most likely suspects in the case that he stitches together from an offhand comment, eye-witness testimony from the resort’s Black servers (who notably receive better treatment from the more enlightened Wolfe than from Archie whose racist blurbs in that chapter may have been common for the time but are a bit off-putting eight decades later), the fact of a radio being played, and a considerable amount of mental energy. For the publicity tour, a small collection of the recipes discussed in the novel was put together by the publisher as well.