I wish I had, as Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin does, the ability, when I go to bed, of laying my head on the pillow and immediately falling asleep, no matter how much stress I’m under. It’s a gift. Archie must live a blameless life. Although you might wonder, given his behavior here…

This book is so unlike Rex Stout’s other books. Nero Wolfe leaves his brownstone on 35th Street in the middle of the night, alone, without telling anyone. He hands Fritz, his chef and majordomo, off to his good friend Marco Vukcic to work in his restaurant. He ships his gardener, Theodore, and his vast collection of prized orchids to his rival orchidist on Long Island. He cuts Archie off with a terse note that basically says, Goodbye and Do As You See Fit. He disappears completely.

Why would he do such a thing?

It’s a puzzle to even keep Archie up at night.

But does Archie lie in bed wondering what the heck is going on? No.

Archie wraps up a few last cases that Wolfe had percolating, then hangs out a shingle and starts his own detective agency. The gigs he takes on are nothing to write home about, compared with the work he did for Wolfe, but they keep him in milk and sandwiches.

No one can believe that Archie doesn’t know where Wolfe is.

Not the Westchester DA who is wondering why Archie was on the scene when Wolfe’s latest client was killed in the night; he doesn’t buy Archie’s story of being blamelessly in bed in her brother’s on-site guesthouse, until awoken by the cries of her attack-trained Doberman who, although also stabbed, managed to drag herself to the door of the brother, who raised and cared for the dogs.

Not Inspector Cramer, who has come to warn Archie of the danger of tangling with the mobster that he and Wolfe had accidentally stumbled into investigating – a mobster who had sent a message to Wolfe the last time their paths had crossed, by sending him a dozen roses and a Fer-de-lance. Say it with snakes!

But Wolfe had sworn, after that last entanglement with the mobster, that if their paths crossed again, one of them would have to go. Is that what Wolfe has done? Finally retired to the villa he keeps in… Egypt, was it?

Archie has no idea. And now the mobster is trying to recruit him to his syndicate, sending his latest right-hand henchman, a skinny guy with a hideous mug and way too much skin around his jowls, to make sure Archie doesn’t say no. It seems like everyone from their late client’s husband to politicians to the police and the judicial system are in this mobster’s pay, and there’s no way to fight city hall.

So Archie says Yes.

Yep, completely unlike any other Rex Stout book.

Nero Wolfe mysteries are an enjoyable blend of the familiar and the unknown. For the familiar, there are Fritz, Theodore, Archie, Marco, Cramer, Lily Rowan, and assorted other regulars who appear repeatedly in the books; the brownstone with Wolfe’s comfortable office, with his big desk placed at one end and Archie’s off to the side next to the safe, a picture camouflaging the peep hole that Archie and Wolfe sometimes use to spy through when they’ve set a trap, the kitchen with the backdoor to the yard, the orchid rooms in the greenhouse on the roof; the streets of New York, the starlight lounge where Archie and Lily dance to live music, the DA’s office where Archie often finds himself when the cops want to try to shake facts loose from him; and sometimes Westchester or Long Island, huge tracts of wooded land and vast lawns, punctuated occasionally by a quaint small town, the palatial home of someone with unimaginable wealth, or a Podunk police station with a single cell just Archie’s size.¹

The unfamiliar comes through the clients and their stories, the problems they need Wolfe to solve, and the unusual things that happen when he starts to unravel the truth behind what is really happening and has to figure out how to wriggle out of whatever trap is triggered by his investigation. They really keep you guessing. Sometimes, even though I’ve read them all a million times, Stout still fools me.

It reminds me a little of work. Although the people I work with every day are the same characters I have grown to know and love, and the systems that we use are too familiar to me, the problems or little mysteries that people bring me are different every week. And sometimes solving the problem isn’t as simple as it would seem when colleagues first tell me their story; sometimes, when you dig a little, the obvious answer isn’t really going to solve the problem.

It’s what I call, Unintended consequences of a successful implementation. You figure out what you need to do, you marshal the resources, put the plan into motion, and execute successfully. And then discover that you didn’t do enough homework up front, and what you built – while it may solve your problem – created a new problem downstream.² Perhaps you launched a system that would make it easier for you to do your job; not realizing that the new system breaks a process in the department that relies on your work output. It can be challenging when executives who are demanding that you fix the problem are pressuring you to act quickly, but you need to move slow at the start of the process, to understand and mitigate the risk to downstream processes.

It’s enough to wake you up at 3 am, stress whispering in your ear.

And then you think about Archie Goodwin, envy him his good night’s sleep, and crawl out of bed to fetch a little Nero Wolfe.

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1. When I first moved to NYC, a girl I went to school with who was from Long Island wore a letterman’s jacket with Hicksville emblazoned across the back shoulders. I thought it was a cynical joke and laughed. She quickly made it very clear that there was a real town called Hicksville, and that she proud to have gone to high school there. Oops. ↩︎
2. It’s why I went into Change Management. I kept seeing projects march successfully through every milestone and then blow up when launched because people refused to use them, or were taken by surprise and were untrained, or needed to understand how these changes would benefit them. At best these projects were implemented and then just sat there, unused, until they faded from memory. At worst, the payroll system blew up two weeks before Christmas, distracting the sales team from selling during peak sales season. (Say that 10 times fast.) ↩︎