The First Rex Stout Omnibus: Featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin: " The Doorbell Rang " , " The Second Confession " and " More Deaths Than One "

By Rex Stout

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140040323
• ISBN13: 9780140040326
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

great books, odd publication order

I love Rex Stout. Archie and Nero had to be two of the most obnoxious detectives in the history of detective fiction. Between Nero's eating and Archie's remarks regarding women past their sell-by date, I really like these guys. When I was a young teenager first reading these books, I loved Archie and his hard-boiled ways with women. Now that I'm approaching (or even in) middle age, I can completely get behind Nero using his genius to fund reading and eating. First a note about the omnibus edition itself. This is a very strange selection of Wolfe novels, and they are bound in a very strange order. First of all, the omnibus publishes the books in an order opposite to the order in which they were published. So, The Doorbell Rang (the first book in the omnibus) was published in 1965; The Second Confession was published in 1949; More Deaths Than One (ISBN: 0727800744) was published in 1948 (the US title was And Be a Villain-- this omnibus was published in the UK). Publishing them in reverse order wouldn't be so bad if the books were totally independent of each other in terms of plot. Unfortunately, that's not true. Second Confession and More Deaths than One are two out of the three Wolfe books that feature Arnold Zeck-- something like Wolfe's ultimate nemesis. It's really just wrong to read them out of order, since they (at least loosely) refer to each other. So if you find yourself with this particular omnibus edition, do yourself a favor and read the novels from back to front. Trust me. You'll thank me later. Stout is highly recommended in general. If you like intelligent mysteries and you haven't read any of the Wolfe books before then you would be in for a treat with any collection of his work. I haven't reviewed the individual books here, but have put those reviews on the separate product pages. The four star rating refers to the weird publication order and not the novels themselves-- they're all five star.