Too Many Women by Rex Stout

Alright, once again, picking up after a pointless break in a surely vain attempt to catch up with my little project, this time looking at the classic, Too Many Women. Like The Silent Speaker, this one gets re-read more than others in my collection, and is still fun to read every time.

The president of the large engineering supply corporation, Naylor-Kerr, comes to Wolfe with an interesting problem. During a recent survey of departments about employee turn-over, an employee of the company is listed as "murdered." Which is a pretty good reason to no longer come to work, but the idea that one of their employees has been murdered (particularly when the police think he was just a victim of a hit-and-run) is a bit too scandalous for such a fine and upstanding company, and could Mr. Wolfe please rid them of such rumors? Wolfe takes the case, mostly to get Archie out of the office for awhile--they're getting on each other's nerves and could use some space. So Archie poses as a personnel consultant and goes undercover.

The first thing Archie notices on his arrival at the offices is that there are a whole lotta women (clerical staff, on the whole) working at this company (see quotation below), enough to ensure that he's got plenty of incentive to stick around and do a thorough investigation. He's not there too long before he begins to find evidence that the murder accusation might be well founded after all--and before you know it, there's another body (shock!). The first victim was some sort of lothario, who didn't like to go far for his pray, so the suspect list is pretty large. Archie bounces around from attractive female suspect to attractive female suspect, questioning, wining and dining, and all other sorts of verbs, until his boss puts all the pieces together.

This is a breezy novel with plenty to recommend it in matters of style, humor, fun characters and plot quirks. Whether it be the petty bickering between the two stars, the patter between Archie and the women, or Archie having to put up with one individual's health food nuttiness; the interplay between various characters is definitely more than enough to draw the reader in.

I can't help but note, each time I read this, how much books like this disprove many of the assumptions we have about this time period--particularly those propogated by groups wanting to imagine the mid-20^th century as some sort of moral oasis

I could reproduce pages and pages of Archie's descriptions of the staff of Kerr-Naylor to give Stout a chance to strut his stuff, but will leave them to their proper context, just listing two here for a sample:

     ...as far as space went, it was a room about the size of the Yankee Stadium, with hundreds of desks and girls at them. Along each side of that area, the entire length, was a series of partitioned offices, with some of the doors closed and some open. No stock of anything was in sight anywhere.
     One good glance and I liked the job. The girls. All right there, all being paid to stay right there, and me being paid to move freely about and converse with anyone whomever, which was down in black and white. Probably after I had been there a couple of years I would find that close-ups revealed inferior individual specimens, Grade B or lower in age, contours, skin quality, voice, or level of intellect, but from where I stood at nine-fifty-two Wednesday morning it was enough to take your breath away. At least half a thousand of them, and the general and overwhelming impression was of--clean, young, healthy, friendly, spirited, beautiful and ready. I stood and filled my eyes, trying to look detached. It was an ocean of opportunity.

She was not at all spectacular...but there were two things about her that hit you at a glance. You got the instant impression that there was something beautiful about her that no one but you would understand and no one but you could help her out of. If that sounds too complicated for a two-second-take, okay, I was there and I remember it distinctly.