Wolfe at the door

The last Rex Stout "Nero Wolfe" book in our collection arrived yesterday. I've now acquired 50 or so of these books for Margaret; it's taken me about three years. This last one, "Triple Jeopardy", has been out of print for a while. The only one I didn't get her was "Corsage", which as a novella that appears to have had only short numbered print runs. The cheapest copy I found on line was $200 and it was apparently adapted into one of his later novels. A few years ago I nearly completed my friend Joanne's Nero Wolfe collection when she gave me a list of 17 she was missing and I found 15 of them. I then lost the list and so no longer know which two she was missing. The tv show they made from these books was fantastic and we were very sad when it was discontinued. It starred Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin and the rest of the cast was an ensemble with the same actors playing different roles each week. This way, you could not guess who was the criminal based upon the actor; one week someone might be the killer, the next s/he might be the victim or the witness. Really well acted and designed. It's available on dvd, the library has both seasons although at least on of the season one discs was scratched. When you read the books after seeing a few episodes of the show, you can really hear their voices as you read. These are the only mystery novels I've ever read, having read my first ones about two years ago when I was travelling to Victoria and ran out of other reading materials.