GAMBIT

Rating:
Summary: Stout is consistently excellent
Review: A little stronger of a mystery this time. I would never excel as a solver of locked room mysteries, because I tend to enjoy the writing too much (when it is good) than I cultivate an ability to cull facts. Here Stout gives you plenty of clues and hints towards the solution of the murder, almost literally telling you how it was committed in the first 50 pages. I missed it completely. Another excellent Nero Wolfe novel.

Rating:
Summary: Death by Cocoa
Review: A Review by Alex

Jerin is playing the usual twelve players with messengers running in a room with Jerin alone telling the layouts of each board. A man had come in with some hot chocolate for Jerin. The man's name was Blount. Later that night, Jerin dies and Blount is thrown in jail because they all think he did it. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin have to solve the mystery and see to it that Blount is innocent. The only way they can solve it is the use of his daughter, Sally.

I really love and enjoy the fact that this book makes me think and makes it so I use my brain a little. It is a mystery, so therefore I have to be smarter than Archie. I was always trying to figure out if it is someone or not and when I read to find out it's not one person I try to guess who it could be. This book also gave me suspense, I got so excited when they were about to do questioning with someone like Sally or the mother. I always find out something new and clues of the killer. This book was also a perfect read when it came to pages, only 137 pages and the text was a bit on the small side but still made it a perfect size. Not too quick and not too long. This book always gave me a surprise.

This is a great mystery for those who love to use their brain figuring things out. Gambit is a really exciting book to discover new suspects and an unexpected murderer. You will dive into the book and not want to put in down caused by the eagerness to read about who did it and why.

Rating:
Summary: Death by Cocoa
Review: The dictionary defines "gambit" as a stratagem. In chessplay it is a particular type of stratagem in which a piece is sacrificed in order to gain an advantage. The victim in this story is a chessmaster who agrees to do a simultaneous blindfold exhibition for the "Gambit Club" a chess club for rich snobs. In a blindfold simul, the master plays several opponents without looking at any of the boards. It is usually accomplished by the master sitting with his back to the array of boards. In this exhibition, the master sat in a different room sipping cocoa while four messengers brought the moves to him from his twelve opponents. One of the opponents actually played a counter gambit.

When the master keels over dead from arsenic poisoning, the club member who brought him the cocoa becomes the prime suspect. Wolfe refuses to believe that the cocoa deliverer committed the murder because he will have to return the $22,000.00 retainer paid him by the suspect's daughter if the suspect actually proves to be guilty.

Wolfe decides that the only way the suspect could be innocent would be if one of the messengers had sacrificed the master as a gambit to incriminate the suspect. But he lacks one essential fact to be able to prove his case.

Wolfe devises a gambit to get that fact, but someone sacrifices the witness who can give it to him. He then decides that he can find the true killer in the first murder by the stratagem of solving the more easily investigated second murder.

Then Wolfe gets the fact which cost the second victim his life, and he decides that his only hope to solve either murder is to devise a gambit which sacrifices his confidential assistant, Archie Goodwin.

Wolfe calls all the suspects together, announces he has fired Archie for incompetence, and then . . . .

Rating:
Summary: A Gamut of Gambits
Review: The dictionary defines "gambit" as a stratagem. In chessplay it is a particular type of stratagem in which a piece is sacrificed in order to gain an advantage. The victim in this story is a chessmaster who agrees to do a simultaneous blindfold exhibition for the "Gambit Club" a chess club for rich snobs. In a blindfold simul, the master plays several opponents without looking at any of the boards. It is usually accomplished by the master sitting with his back to the array of boards. In this exhibition, the master sat in a different room sipping cocoa while four messengers brought the moves to him from his twelve opponents. One of the opponents actually played a counter gambit.

When the master keels over dead from arsenic poisoning, the club member who brought him the cocoa becomes the prime suspect. Wolfe refuses to believe that the cocoa deliverer committed the murder because he will have to return the $22,000.00 retainer paid him by the suspect's daughter if the suspect actually proves to be guilty.

Wolfe decides that the only way the suspect could be innocent would be if one of the messengers had sacrificed the master as a gambit to incriminate the suspect. But he lacks one essential fact to be able to prove his case.

Wolfe devises a gambit to get that fact, but someone sacrifices the witness who can give it to him. He then decides that he can find the true killer in the first murder by the stratagem of solving the more easily investigated second murder.

Then Wolfe gets the fact which cost the second victim his life, and he decides that his only hope to solve either murder is to devise a gambit which sacrifices his confidential assistant, Archie Goodwin.

Wolfe calls all the suspects together, announces he has fired Archie for incompetence, and then . . . .

Rating:
Summary: Mix a 12-game blindfold simul, hot chocolate, and arsenic
Review: This book was my introduction to Nero Wolfe, so I, like his new client Sally Blount, first encountered him not in his office, but in the front room, feeding Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged (3rd edition) to the fire for the crime of threatening the integrity of the English language. Archie says that's nothing - Wolfe once burned a cookbook for a bad suggestion - and it's material only because Wolfe's mental processes are muddled, what with the open fire and his anger.

Sally brought $22,000 in cash to engage Wolfe to investigate the murder of Paul Jerin, who was poisoned while playing 12 simultaneous blindfold chess games at the Gambit club. Sally's father, Matthew, wanted Jerin's nose rubbed in the dirt after Jerin creamed him (Jerin's giving odds of a rook in their last game made it even worse), and not only arranged the blindfold match, but provided the hot chocolate that appears to have been the vehicle for the arsenic, so now Matthew's in jail. Sally doesn't trust her father's lawyer, Dan Kalmus, to handle a criminal case in which the husband of Anna Blount is on trial for his life, but she couldn't persuade him or her father to face facts and hire Wolfe, so she's come to do it herself.

After hearing everything that Matthew is known to have done with regard to carrying chocolate and clean cups that evening, Wolfe states that either Blount's "an unexampled jackass, or he is innocent." Sally wins points for being very frank with Wolfe, plus saying that he's a wizard, and bringing a big wad of cash, so Wolfe takes the case.

Unfortunately, the case really *needs* a wizard: they soon discover that only a handful of people had an opportunity to poison Jerin's hot chocolate, and of that handful, only Blount even knew Jerin, let alone might have had a motive. So Wolfe takes the position that Jerin's death was itself a gambit: the early sacrifice of a piece (Jerin) to gain an advantage (the removal of Matthew Blount), and that it's not Jerin's murder, but the planned judicial murder of Blount that he needs to investigate.

Apart from the lovely opening scene, this book is distinguished by what Archie considers to be one of the best charades Wolfe has ever staged (Archie pretends to have been fired, so Wolfe and Saul have a field day play-acting as he watches through the waterfall peephole). It's also the only case I remember in which Archie reached the answer before Wolfe did (granted, because he got the crucial piece of evidence first).

Rating:
Summary: Best of Wolfe
Review: This is one of the very best Wolfes; I'd put it in my top three with Murder by the Book and Too Many Clients. The plot is offbeat but original and you'll do well to guess the solution before it's half given away. Notable for being the only time I can remember when Archie knows the killer's identity before Wolfe.