Plot Introduction
She was staring up at me. "He's burning up a dictionary?"
"Right. That's nothing. Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup."
— Archie, explaining Wolfe's reaction to a dictionary that allows the use of "imply" in place of "infer," in Gambit, chapter 1.
A chess prodigy is poisoned during a club tournament, and the police arrest the member who served the victim hot chocolate. Wolfe is hired to exonerate the suspect, but finds that no one else has either an adequate motive or the requisite opportunity.
Gambit employs three distinctive plot elements found in other Wolfe stories. The means by which poison is administered is very similar to the means used in "Cordially Invited to Meet Death." A tape recording is made in an Italian restaurant, one which also appears in "Poison à la Carte"; and the part that a gambit plays in a murder echoes "Method Three for Murder."
Read more about this topic: Gambit (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or introduction:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“We used chamber-pots a good deal.... My mother ... loved to repeat: “When did the queen reign over China?” This whimsical and harmless scatological pun was my first introduction to the wonderful world of verbal transformations, and also a first perception that a joke need not be funny to give pleasure.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)