Where There's A Will (novel) - Reviews and Commentary

Reviews and Commentary

• Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor Hertig, A Catalogue of Crime — Endless talk over how to keep a kept woman from inheriting millions which only she thinks have been left her, and then — after deceased is shown to have been murdered — more talk about who did it. Wolfe spots the criminal by looking closely at six small photographs (poorly reproduced in the book) and applying his knowledge of floriculture."
• Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors — While was on, Stout, who had organized the Writers' War Board and became its chairman, was placed on something called the "General Watch List." Hoover himself, according to a heavily censored page marked Confidential, requested Byron Price, director of Censorship, Federal Trade Commission Building, Washington, to include Rex Stout of Brewster, New York, on "General Watch List No. 49."
  The FBI watched what Stout wrote and somehow turned his fiction into suspicious fact. Because, for example, of a story that appeared in the May 1940 issue of American Magazine called "Sisters in Trouble," he was labeled what might be called "prematurely anti-Nazi." A highly imaginative document from Los Angeles (correspondent's name censored) to the FBI's Communications Division in Washington claimed that the story was "either a deliberate attempt to convey a meaning other than the solution of a mystery story — or else the whole thing is full of coincidences. Note the almost exclusive German cast of characters, particularly Fritz Brenner. Could Fritz refer to the German Consul in San Francisco, and could Brenner have any reference to the Brenner pass? Could 'Nero' refer to Rome by any chance? While for the purposes of the story, April, May and June are the names of three sisters, couldn't it also mean that for three months, or until July, somebody's back was to the door — maybe the door to the Balkans or the Mediterranean?"
  When it served its purposes, agents of the FBI could turn into literary critics, finding, however ludicrous, damning symbols in fiction.