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Triple Jeopardy
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The sixth collection of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novellas, published in 1952.In "Home to Roost," Benjamin and Pauline Rackell hire Wolfe to investigate the death of their nephew Arthur, poisoned with a cyanide capsule in his pillbox at a group dinner. While Arthur had vocally expressed Communist viewpoints, Pauline tells Wolfe he had confided that he was secretly working with the FBI to infiltrate the Communist Party. Investigating the five dinner guests, Wolfe resorts to a claim of bribery and a constant tail of one suspect to expose the murderer, putting his license at risk for bribing a suspect and hoping the tail pays off."The Cop-Killer" sees Carl and Tina Vardas, coat-checker and manicurist at Goldenrod's Barbershop, calling on Archie to help them flee New York; Carl and Tina are illegal immigrants, and a policeman came to the barbershop and started asking the employees questions, scaring them into flight. Archie visits the barbershop to find the policeman, Detective Jacob Wallen, stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, and the homicide department crowding the scene in search of the Vardases. Wallen had been investigating a hit-and-run the night before, and had taken the lead to the barbershop himself, hoping to score a promotion, only to end up dead. After Archie returns home and uses a trick to establish Carl and Tina's innocence, Wolfe is forced to take on the case, eventually making his own way to the barbershop for a haircut and a Summation Gathering.Lastly, "The Squirt and the Monkey" opens with Archie's trip to the home of Harry Koven, creator of the Dazzle Dan comic strip. Koven has hired Wolfe to find a gun that has been stolen from his drawer, intending to replace it with Archie's to get a reaction from the thief. However, that afternoon, Archie finds Koven's gun back in the drawer, and his own gun in the cage of Koven's monkey Rookaloo, next to the body of Adrian Getz. Although Archie spills the entire bag to the police, Koven tells a phony story about hiring Wolfe and Archie to consult on a Dazzle Dan arc where Dan opens a detective agency, implicating Archie as shooting Getz in a scuffle. Believing Koven's story, the police suspend Archie and Wolfe's licenses; Wolfe not only files a slander lawsuit against Koven, but brings the suspects to the brownstone in order to uncover the fraud - and the murderer.A Nero Wolfe Mystery adapted "The Cop-Killer" as their penultimate second-season episode. | |
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| Triple Jeopardy / int_1235f055 | type |
Dirty Coward | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_1235f055 | comment |
Dirty Coward: Harry Koven. Faced with a murder in his household, Koven spins a lie to the police, putting the blame for Getz's death on Archie. His wife Marcelle is not immune to this either, trying to pin the crime on Harry once Wolfe exposes her. | |
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Obstructive Bureaucrat | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_1f799027 | comment |
Obstructive Bureaucrat: Cramer and the police seem to take Harry Koven's side over Archie's in "The Squirt and the Monkey" at least partly out of spite, and almost deliberately refuse to even given them an inch of the benefit of the doubt. The resulting rancor results in Wolfe and Archie temporarily having their private investigator licenses suspended. Lampshaded at the end, when Cramer is shown up yet again; when he angrily demands why Wolfe didn't reveal what he knew earlier, Wolfe scathingly retorts that he had no motivation to, as Cramer had clearly closed his mind and was not going to listen to a word he had to say. | |
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Framing the Guilty Party | |
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Framing the Guilty Party: Played with in "The Squirt and the Monkey", in which Wolfe and Archie do manufacture evidence, but not against the guilty party (or at least, not the party guilty of murder, since the person actually is guilty of a lesser crime): They stage a recording of their parts of an earlier meeting with Harry Koven in which he originally hired them in order to break his lie to the police that has implicated Archie, thus convincing him that they can furnish the police with proof that he lied and obstructed justice. | |
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Compulsive Liar | |
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Compulsive Liar: Harry Koven, who not only tells a lie that gets Wolfe and Archie into trouble, but insists on continuing the lie to their faces even in a private meeting (albeit while surrounded by his entourage) as if it were actually the truth. Wolfe makes him eat it. | |
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Blatant Lies | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_40bb59d0 | comment |
Blatant Lies: Bad enough that Harry Koven sinks Wolfe and Archie into a whole heap of trouble by lying to the police about the circumstances in which the murder weapon made it into the house and fingering Archie for the shooting, but he even has the brass stones to brazenly continue the lie directly to Wolfe's face about something all three of them know to be true. Wolfe is incensed by this lack of respect for either himself or the basic truth, and promptly makes him eat it by completely blowing up Koven's life in The Summation: namely, that he knows and can prove that Koven does not write the strip that has made his name and fortune, and that his own wife murdered Getz. | |
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I Never Said It Was Poison | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_4aaffbd5 | comment |
I Never Said It Was Poison: Played with, in that it's less of a clincher because it relates more to motive than something which tangibly happened. Nevertheless, Wolfe is convinced of the murderer's guilt in "Home to Roost" in part because they are far too insistent on a particular point which they otherwise couldn't possibly know for sure unless they were the murderer. Specifically, Pauline Rackell will tell anyone who will listen that her nephew had told her he was an undercover FBI agent and so he had to have been murdered by a secret communist because they feared he had uncovered their secret activities. Since it's a rather flimsy claim of her nephew's to begin with no evidence to support it, meaning she has no real reason to believe it was the truth, and it's also a rather convoluted claim for someone to otherwise just come up with for no reason, it leads Wolfe to surmise that the reason she is so convinced this must be the truth is because she is the secret communist and this is her motive for murdering her nephew. | |
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Police Are Useless | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_59907e4f | comment |
Police Are Useless: As noted under Obstructive Bureaucrat, in "The Squirt and the Monkey" Cramer and the police seem to go out of their way to refuse to consider that Archie and Wolfe might be telling the truth and that Harry Koven might be lying. Both Cramer and Stebbins appear to quickly realise they've screwed the pooch, however, and it's lampshaded during The Summation, which Wolfe partially devotes to a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Cramer (who is secretly listening in). He dryly points out that if Cramer had just considered for a moment that Archie and Wolfe might be telling the truth instead of stubbornly digging his heels in, he could have almost certainly quickly cleared things up without any involvement (and thus humiliation) from Wolfe whatsoever. | |
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The Alcoholic | |
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The Alcoholic: It's heavily suggested that Harry Koven has a severe drinking problem because he needs plenty of Dutch courage to overcome his crippling cowardice. | |
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Sarcastic Confession | |
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Sarcastic Confession: Both Archie and Wolfe exploit this in "The Cop Killer" by freely admitting that they have Carl and Tina, illegal immigrants suspected of murdering a police officer, hidden away in their house, but in such a way that none of the cops they're telling this to will ever take them seriously. | |
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Golden Mean Fallacy | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_cf16cfa9 | comment |
Golden Mean Fallacy: In "The Squirt and the Monkey", after Wolfe launches a million-dollar lawsuit against Harry Korven for slandering him and damaging his ability to earn a living, Korven's publicist shows up and snottily informs Wolfe that Korven intends to launch a countersuit. While things are initially heated, she eventually calms down and tries to demonstrate judiciousness by pointing out that, since the two suits will ultimately cancel each other out, it would surely be fair and reasonable if they just both agreed to drop their claims against each other. Wolfe dryly retorts that it wouldn't be particularly fair or reasonable for him, since he is actually the wronged party and his suit has merit, while Korven's is just a groundless kneejerk counter-reaction intended to intimidate Wolfe into backing down. | |
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| Triple Jeopardy / int_e5421161 | type |
Expy | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_e5421161 | comment |
Expy: Dazzle Dan, the comic strip at the center of "The Squirt and the Monkey", appears to be a gag-a-day strip similar in nature to Barney Google or Myrtle. While not explored in any great depth, it's hinted that the briefly-mentioned Pleistocene Patty, which Wolfe suggests that Archie prefers, is an on-going adventure strip featuring a scantily-clad "jungle queen" along the lines of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. | |
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Writer on Board | |
| Triple Jeopardy / int_e88e8a8f | comment |
Writer on Board: "Home to Roost" is not subtle either about Rex Stout's low opinion of the international communist movement or his equal disdain for McCarthyism. | |
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished | |
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Wolfe exposes Jake Wallen's murderer as his preferred barber. | |
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Evil Is Petty | |
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Evil Is Petty: The murderer in "The Squirt and the Monkey"; while Wolfe doesn't go to as far as to say that the murderer could have gotten away with it otherwise, he does note that this trope was a vital factor in his figuring it. Marcelle opening the window of the room the monkey was in, knowing it was sensitive to cold and a slight chill would kill it, was an act of pure spite that was completely unnecessary to achieve her broader goals, and only she had sufficient rancor towards the monkey to bother doing so. | |
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