Talk:The Black Mountain

by Rex Stout (1954)

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‘Warning’

A lot of the talk I report was in languages I am not on speaking terms with [...]

--Faterson

Nero Wolfe hears of Marko Vukcic's death in chapter 1, page 2 <ref>Page references follow the 1955 Bantam Books edition, in which the novel is 143 pages long.</ref>

¶  I would have preferred to go on talking, but had to stop to clear my throat. Wolfe had put down his knife and fork, quietly and properly, on his plate. His eyes were levelled at me, but he wasn’t scowling. A corner of his mouth twitched, and after a moment twitched again. To stop it he compressed his lips.<ref>This description is at odds with what Archie Goodwin claims, five years later (1959) in chapter 13 of Plot It Yourself, happened when Wolfe heard of Marko's death. Credit goes to our contributor Adonis Guilfoyle for pointing out the inconsistency. [Faterson]</ref>  ¶

“Also I am an accountant, an amanuensis, and a cocklebur. Eight to five you never heard the word amanuensis and you never saw a cocklebur.”

Wolfe on the move

Since that was the first time to my knowledge that he had ever started investigating a murder by a personal visit to the scene of the crime – not counting the occasions when he had been jerked loose by some other impulse, such as saving my life – I was curious to see how he would proceed. It was a chance he had seldom had.

Wolfe and Archie

“Saul will smell it. He’ll know.”

“Let him. He won’t know where she is, and even if he did, no matter. Who is more trustworthy, Saul or you?”

“I would say Saul. I have to watch myself pretty close.”