Talk:The League of Frightened Men
Chapter 1, page 2 (Bantam, 1993)
Wolfe once asked me why the devil I ever pretended to read a book, and I told him for cultural reasons, and he said I might as well forgo the pains, that culture was like money, it comes easiest to those who need it least.
Chapter 2, page 18
‘As you know, the book came. I read it last night.’
‘Why did you read it?’
‘Don’t badger me. I read it because it was a book.’
Chapter 3, page 22
I’m funny about women. I’ve seen dozens of them I wouldn’t mind marrying, but I’ve never been pulled so hard I lost my balance. [...] When I meet a new one there’s no doubt that I’m interested and I’m fully alive to all the possibilities, and I’ve never dodged the issue as far as I can tell, but I never seem to get infatuated. For instance, take the women I meet in my line of business – that is, Nero Wolfe’s business. I never run into one, provided she’s not just an item for the cleaners, without letting my eyes do the best they can for my judgement, and more than that, it puts a tickle in my blood. I can feel the nudge on the accelerator. But then of course the business gets started, whatever it may happen to be, and I guess the trouble is I’m too conscientious. I love to do a good job more than anything else I can think of, and I suppose that’s what shorts the line.
Chapter 3, page 23
If worry about her uncle was eating her, and I suppose it was, she was following what Wolfe called the Anglo-Saxon theory of the treatment of emotions and desserts: freeze them and hide them in your belly.
'If Archie was a woman ...', chapter 3, page 33
‘Archie, I warn you, someday you are going to become indispensible.’ He stirred a little. ‘If you were a woman and I were married to you, which God forbid, no amount of space available on this globe, to separate us, would put me at ease.’
Wolfe makes an impression, chapter 4, page 40
I suspected he wasn’t overwhelmed by prestige as much as he was by avoirdupois, having never seen Wolfe before.
Chapter 5, page 56
He was easing them into it; he was sewing them up. I grinned to myself, ‘Boss, you’re cute, that’s all, you’re just cute.’
