Talk:Too Many Women
Chapter 1, page 1 (Bantam: 1967)
It was the same old rigmarole. Sometimes I found it amusing; sometimes it only bored me; sometimes it gave me a pronounced pain, especially when I had had more of Wolfe than was good for either of us.
ib.
I told him I was Archie Goodwin, the heart, liver, lungs and gizzard of the private detective business of Nero Wolfe, Wolfe being merely the brains.
Chapter 3, page 5
“Nothing. Excuse me.” I stood up. The notion of Wolfe fighting his way down to William Street every morning or even with me driving him, and punching a time clock, and working all day in the stock department, had been too much for my facial control.
Chapter 4, page 5
A coolness had sprung up between Wolfe and me. These coolnesses averaged about four a week, say, a couple of hundred a year. This particular one had two separate aspects: first, my natural desire for him to buy a new car opposed to his pigheaded determination to wait another year; and second, his notion of buying a noiseless typewriter opposed to my liking for the one we had.
Wolfe's alias, chapter 5, page 8
"His suggestion that you get a job in the stock department under another name shows that he has given the problem a great deal of thought. You could call yourself Clarence Camembert, for instance, or Percy Pickerel. If they gave you too much to do, you could bring things home and I’d be glad to help. They could pay you by weight – say, a dollar a pound a week. As you stand now, or at least sit, close to three hundred and forty pounds, it would come to an annual salary –"
"Archie. Your notebook."
Chapter 5, page 9
"Archie," he murmured. His murmur is Wolfe at his worst. "I agree with someone, I forget who, that no man is indispensable."
Chapter 8, page 20
Where it branches out from, I thought, is the restroom. If I could borrow a skirt and blouse and spend thirty minutes in the restroom I would have all I needed for a final report.
Lon Cohen considers Archie as a pet, chapter 9, page 25
"Okay. The subject of your inquiry is a befriender of young men. Not promiscuous. Discriminating, but chronic. She has plenty of dough, is well preserved, and presumably not a fool or she would have lost her balance long ago. I would advise you to try for it – how old are you, thirty? Just about right for her! You have the looks, and you could brush up on manners –"
"Yeah. You’ll get ten percent."
Archie womanhandled, chapter 11, page 36
I stopped and looked down at her [Rosa Bendini]. She was at least nine inches below me. She kept the arm.
"You brute," I said. "You’re hurting me."
She looked good enough to eat.
Archie in action, chapter 12, page 45
Then I realised at the edge of my mind that it wasn’t him. The taxi drivers were leaning against the fender of the cab I had paid for, enjoying free show. I resented that, and, knowing I was in no position to resent anything, shoved it out of the way. The husband apparently had oversized lungs. With no gong to announce intermissions I was beginning to wish I had learned to breathe through my ears, but he didn’t even have his mouth open. He just kept coming.
Chapter 13, page 50
And three hours later, at half-past one in the morning, we were still there and I was still reporting. I have never known him to be more thorough, wanting every detail and every little word. My face felt stiff as a board, and I hurt further down, especially my left side, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction and pleasure of hearing me groan again, and I didn’t. After I had given him everything he kept coming back for more, and when it was no longer possible to continue that without making it perfectly plain that he was merely trying to see how long it would take me to collapse on the floor there in front of him, he asked:
"What do you think?"
Chapter 16, page 68
Wolfe was reading three books at once. He had been doing that, off and on, all the years I had been with him, and it always annoyed me because it seemed ostentatious.
