Too Many Cooks

I have been reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels in publication order, and about a hundred pages into the fifth, Too Many Cooks, I was enjoying myself as usual but thinking that modern readers would have to take the book with some historical sensitivity, as there was a fairly high quotient of unfortunate racial terminology, some of it emanating from the breezy and not overly sensitive Archie Goodwin. I knew that Rex Stout was famously liberal in his politics -- Hoover's FBI predictably kept a file on him -- but thought, well, the times (Too Many Cooks was published in 1938).

Oh me of little faith! Too Many Cooks is actually a seriously anti-racist book. I shouldn't say too much about how Stout manages this since the book is, after all, a mystery novel, but I will note that there is a two-chapter sequence (Ten and Eleven) that dazzlingly makes clear Nero Wolfe's advanced thinking in a way that we, the readers, get it, but Archie, the narrator, doesn't quite. It's not one of those pulling-out-the-rug-from-under-the reader sequences beloved of mysteries; it's more the equivalent of slipping the rug back under our feet while we're standing there.