Both sad and satisfied, I recently came to the end of a little ad hoc reading project that took on a life of its own. I was re-reading Fer-de-Lance, the first of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, in something of a spur-of-the-moment reaction to a New Yorker article on the “no-work” gardening books of Stout’s sister Ruth, and I was idly thinking about moving on straight to the next book. Around that time my best friend took sick, and I discovered something that I definitely hadn’t known when I first read some of these mystery novels half a century ago: for me, anyway, at that moment, anyway, they made first-rate reading for a bedside vigil.
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