A Rex Stout novel based on his most famous character 'Nero Wolf'
in one of his more memorable novel this one having to do with the death of a white woman by what the police and the general public assumed to be a black man. at the time in 1964 this would be considered an open-and-shut case with civil rights still being a very big issue.
Civil rights plays one of the major motives in the whole book the entire case revolving around it and everyone's motivation in some way being connected to it. It's interesting to see that racism exists on both sides of this book. A lot of the novels of the age were simply protraying the ''evil white man vs the purest of black man (a very cartoon betrayal). This is why I like the Rex Stout interpretation both sides have their reasons for believing what they do and both sides for the most part also hate the idea of mixed-race marriage which was one of the major issues in the book.
It makes me kind of sad that we're still having a lot of the same discussions today. it's been over 50 years and from of cultural point of view very little has changed Oh sure the legal systems Changed by all definition all people are equal in the face of the law. the lawn the culture are not the same thing,
especially in the United States of America, feels like those people are being divided on everything. You may not consider that big of a deal today but what affects America today controls Canada tomorrow.
Now it seems we're getting to a point with the pendulum being pushed in the other direction, creating victim cultures everybody thinking that they deserve more, that they've done something awful (yes some people want both!). You would think we just learn to live with each other and maybe not to abuse our legal system, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. Not with the way we portray things and especially not with our political system which are more happy to work on populism then actually achieve any forms of humanitarianism.
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