Book Summary X (Too Many Cooks)

Too Many Cooks or the world's most elaborate work around for sausages.
Is a strange Nero Wolfe story in that it has Nero Wolfe himself not merely being out of his home but sitting up on a locomotive train and travelling to a different state. Or to put that in the more understandable context, I'm going to sneak into NASA's headquarters, construct and launch my own personalised rocket to the moon for a third Landing attempt.
Because that's the amount of difficulty and disbelief one would have when imagining Nero Wolfe leaving his own home.

However there is one event in this world that even Wolfe is willing to go through copious amounts of personal torment to attend Les Quinze Maîtres ("The Fifteen Masters")  a congregation of Haute cuisine. Where Nero Wolfe is not only a mere participant but the guest of Honor who is to have a specialised speech delivered to them on the values and contribution of American culinary arts* to the greater world.
But as all things go it wouldn't be a Nero Wolfe novel if a murderer or some other form of Highly illegal activity hadn't taken place.
There's a murder of one of the chefs and worse still one of the other chefs has been blamed for it. A man by the name of Marko Vukcic a personal friend to Nero Wolfe.
One of the unique elements in this story is the race against the clock dynamic. In which Nero Wolfe deciding to take on the investigation of the murder only has 28 hours to do so. As he wishes to board a train from New York City and escape the horrible clutches of West Virginia. This creates a double problem for him. Not only does it put them under extreme stress to work uncomfortably quick but he's also met with the Dilemma that if he should pop up for any reason as a material witness he might be detained or ask to return to West Virginia.
The event becomes even more confusing when certain employees of the local spa are both involved and accused of the murder itself. Leading into a subplot involving America's racial stand towards African American people in the 1930s. Something that you don't get a lot of in books of the time.
But perhaps most interesting of all is the sheer amount of Nero Wolfe within the book. With most Nero Wolfe novels Nero is but a secondary character who moves the plot along and resolve all the issues. It's his sidekick Archie Goodwin who's the true protagonist of any story. But because this entire book takes place on a relatively small location and Nero Wolfe is forced into an unnatural situation in which he must deal with things had on we get a lot more direct involvement with him. And it makes for some phenomenal dialogue between both Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin as they debate and bewilder one another in an unfamiliar territory.

And all of this becomes even more miraculous when you consider that Nero Wolfe is technically on vacation. He's not taking a fee for his investigating and throughout the entire Endeavor he might get it entirety 7 hours sleep. One might complain that it's something of a mental strain. And that's not accounting for other mishaps that come about during this adventure.

There's even a secondary subplot involving Nero Wolfe trying to obtain a recipe for saucisse minuit a recipe of sausage that Nero Wolfe loves and has found over the years to be unobtainable.

Overall it's a fairly enjoyable read. Because of the change in atmosphere from a conventional Rex Stout novel and the general fast action of the crime investigating, keeps everything running at a nice brisk pace.

What's impresses me even more was my ability to keep on top of which character where who. You would think with an introduction of 15 different chefs along with their esteemed company and an introduction of new secondary detective, Sheriff's and prosecutors in a new land that it would become overbearing with its character Dynamics. But every character is given just enough info to make them interesting and (slightly) rounded without being properly invested or board by there attributes.

The only character who doesn't seem to have any real purpose is Vukcic's daughter. She's there for dramatic effect and as a character that Archie Goodwin can occasionally flirt with. But unlike so many other female characters in other books there's nothing that comes of it. Her testimony isn't added up into the investigation, she doesn't possess any power or influence into the investigation that would make her important to the plot and she has no real romantic chemistry with Archie. But still that's not a bad thing it's just a simple thing and is the closest that I can think of to any negatives in the book.

I think at the end of the day the one big thing that brings me back to this book beyond the colonary environment and the amusing detective story is Nero Wolfe's personal handling of racial prejudice.
Nero Wolfe shows a spark of appreciation towards black Americans that I just don't see in any other books of the time. He doesn't use racial slangs with them, he doesn't talk down to them or treat them as some sort of secondary class citizen (which at that point they most definitely were in the eyes of most
''non black'' Americans)
He even go so far as to guarantee their personal safety for any help towards the investigation of the murder and to ensure that none of them will be wrongly persecuted by the local authorities of the West Virginia and State.
This isn't just merely the author's opinion on racial Prejudice either. As he'll have many other characters in the same story using every Antiquated pejorative term that you can think of when referring to Black Americans.
He purposely writes Nero Wolfe to be a more compassionate and understanding man than just about anybody else. Even a little bit beyond Archie Goodwin.
And it's proof that there was actually a conversation about the disunity between the different racial groups in America even as far back as the 1930s**. This isn't something that just popped up in the sixties and was never brought up before. It's part of a much longer much deeper problem. Something that even Rex doubt will draw upon again in a later Nero Wolfe novel involving one of the very characters from too many cooks.

One final note there are certain copies of Nero Wolfe 'Too Many Cooks' out there that actually possess the ingredients and preparation for saucisse minuit. Unfortunately the one I owns does not have, it a barebone minimum novel off a dime store shelf softcover book. But all the same I'm still looking for that darn recipe and one day I too will attempt to make blank

*“A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords.” - Nero Wolfe.

**Also interesting to know that this was the statistically lowest time for the black American population in comparison with the rest of the country.