Some Buried Caesar
Some Buried Caesar is the sixth Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. The story first appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine (December 1938), under the title "The Red Bull." It was first published in book form by Farrar & Rinehart in 1939. The novel is included in the omnibus volume All Aces, published in 1958 by the Viking Press.
Plot introduction
We sat, the nephew and niece looking worried, Lily Rowan yawning, Pratt frowning. Wolfe heaved a sigh and emptied his glass.
Pratt muttered, "All the commotion."
Wolfe nodded. "Astonishing. About a bull. It might be thought you were going to cook him and eat him."
Pratt nodded. "I am. That's what's causing all the trouble."
— Conversation on Thomas Pratt's patio, laying the groundwork for conflict, in Some Buried Caesar, chapter 2.
On the way to an agricultural fair north of Manhattan, Wolfe's car runs into a tree, stranding Wolfe and Archie at the home of the owner of a chain of fast-food cafés. A neighbor is later found gored to death; the authorities rule the death an accident but Wolfe deduces that it was murder. Lily Rowan, Archie's longtime girlfriend, makes her first appearance.
This is one of several Wolfe plots that break one of Wolfe's cardinal rules, to never conduct business away from the Manhattan brownstone. It involves minor characters who appear in several other Wolfe novels, under different names and in different locales: the self-important police officer who tries to intimidate Archie, and the occasionally bumbling but politically attuned district attorney. The book's title is from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Plot summary
Wolfe and Archie are on their way to show orchids at an upstate exposition when a tire blows and their car crashes into a tree. Uninjured, they notice a house across a large pasture and decide to walk there, to phone for help. On their way across the pasture, they are threatened by a large bull. Archie runs for the fence to divert the bull, giving Wolfe time to climb to safety atop a large boulder. Wolfe is subsequently retrieved by car.
Wolfe and Archie get a lift to the house, where lives Thomas Pratt, the owner of a large chain of fast-food restaurants. Pratt plans to barbecue a champion Guernsey named Caesar, the very bull that threatened Wolfe and Archie, a few days later. The idea is to get publicity for Pratt's restaurants by serving beef from a bull that has been purchased for the then-fantastic price of $45,000. The plan has outraged the members of the Guernsey League, who are in town for the exposition.
Clyde Osgood, son of a despised neighbor, shows up and offers to bet Pratt $10,000 that Pratt will not barbecue Caesar. Pratt accepts the bet, and Wolfe offers Archie's services in exchange for a comfortable stay at Pratt's house: Archie will help guard the bull from possible theft. During his watch that night, Archie discovers Clyde's body, gored to death in the pasture. The bull is using its horns to push at the corpse. Everyone involved assumes that the bull killed Clyde, but Wolfe thinks not.
The unfamiliar word
"Nero Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic," said Michael Jaffe, executive producer of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery.[1] Nero Wolfe's erudite vocabulary is one of the hallmarks of the character. Examples of unfamiliar words — or unfamiliar uses of words that some would otherwise consider familiar — are found throughout the corpus, often in the give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie. Stout did not normally resort to Latin phrases, but Some Buried Caesar contains several.
- Plerophery, chapter 1. Wolfe to Archie, after the shock of the collision that follows a blown tire:
- It has happened, and here we are. I presume you know, since I've told you, that my distrust and hatred of vehicles in motion is partly based on my plerophory that their apparent submission to control is illusory and that they may, at their pleasure, and sooner or later will, act on whim. Very well, this one has, and we are intact. Thank God the whim was not a deadlier one.
- Ignoratio elenchi, chapter 4. Wolfe places the Latin phrase subsequent to "sophistry" and "casuistry". Unfamiliarity is a personal and subjective concept.
- Petitio principii, chapter 8, spoken by District Attorney Carter Waddell.
- Apodictically, chapter 9. Wolfe to Frederick Osgood:
- Elimination, as such, is tommyrot. Innocence is a negative and can never be established; you can only establish guilt. The only way I can apodictically eliminate any individual from consideration as the possible murderer is to find out who did it.
- Ethology, chapter 13. Wolfe, after Bronson accuses him of name calling:
- Just so. I can excoriate stupidity, and often do, because it riles me, but moral indignation is a dangerous indulgence. Ethology is a chaos. Financial banditry, for example ... I either condemn it or I don't; and if I do, without prejudice, where will I find jailers? No. My only excuse for labeling you an unscrupulous blackguard is the dictionary, and I do it to clarify our positions. I'm in the detective business, and you're in the blackguard business ...
Cast of characters
- Nero Wolfe – The private investigator
- Archie Goodwin – Wolfe's assistant, and the narrator of all Wolfe stories
- Thomas Pratt – The owner of a chain of fast-food restaurants, who plans to barbecue a champion Guernsey bull for publicity
- Monte McMillan – The stockman who sold the champion bull Caesar to Pratt
- Frederick Osgood – Pratt's neighbor, a wealthy landowner whose prodigal son is found gored to death in a cow pasture
- Clyde and Nancy Osgood – Frederick Osgood's son and daughter
- Carolyn and Jimmy Pratt – Thomas Pratt's niece and nephew
- Lily Rowan – A free spirit from Manhattan with whom Clyde Osgood is smitten. Introduced in this book, Miss Rowan makes frequent appearances later in the series, as a prominent figure in some plots and as Archie's close friend.
- Howard Bronson – A mysterious, sinister acquaintance of Clyde Osgood, also from Manhattan
Reviews and commentary
- Isaac Anderson, The New York Times Book Review (February 5, 1939) — Only twice since Rex Stout began to record his adventures in detection has Nero Wolfe left his home for an extended stay. The first time was when he attended a convention of chefs (Too Many Cooks). This time he goes to exhibit his orchids, and again he arrives at the scene of a murder before it happens. A prize bull is suspected of the killing, but Wolfe knows better, although he keeps his opinion to himself because he prefers not to take on another investigation away from home. When it proves impossible to keep out of the case he agrees to take a hand and the mystery is as good as solved, even though it does look at times as though Wolfe has, for once, met his match. The story is told in the usual breezy Rex Stout manner — the breeziness being supplied chiefly by Archie Goodwin — and anybody who reads detective stories can tell you that Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe make a combination that is hard to beat.[2]
- Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime — The story of the prize bull, to be highly esteemed by all Stout partisans. Nero and Archie in top form despite rural surroundings.[3]
- Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker (February 3, 1939) — Clyde Osgood is found gored to death, and Hickory Caesar Grindon, prize bull, is the natural suspect. Fortunately, Nero Wolfe and his Watson, Archie Goodwin, are on the spot to run down the real murderer. Mr. Stout's dialogue and clever plots seem to get better and better.[4]
- The Saturday Review of Literature (February 4, 1939) — Ingenious plot, Nero's eccentricities, Archie Goodwin's wise-cracks keep story on Stout's best level. Verdict: Unbeatable.[5]
- Terry Teachout, About Last Night, "Forty years with Nero Wolfe" (January 12, 2009) — Rex Stout's witty, fast-moving prose hasn't dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I've spent the past four decades reading and re-reading Stout's novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor ... It is to revel in such writing that I return time and again to Stout's books, and in particular to The League of Frightened Men, Some Buried Caesar, The Silent Speaker, Too Many Women, Murder by the Book, Before Midnight, Plot It Yourself, Too Many Clients, The Doorbell Rang, and Death of a Doxy, which are for me the best of all the full-length Wolfe novels.
- Time (March 6, 1939) — Attempted barbecue of a championship bull cooks the goose of two up-State New Yorkers. Not expert-proof, but Nero Wolfe's sleuthing and Archie Goodwin's cracks make it Rex Stout's best.[6]
Adaptations
Per la fama di Cesare (Radiotelevisione Italiana)
Some Buried Caesar was adapted for a series of Nero Wolfe films produced by the Italian television network RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana). Directed by Giuliana Berlinguer from a teleplay by Edoardo Anton, Nero Wolfe: Per la fama di Cesare first aired March 11, 1969.
The series of black-and-white telemovies stars Tino Buazzelli (Nero Wolfe), Paolo Ferrari (Archie Goodwin), Pupo De Luca (Fritz Brenner), Renzo Palmer (Inspector Cramer), Roberto Pistone (Saul Panzer), Mario Righetti (Orrie Cather) and Gianfranco Varetto (Fred Durkin). Other members of the cast of Per la fama di Cesare include Gabriella Pallotta (Lily Rowan), Antonio Rais (Dave), Aldo Giuffrè (Thomas Pratt), Umberto Ceriani (Jimmy), Franco Sportelli (MacMillan), Giorgio Favretto (Clyde Osgood) and Nicoletta Languasco (Nancy Osgood).
Publication history
- In his limited-edition pamphlet, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I, Otto Penzler describes the first edition of Some Buried Caesar: "Green cloth, front cover and spine printed with black; rear cover blank. Issued in a full-color pictorial dust wrapper … The first edition has the publisher's monogram logo on the copyright page. The second printing, in March 1939, is identical to the first except that the logo was dropped."[8]
- In April 2006, Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine estimated that the first edition of Some Buried Caesar had a value of between $2,500 and $5,000.[9]
- 1939, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1939, hardcover
- 1939, London: Collins Crime Club, July 3, 1939, hardcover
- 1940, New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1940, hardcover
- 1941, New York: Triangle, October 1941, hardcover
- 1945, New York: Dell (mapback by Gerald Gregg) #70, January 1945, as The Red Bull: A Nero Wolfe Mystery, or Some Buried Caesar, paperback
- 1958, New York: The Viking Press, All Aces: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus (with Too Many Women and Trouble in Triplicate), May 15, 1958, hardcover
- 1963, New York: Pyramid (Green Door) #R931, November 1963, paperback
- 1972, London: Tom Stacey, 1972, hardcover
- 1990, New York: Bantam Crimeline ISBN 0-553-25464-2 February 1990, paperback
- 1998, Auburn, California: The Audio Partners Publishing Corp., Mystery Masters ISBN 1-57270-054-8 August 1998, audio cassette (unabridged, read by Michael Prichard)
- 2008, New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group (with The Golden Spiders) ISBN 0-553-38567-4 September 30, 2008, trade paperback
- 2010, New York: Bantam Crimeline ISBN 978-0-307-75619-0 September 8, 2010, e-book
References
- ^ Quoted in Vitaris, Paula, "Miracle on 35th Street: Nero Wolfe on Television," Scarlet Street, issue #45, 2002, p. 36
- ^ Anderson, Isaac, The New York Times Book Review; February 9, 1939, p. 20
- ^ Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN 0-06-015796-8
- ^ The New Yorker, February 3, 1939, p. 68
- ^ The Saturday Review of Literature, February 4, 1939, p. 18
- ^ Time, "February Mysteries," March 6, 1939, p. 63
- ^ Townsend, Guy M., Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980, New York: Garland Publishing; ISBN 0-8240-9479-4), pp. 15–16. John McAleer, Judson Sapp and Arriean Schemer are associate editors of this definitive publication history.
- ^ Penzler, Otto, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I (2001, New York: The Mysterious Bookshop, limited edition of 250 copies), pp. 14–15
- ^ Smiley, Robin H., "Rex Stout: A Checklist of Primary First Editions." Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine (Volume 16, Number 4), April 2006, p. 32
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