Books like Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels (The Silent Speaker, Might As Well Be Dead / If Death Ever Slept / Three at Wolfe's Door / Gamb

Sometimes several titles are put in one book because they are closely related sequential stories, as we find with, say, The Chronicles of Narnia, or the Skeeve and Ahz Mythadventures. Sometimes it is done because there is one famous title and a batch of others that won't sell without riding on the coattails of the one, possibly for good reason. Sometimes a collection is a "best of", someone's chosen favorites. It is difficult for me to say whether this is that last type, as I have only read three other Nero Wolfe mysteries and seen some small number produced for television. These, however, were all very good, and although after reading straight through nine stories (the fourth of the seven included "novels", "3 At Wolfe's Door", is three shorter stories, but it seems Stout does this sometimes, as the ABC Primer I previously read had two stories in the second book) I am not certain I can recall them all in detail.I am also hesitant to rate a book which was originally published as seven separate books and is now combined. It may well be that as individual books some of these would have rated higher, and in that sense it seems unfair to penalize a good story simply because it is bound together with an adequate one. On the other hand, someone who has read more than a few Nero Wolfe mysteries may well have read one or more of these, and it is unfair to that reader for me to suggest that the book stands superior based on its best story.These are all decent, and while not exactly spread through the history of the series begin with a couple from the mid 1940s and then draw the rest from the 1960s; the final story has marks of possibly being the last Nero Wolfe case, although it is a bit open ended on that point. (A quick check shows it was the last published but for a posthumous work.) Most of the core characters remain the same throughout, from the detective Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, to the homicide detectives Cramer, Rowcliffe, and Stebbins, to the household staff of Fritz and Theodore, to the outside contractors Saul, Orrie, and Fred, to the peripheral Doctor Vollmer and reporter Lon Cohen.Some of the devices were predictable--as with the couple who were fighting to claim guilt because each thought the other was the murderer. Several were quite original, and broke some of the expected "rules" of mysteries. I have read more than my share of Agatha Christie and a smattering of other mystery writers, and this holds up quite well. I sometimes worked out parts of them, but never got the complete answer, and only once thought that Stout had kept a critical piece away from the reader's knowledge (and even Conan Doyle did that in A Study in Scarlet). Overall I was pleased, and will probably read it again in a few years.