1973 detective novel by Rex Stout
Please Pass the Guilt is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1973. Unusually for a Nero Wolfe story, which mostly take place very near the time of publication, this novel is set in 1969, though it was originally published in 1973.
Plot introduction
Wolfe picked up the check and held it out. "Take it. You have wasted your time and mine. You want a miracle, and miracles are not in my repertory. Give me the receipt."
"My god," she said, "you are highhanded. What can they tell you?"
"I don't know, and I need to know. If there is a fact that will help me to do what you want done, I want it. If you think that I may inadvertently disclose what you have told me, even a hint of it, if you think me capable of such ineptitude, you were a ninny to come to me at all."
— Nero Wolfe with client Madeline Odell, chapter 5
As a favor to Dr. Edwin Vollmer, Wolfe agrees to find information about a case from Vollmer's friend's crisis intervention center. A man with the alias "Ronald Seaver" has attended the clinic, given no information, but spoken of having blood on his hands no one can see. Through trickery, Wolfe and Goodwin learn that this man is actually Kenneth Meer, an employee at the CAN broadcast network. An executive at the network, Peter Odell, has been killed in a bomb attack. Odell's widow believes that one of his rivals murdered him, and hires Wolfe to find proof.
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.[5] "Readers of the Wolfe saga often have to turn to the dictionary because of the erudite vocabulary of Wolfe and sometimes of Archie," wrote Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald.[6]
Nero Wolfe's 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.
