The Second Confession by Rex Stout
By 1949, Rex Stout had written fifteen crime novels featuring the homebody gardener/detective Nero Wolfe, and the no-nonsense series was a reliable source of entertaining puzzles.
The Wolfe books make good use of the body-mind split concept, with Wolfe—-an obese man who uses an elevator to go from floor to floor in his home—-pondering cases mentally at home while his younger assistant Archie Goodwin performs the legwork and all necessary seductions. The Second Confession, however, breaks from form by sending Wolfe out his office—-for awhile at least.
Hired by the owner of a mining company to prove that the man his daughter is dating is a Communist, Wolfe is accidentally drawn into the sphere of Arnold Zeck, an underworld kingpin (and the only man Wolfe fears.) Zeck’s idea of sending a message is having one his goons machine gun $40,000 worth of damage into the detective’s orchid garden. Wolfe, however, does not retreat. He is bound by honor not to drop a case until it is solved. But when the subject of his investigation, the boyfriend/potential Communist is found dead and an associate of Wolfe’s client makes a dubious confession to a hit-and-run, Wolfe finds himself fired by the mining magnate only to be hired by the shadowy Zeck to look into the death.
The case takes Wolfe and Archie into the upper reaches of the American Communist Party, as Wolfe tries to smoke out information by writing and sending to a newspaper a fake “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” style document that is supposedly the minutes of a meeting of Communists plotting to influence the 1948 Presidential Election.
Though the Communists in the book are portrayed negatively, Rex Stout was himself the target of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-communist crusade, earning himself a thick file that the FBI attempted to keep sealed even a dozen years after the author’s death.
The Second Confession is appropriately lean and fast-paced. It is quite satisfying, though the storyline with the underworld overlord Zeck are clearly a set-up for a coming book, 1950’s In the Best Families.