Review by Booklist Review
A long-lost novel by Rex Stout, creator of reclusive gourmand-detective Nero Wolfe and winner of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award, has surfaced again, thanks to this reissue by Hard Case Crime. Originally published in 1930, it was Stout's second novel, following How Like a God and preceding the first Nero Wolfe, Fer-de-Lance. This Stout is both a find and a departure for Hard Case, which specializes in hard-boiled detective stories of the 1940s and '50s, which often have garishly sexy paperback covers, as does this one. Readers, however, will find this is very much a Depression-era novel, with a startling look at how quickly people can plummet from wealth or middle-class security into poverty. It's more a psychological portrait of a hard-edged heroine than a traditional mystery, although some criminal activity and sketchy deals lace the action. Lora is mistress to three successive men, each of whom funds a lavish lifestyle. She sums up her existence as "another day, another man, another bed." Lora's pragmatism makes some sense against Stout's wonderfully rendered backdrop of Depression-era life, but readers will still wonder what makes Lora tick until Stout neatly connects a gun that appears at book's beginning to the devastating resolution.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Before launching the epic career of armchair detective extraordinaire Nero Wolfe, Stout tried his hand at mainstream fiction, with intriguing results. In this, his second novel, from 1930, Stout revived the intricate nonlinear plotting that garnered critical praise for his debut, How like a God (a reissue of which is due out from Hard Case this summer), jumping back and forth through time to puzzle out the unconventional life choices of heroine Lora Winter, a serial single mother with four children by four different fathers--and counting. Something of an antecedent to the protagonists in James Cain's Mildred Pierce and Vera Caspary's Laura, Lora seems to be no-nonsense modern woman carving out a life against the odds and on her own terms. Clearly something must be wrong with this picture. Taken as psychological fiction, it's hard to resist the conclusion that the author himself soon reached, that he was, as he told his biographer, "a good storyteller" but "would never be a great novelist," with this correction: Stout is a great storyteller. VERDICT One of the most ingenious plotters ever, Stout keeps readers guessing in this compelling saga, a curious forerunner to Ross Macdonald.
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