A review by hannahstohelit
In the Best Families by Rex Stout

4.0

I have complicated feelings about this one. On the one hand, it was really fun to have a book that was basically what happens when you put Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories The Final Problem/The Empty House, His Last Bow, and Charles Augustus Milverton in a blender. And I will say- the antics were great and it was really cool to see what happens when Wolfe, who manages to be both a tumultuous and stabilizing force for his household, is gone.
 

The funny thing is, though, that while it's hard to read In The Best Families any other way once you make that Holmesian connection, I actually didn't much like the way the book handled all this. Arnold Zeck was fun in the prior two books, when he was just an unseen influence and we didn't know quite who he was or what he was doing, let alone how; in the same way, we only got a very general idea from ACD about how Moriarty achieved his status as Napoleon of Crime, and certainly never got a real sketch of his organization or how it functioned, which allowed him not just to maintain an air of mysterious menace but also a camouflage of very vague plausibility. But in this book, Stout makes the mistake of not just going into detail on how the organization functions, not just introducing us to Zeck in the flesh, but also having Wolfe do a very very implausible and unconvincing undercover job (even Holmes's undercover job in His Last Bow took him years to accomplish to establish his identity!) and penetrate the organization in a way that makes no sense. Then, even on its own terms, the whole structure that Stout made the mistake of sketching out gets punctured by Zeck openly telling Archie the score in a way that would make him quite dangerous in a courtroom, unless I'm missing something. 

The smidge of Milverton (the ending) I did enjoy- that said, I think what I most liked was the idea of the book as "what if we'd seen Watson go about his real life over the hiatus." Obviously, Holmes being dead vs Wolfe just being missing make the dynamics of the various hiatuses different, but at the same time, ACD does have Watson allude to his continuing his interest in crime without Holmes around, and adaptations take it even further (with Granada showing Watson as a police doctor in the Ronald Adair case). Archie, of course, is not quite Watson in his role or personality and it's therefore fun to see how he takes to independence, but being able to follow the hiatus throughout it (with of course Marko Vukcic as Wolfe's Mycroft and, arguably, Fritz as his Mrs Hudson). It was really entertaining, and whether intentional or not (and I can't imagine it wasn't) it was a fascinating homage to Holmes- but I do feel like it got away from Stout a bit, and I don't get the impression that he ever took a departure like this again. 

I liked this one, but the messiness of the actual plot annoyed me.