Word: whoduniteer
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Died. Rex Todhunter Stout, 88, premier American whodunit writer, whose corpulent orchidologist-detective, Nero Wolfe, with the help of his faithful legman Archie Goodwin, solved crimes in 46 books that were translated into 22 languages and sold more than 45 million copies; at his home in Danbury, Conn. As sinewy and energetic as his protagonist was fat and lethargic, Stout would work out the story line for such mystery novels as The Doorbell Rang and Too Many Cooks while puttering about his daily cooking or gardening chores, then sit down and type out a complete mystery in 38 days...
...Hough Jr. doesn't really want this to be a detective novel and subtly deemphasizes all aspects of the book that are such. The motive and method of the murder are quite ordinary, and, in spite of Gifford and O'Rourke's exertions, its solution is quite simple. The whodunit is so peripheral to the body of the novel, in fact, that the first real clues do not surface until three months after the killing and a sizeable lull in the narrative, and Gifford continues his account for a good 30 pages after the guilty verdict...
This year's winners were typical of that diversity. In fiction, the split award went to a traditional academic novel, Thomas Williams' The Hair of Harold Roux, and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, a savage morality tale that moves as fast as a whodunit and finds a nihilistic link between the Viet Nam War and the drug culture. The arts and letters award was shared by Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, a meditation on the structure of all living matter, and Roger Shattuck's life of Marcel Proust. For the recently created category...
...long--any recent film like Bullitt could give us a more varied and exciting sequence, probably with helicopters and Jensens and a pyrotechnic climax. Major Calloway is a wiser, more upstanding policeman than any (although Ironside may be a close second) but he is part of the irrelevant, whodunit part of the story...
...Whodunits like The Third Man are valuable for what the writer and director manage to accomplish despite their primary goal of creating suspense. The average whodunit (and the Orson Welles festival has its share of those) is almost by definition something you'd never want to see twice--or at least not until you'd forgotten it. But the first time around, anyway, such films may warrant taking out your pipe and putting on you deerstalker...