Marko Vukcic is dead. Nero Wolfe is extremely displeased by the murder of his oldest and dearest friend, and is even more displeased when, after weeks of effort, he is unable to locate or identify the murderer. Marko, it seems, was involved in international intrigue in their native Montenegro, and it seems increasingly likely that his murder is connected to his activities there. When Wolfe receives news that his adopted daughter (also a Montenegrin) was killed in nearby Albania, he decides to take matters into his own hands, and he and Archie hop a plane to Italy and thence to the Black Mountain itself. Wolfe is bound and determined to find the killer and bring him to justice. But first he has to survive a harrowing trek through the mountains, beset by Communist dictators--Tito's regime on the one side and Stalin's Russia on the other--and the local rebels who resist them.As you can probably guess, this is not the typical Nero Wolfe book. Wolfe does sometimes leave his house--to dine with the world's best chefs, to show off his impressive orchid collection, or to temporarily avoid an enemy or annoyance--but never before has he traveled so far. It would be implausible were it not for the extreme nature of the catalyst: the death of Marko Vukcic and Wolfe's self-imposed responsibility to catch the killer provide a realistic explanation for Wolfe's otherwise fantastic behavior.The trans-Atlantic shift upsets more than Wolfe's usual routine, however. Archie, our faithful narrator, can no longer relay verbatim the conversations around him. he must trust Wolfe to summarize or translate the goings on around him (fortunately, Wolfe is fluent in Italian, Montenegrin, Serbo-Croat, and Albanian, just to name a few, and is thus more than up to the task). Fortunately, we still get Archie's flair for humor and good storytelling.Archie is just as out-of-his-element as Wolfe--and more so, since Wolfe had the dubious benefit of growing up in these mountains and has at least some familiarity with the geography and customs. That Archie comes with him at all is evidence of the friendship that undergirds their professional relationship. And anyway, Archie is a good man to have around in case things get rough, and they most certainly will do just that.The story here is less mystery and more adventure. There is no real mystery at all--Wolfe figures out fairly early on that someone connected with either Belgrade (Tito) or Moscow (Stalin) was sent to kill Marko, and the obstacles that interfere with the apprehension of the killer are primarily practical. Wolfe and Archie must find a way into Montenegro, establish and maintain their disguises, explain their lack of papers to the officials, win the confidence of the rebels Marko supported, and then convince those rebels to help them locate the murderer--or at least to take them to someone who can help them. When they finally do stumble upon the killer (is it really a spoiler to tell you that? with a book like this?), it is purely a matter of chance--and a nearby character supplies a good deal of highly improbable but extremely helpful exposition to further facilitate the completion of their mission.Still, it's a fun read, and fans who've loved Wolfe for years will enjoy seeing him in his native element and learning a bit about his elusive backstory. (I am not one of those who believe that Stout intended Wolfe to be the offspring of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.) And I for one learned a lot about Montenegrin politics in the 1950s, which is not a topic I would likely have pursued on my own.Prichard's narration of the audiobook version is good bordering on excellent--I don't know enough about the respective accents to know if his portrayals are accurate, but the end result is certainly aurally pleasing to this layperson.
A man steps out of his house on East 54th Street and is shot three times. He now lies dead in the morgue. He was Marko Vukcic, owner of Rusterman's Restaurant, the only place Nero Wolfe will dine at apart from home and his boyhood friend from Montenegro where they were both born. Wolfe himself places the old dinar coins upon his eyes and then begins to track the killer.But this is not all. Carla Britton (nee' Wolfe), Nero's adopted daughter has also been murdered in Montenegro. Her last message was that the man Wolfe seeks is within sight of the mountain. The Black Mountain for which Montenegro is named.Now, not only will the usually immobile Wolfe leave his chair and home and table but he will cross the seas and lands to track down the killer or killers with Archie Goodwin at his side and bring them to justice.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SPOILERS CLINGING TO REMOTE MOUNTAIN LEDGESCover Art - I have the Bantam 1988 edition, cover by Rick Lovell. That's a very nice one. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I... It has the clunky yellow coffee mug mentioned, the lugar, the mountain and the severed finger. Well done!It is one thing for Nero Wolfe to go to the city morgue to view Marko's remains. That alone is a feat. But in this book, we find Wolfe actually tramping around old paths he used to herd goats around in the mountains in far-off Montenegro. It nearly kills him. But he goes on, without the traditional prodding by Goodwin because he is driven.Goodwin complains often that he is left in the dark because he only speaks english. He has to wait for Wolfe to translate things, mostly after they happen and they are alone. There are many factions buzzing around in Montenegro/Yugoslavia. The Communists, Fascists, Freedom fighters called The Spirit of the Black Mountain. Spies, counter spies, traitors and all the rest.Through it all, Wolfe manages to survive and track down the killer of Marko and he really does bring him back to New York to face his crimes in a very clever way. I won't spoil that. One thing bothers me. The killing of his daughter. I'd have been much more suspicious about the ground where the dog died, since both the dog and the woman were both stabbed. It isn't totally cleared up just who killed her. It is assumed that the group in the fort did it. But I am not sure. Maybe Wolfe had to rely on the murderer of his daughter to get at the killer of Marko? Hmm... I'll be pondering this for awhile.Anyway, a good read!
What do You think about The Black Mountain (2011)?
::4-3/4 STARS::What would it take to get Nero Wolfe, the corpulent Great Detective who rarely ventures from his home, to leave all his creature comforts behind and travel across the Atlantic Ocean? When Wolfe's oldest and closest friend, Rusterman's Restaurant owner Marko Vukcic, is shot assassination-style, Wolfe and Archie immediately plunge into investigating his death - and almost equally immediately hit the same wall the NYPD has. When Wolfe's adopted daughter Carla Lovechen (introduced in Over My Dead Body) is also murdered, this time in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, he does the unthinkable and tells Archie they must pursue the killer to Montenegro.... A country annexed by Yugoslavia....Which is a satellite state of The Soviet Union....In the middle of The Cold War.Because Under All That Fat? Nero Wolfe Has BALLS OF STEEL...!Posing as a Montegnegran businessman returning to his homeland with his American son, Wolfe and Archie travel to Europe, where they find themselves hip-deep in the Montenegro Independence movement both Marko and Carla were a part of, and Yugoslavia's "President-For-Life" Tito's efforts to squelch it. Wolfe, who fought for Montenegrean Independence as a young man and still identifies as "Montenegrean" though he's no longer active in the movement, and Archie troop through the landscape of a Soviet satellite country (Stout, Cold War Liberal that he was, uses the opportunity to make many swipes at the Soviet Union and Communism as the West believed it to be in general) with the reluctant aid of both freedom fighters and the local authorities. While there they uncover the killer, (view spoiler)[Peter Zov, an Agent of Yugoslavia's secret police (hide spoiler)]
—Delia Binder
The constantly shifting timeline of these books (the characters don't get any older, but the world around them changes) makes this an interesting story, as Wolfe and Archie go on an adventure to Wolfe's native Montenegro, which is by the time this was written Tito-era Yugoslavia. One of the rare-ish stories in which Wolfe leaves the office, it's an atypical book in the series. I give it three stars mostly because the events of the story dramatically affect Wolfe's life in pretty major ways, but you wouldn't really know it from the way the character reacts. Sure, he goes halfway around the world and subjects himself to great personal danger, which is out-of-character for him in the extreme, but there's never a clear sense of exactly why he's doing so. Wolfe is a pretty unrealistic character to begin with, so maybe that's OK, but it makes the book not as great as it could have been.
—Benjamin
I enjoy Archie and Nero in their typical relationship dynamics and solving mysteries, but this was more of an action-adventure with Archie unable to contribute much. They traveled all over and then have the solution to whodunit handed to them. Nero showed how clever he is by how he managed to get them in and out again alive, but it's his mystery-solving skills that I enjoy reading about.I also had a hard time believing Nero Wolfe would really go tramping all around on rugged terrain. We're repeatedly told in this series that he only rarely will even leave his house. It would have made more sense (though admittedly been less exciting) for him to hire someone to find out the information and then cleverly convince the murderer to come to him. I think this is mainly one for Nero Wolfe fans who want to know more about Wolfe's pre-American life. It was a fun read but not as interesting to me as his mystery-focused stories.
—Debbie
