Fortune Favors the Dead

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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THE OVERSIMPLIFIED SETUP
It's a gender-flipped Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin. Instead of staying home habitually because of eccentricity, detective Lillian Pentecost has multiple sclerosis. Her assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker has a much more colorful history than Archie Goodwin—she spent years in the circus after running away from a terrible home in her teens. Will is game to get physical with suspects if necessary, but she's not up to Archie's level and doesn't necessarily give as good as she gets.

Pentecost is much more active outside the home than Wolfe, and the pair are more socially active—with social consciences that would be far more at home in Twenty-First century American than in the 1940s. But largely the duo operates like their archetypes.

WHAT'S FORTUNE FAVORS THE DEAD ABOUT?
The book begins with how the two met and started working together, then it jumps three years to after the partnership had been established and prospective clients show up.

A year ago, Abigail Collins' husband shot himself when it looked like everything was going the way the steel magnate wanted it to (in the mid-1940s, selling steel to the U.S. Government was a license to print money). Now, she's been murdered, and her body was found in the same chair as her husband. Her son, daughter, and an old family friend (now head of the company) come to Pentecost to do what the police have been unable to—find the killer and assuage the worries of the company's stockholders.

It's practically a true-locked room mystery, which gets Pentecost's attention. As an added bonus for the detectives, hovering around the case is a famed spiritualist that Pentecost has been wanting to expose for a fraud.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT FORTUNE FAVORS THE DEAD?
When it comes to re-imaginings, or characters based on Wolfe/Archie, I thought this was one of the more inventive and successful (DeAndra's Lobo Black/Quinn Booker might be better, but it's been so long since I read it, I'm not sure). Don't take anything negative I say—or if I'm not that enthusiastic about it—as being a reaction to being a Wolfe purist.

When you think of Stout's works—it's about the case, the mystery. Sure, you stick around because of the characters—but it's about watching the characters at work in and around the case. This was about Will Palmer first and foremost—with Pentecost clearly a secondary character—and her relationships/interactions with the principals related to the case and her background. The next priority of the novel was in creating and revealing the world of Pentecost and Palmer—how they were active in it and related to people in the world. The case—and everything else—came in as a tertiary concern.

This is all fine and good for a first novel—but it didn't seem to fit the setup either as something modeled on Wolfe/Archie novels, or as something in a vaguer 1940s detective mold. That's me carrying in assumptions to the text, I realize. But it still felt like Smallwood's emphasis was misplaced.

The mystery/mysteries were clever enough and the plotlines were well-executed, and the emotional beats—particularly in the final chapter—were handled perfectly by both Spotswood and Porter.

Fortune Favors the Dead was not the novel I expected, but it was good enough to get me to come back for the second in the series.