Plot It Yourself


Plot It Yourself is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1959, and also collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces.

Plot introduction

A group of authors and publishers hires Nero Wolfe to investigate a series of plagiarism claims. Wolfe, by his own admission, bungles the investigation so badly that three murders result.
In Plot It Yourself, Stout draws on his lengthy experience with book publishers, with authors, and with the writing process itself. Apart from the series' continuing characters, all the players in the book are directly associated with the publishing industry. Stout adds as subtext his take on the peculiar relationship between book authors and book publishers — part symbiosis, part animosity. Stout himself experienced at least one instance of contentious relations with his publishers.

Plot summary

Someone has been getting away with a different spin on plagiarism. It's the old scam – an unsuccessful author stealing ideas from an established source – but it's being worked differently. Now, the plagiarists are claiming that the well-known authors are stealing from them. And they are making their claims stick: three successful claims in four years, one awaiting trial, and one that's just been made.
These claims have damaged both the publishers and the authors. The Book Publishers of America and the National Association of Authors and Dramatists form a joint committee to explore ways to stop the fraud, and the committee comes to Wolfe for help. The first four claims have shared certain characteristics: in the first, for example, the best selling author Ellen Sturdevant is accused by the virtually unknown Alice Porter of stealing a recent book's plot from a story that Porter sent her, asking her suggestions for improvement. Sturdevant ignores the accusation until Porter's manuscript is found in Sturdevant's house. The writing and publishing industry is convinced that the manuscript was planted, but the case was settled out of court.
That scenario, with minor variations, is repeated four times, with other authors and by other plagiarists. The latest complaint has been made only recently, and the target of the complaint wonders when a manuscript will show up somewhere that it wasn't the day before.
Wolfe's first step is to acquire and read the manuscripts that form the basis for the complaints. Wolfe's love of literature turns out to be useful in his investigation: from the internal evidence in the manuscripts, Wolfe concludes that they were all written by the same person. Aspects such as diction, punctuation and syntax – and, most convincingly, paragraphing – point Wolfe directly to the conclusion that one person wrote all the manuscripts.
At first, this seems like progress, but then it becomes clear that it's the opposite. The task initially seemed to be to show that the first fraud inspired a sequence of copycats, and the universe of suspects was limited to the complainants. But now that Wolfe has determined that one person wrote all the fraudulent manuscripts, that one person could be anyone. Wolfe meets with the joint committee to discuss the situation.
A committee member suggests that one of the plagiarists be offered money, along with a guarantee of immunity, to identify the manuscripts' actual author. The committee concurs, and asks Wolfe to arrange for the offer to be made to Simon Jacobs. The next day, Archie goes to make the offer to Jacobs, but finds Sergeant Purley Stebbins at the Jacobs apartment: Mr. Jacobs has been murdered, stabbed to death the night before.
In short order, Archie discovers two more dead plagiarists. Wolfe blames himself for not taking steps to protect Jacobs and the others, who had been made targets by the plan to pay for information. The only one left is Alice Porter, who first worked the fraud successfully, and who is now repeating it with Amy Wynn and her publisher. Wolfe, concentrating on Porter, catches her in a contradiction that identifies the murderer for him.

Cast of characters

  • Nero Wolfe — The private investigator
  • Archie Goodwin — Wolfe's assistant
  • Philip Harvey, Amy Wynn, Mortimer Oshin — Representing the NAAD
  • Gerald Knapp, Reuben Imhoff and Thomas Dexter — Representing the BPA
  • Cora Ballard — Executive secretary for the NAAD
  • Alice Porter, Simon Jacobs, Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert — Plagiarists all
  • Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins — Representing Manhattan Homicide

    Reviews and commentary

  • Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime — A plagiarism racket brings Nero and Archie into conflict with each other and with crime. Excellent repartee on all hands and strong suspense. The murderer's confession alone is below the surrounding perfection.
  • Anthony Boucher, The [New York Times Book Review] — Rex Stout has been a member, an officer and a guiding spirit of many an organization of professional writers, and his lively knowledge of such organizations brightens Plot It Yourself, in which Nero Wolfe's client is the Joint Committee on Plagiarism of the National Association of Authors and Dramatists and the Book Publishers of America. An adroit scheme for bringing fraudulent chargers of plagiarism leads into murder and to an error by Wolfe which so enrages him that he vows to drink no beer and eat no meat until he solves the case — which he does promptly and satisfactorily in one of his better book-length adventures.
  • Kirkus Reviews — An ingenious story — as successive charges of plagiarism are brought against writers and publishing houses, and confirmatory evidence presented which seems to make it something more than blackmail.
  • L. G. Offord, The San Francisco Chronicle — For writers or anyone who wants to know what goes on in the literary world, this is wonderful stuff... There's a good surprise finish and a masterly last scene.
  • Nancy Pearl, Book Lust — When Stout is on top of his game, which is most of the time, his diabolically clever plotting and his storytelling ability exceed that of any other mystery writer you can name, including Agatha Christie, who invented her own eccentric genius detective Hercule Poirot. Although in the years since Stout's death I find myself going back and rereading his entire oeuvre every year or two, I return with particular pleasure to these five novels: The Doorbell Rang; Plot It Yourself; Murder by the Book; Champagne for One; and Gambit.
  • Saturday Review of Literature — Mass plagiarism charges send New York publishers and authors to Nero Wolfe for help; triple-murder sequence also puts damper on belles-lettres. Usual pro performance, with Archie Goodwin never so flip.
  • Terry Teachout, "Forty years with Nero Wolfe" — Rex Stout's witty, fast-moving prose hasn't dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I've spent the past four decades reading and re-reading Stout's novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor ... It is to revel in such writing that I return time and again to Stout's books, and in particular to The League of Frightened Men, Some Buried Caesar, The Silent Speaker, Too Many Women, Murder by the Book, Before Midnight, Plot It Yourself, Too Many Clients, The Doorbell Rang, and Death of a Doxy, which are for me the best of all the full-length Wolfe novels.

    Publication history

  • 1959, New York: The Viking Press, October 30, 1959, hardcover
  • 1960, New York: Viking, February 1960, hardcover
  • 1960, London: Collins Crime Club, August 4, 1960, hardcover
  • 1960, New York: Bantam #A2156, December 1960, paperback
  • 1969, New York: The Viking Press, Kings Full of Aces: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus, January 28, 1969, hardcover
  • 1968, New York: Bantam #F3582, Edition: December 1960; 2nd Printing January 1968, paperback,.50¢
  • 1986, New York: Bantam Books, 1986, paperback
  • 1989, New York: Bantam Books April 1989, paperback
  • 1993, London: Hachette [Book Group USA#History|Little, Brown and Company Ltd.],, 1993, hardcover
  • 1994, New York: Bantam Crimeline July 1994, paperback, Rex Stout Library edition with introduction by Susan Dunlap
  • 2007, New Kingstown, RI: BBC Audiobooks America, Mystery Masters November 11, 2008 , CD
  • 2011, New York: Bantam Crimeline August 17, 2011, e-book