| Please Pass the Guilt | |
| Author: | Rex Stout |
| Cover Artist: | Abner Graboff |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Nero Wolfe |
| Genre: | Detective fiction |
| Publisher: | Viking Press |
| Release Date: | September 1973 |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages: | 150 pp. (first edition) |
| Isbn: | 0-670-55994-6 |
| Dewey: | 813/.5/2 |
| Congress: | PZ3.S8894 Pj PS3537.T733 |
| Oclc: | 729130 |
| Preceded By: | Death of a Dude |
| Followed By: | A Family Affair |
Please Pass the Guilt is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1973. Unusually for a Nero Wolfe story, which mostly take place very near the time of publication, this novel is set in 1969, though it was originally published in 1973.
As a favor to Dr. Edwin Vollmer, Wolfe agrees to find information about a case from Vollmer's friend's crisis intervention center. A man with the alias "Ronald Seaver" has attended the clinic, given no information, but spoken of having blood on his hands no one can see. Through trickery, Wolfe and Goodwin learn that this man is actually Kenneth Meer, an employee at the CAN broadcast network. An executive at the network, Peter Odell, has been killed in a bomb attack. Odell's widow believes that one of his rivals murdered him, and hires Wolfe to find proof.
In his limited-edition pamphlet, Collecting Mystery Fiction #10, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part II, Otto Penzler describes the first edition of Please Pass the Guilt: "Black boards, red cloth spine; front and rear covers blank; spine stamped with gold. Issued in a mainly black and brown pictorial dust wrapper."[2]
In April 2006, Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine estimated that the first edition of Please Pass the Guilt had a value of between $60 and $100. The estimate is for a copy in very good to fine condition in a like dustjacket.[3]
The far less valuable Viking book club edition may be distinguished from the first edition in three ways:
"Nero Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic," said Michael Jaffe, executive producer of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery.[5] "Readers of the Wolfe saga often have to turn to the dictionary because of the erudite vocabulary of Wolfe and sometimes of Archie," wrote Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald.[6]
Nero Wolfe's vocabulary is one of the hallmarks of the character. Examples of unfamiliar words — or unfamiliar uses of words that some would otherwise consider familiar — are found throughout the corpus, often in the give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie.