I wish we had seen more of Hattie

I wish we had seen more of Hattie Annis. She was an eccentric, somewhat annoying and absolutely wonderful character. But she pops up in one story and then fades away into pop culture limbo. That's a pity.

But perhaps a character like Hattie only works once and would become tiresome if she continued to appear in later stories. Besides, I have no idea how she would have realistically been sandwiched into any additonal Nero Wolfe mysteries.

The novella in which Hattie appears is "Counterfeit for Murder," which was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961 (under the title "The Counterfeiter's Knife") and later published with two other novellas in the 1962 book Homicide Trinity.

She shows up at Wolfe's brownstone with a large package of $20 bills. Her idea is for Wolfe to find the owner and then they would split the reward. She didn't want to take it to the cops, because she doesn't like cops. And I mean she really doesn't like cops.

Because after the money turns out to be counterfeit and someone tries to run down Hattie and one of the borders at her home is murdered, she locks herself in her room and refuses to allow the police in to question her. They have to break in and literally carry her from the home.

Wolfe and Archie just sort of end up with Hattie as a client without really meaning to. Hattie wants to hire them to make the cops eat dirt. Wolfe interprets the job as figuring out who the killer is. The cops-eating-dirt part may or may not be a by-product of that.

I like Rex Stout's novels featuring Wolfe and Archie more than the novellas, largely because there's more room to portray more of the always entertaining interactions between the residents of that Manhattan brownstone.

But this one has both a good, tight mystery (involving Wolfe getting a hint at the killer's identity and Saul Panzer then doing his usual effective field work) and the presence of Hattie. Her tendency to call Archie "Buster" and Wolfe "Falstaff," combined with her eccentric behavior and unique sense of honor makes her a delight. It's is indeed very possible that she works best as a one-off character, but I still kind of wished we had seen more of her.