A Pyramid Book
Copyright 1934, 1962 By Rex Stout
3rd Printing…July 1968

Contents
Fer-de-Lance
Rear Cover Text:

Remote-Control Murder

Barstow Dropped dead on the golf course — heart attack,
said his doctor… his family… and the police.

But Nero Wolfe looked at a cut-up newspaper and some steamship
tags… and called it murder — a unique and incredibly complex murder!

A wild guess? Not when Wolfe bet his last $10,000 that
he was right!

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The following is an excerpt from NERO WOLFE of West
Thirty-Fifth Street by William S. Baring-Gould concerning FER-DE-LANCE.

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On the afternoon of Sunday, June 4, 1933, Peter Oliver
Barstow, fifty-eight-year-old president of Holland University, was playing
golf on the links of the Green Meadow Club near Pleasantville, thirty miles
north of New York City. The round was a foursome, Barstow playing with
his son, Lawrence, his neighbor, E. D. Kimball the grain broker, and Kimball’s
son, Manuel.As Barstow swung at the ball on his first drive, he uttered
a little exclamation, with a startled look on his face, and began rubbing
his belly. The others asked him what was wrong, and he said something about
a wasp or a hornet and started to open his shirt. His son looked inside
at the skin and saw a tiny puncture, almost invisible. Barstow insisted
it was nothing, but thirty minutes later, on the fairway of the fourth
hole, he suddenly collapsed on the ground, kicking and clutching the grass.
He was still alive when his caddy seized his arm, but by the time the others
reached him he was dead.

So began the first recorded adventure of Nero Wolfe and
Archie Goodwin: the case Archie called Fer-de-Lance. Wolfe was drawn into
the case on Wednesday, June 7; he concluded it successfully just two weeks
later, on Wednesday, June 21.

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Information taken from NERO WOLFE of West Thirty-Fifth Street by William
S. Baring-Gould, page 95 of Bantam paperback edition published February
1970