Not Quite Dead Enough

Reviews and commentary

Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime — Neither is to be missed by anyone with an interest in the Wolfe-Goodwin saga. In this one Archie has to incriminate himself to get Wolfe to abandon physical training and get back to ratiocination and both help win the war. Full of amusing characters and with more action and fewer words than is sometimes true of the longer tales. ... Nero Wolfe does a neat job of selecting the culprit by arranging a booby trap of his own. The final scene, in which Wolfe plays God, is unique: no beer, no audience except Archie (a major of three weeks' standing), and the murderer in a car in Van Cortlandt Park.

Publication history

1944, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, September 7, 1944, hardcover

In his limited-edition pamphlet, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I, Otto Penzler describes the first edition of Not Quite Dead Enough: "Red cloth, front cover and spine printed with black; rear cover blank. Issued in a mainly black, red and blue pictorial dust wrapper. … The first edition has the publisher's monogram logo on the copyright page. the second printing, in the same year, is identical to the first except that the logo was dropped." In April 2006, Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine estimated that the first edition of Not Quite Dead Enough had a value of between $1,000 and $2,000.

1944, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1944, hardcover

1944, New York: Detective Book Club #33, December 1944, hardcover

1944, New York: Detective Book Club, 1944, hardcover

1945, New York: Armed Services Edition #P-6, February 1945, paperback

1946, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1946, hardcover

New York: Lawrence E. Spivak, Jonathan Press #J27, not dated, paperback

1949, New York: Dell mapback #267, 1949, paperback

1963, New York: Pyramid (Green Door) #R-822, February 1963, paperback

1992, New York: Bantam Crimeline ISBN 0-553-26109-6 October 1992, paperback, Rex Stout Library edition with introduction by John Lutz

1995, Burlington, Ontario: Durkin Hayes Publishing, DH Audio ISBN 0-88646-727-6 July 1994, audio cassette (unabridged, read by Saul Rubinek)

2004, Auburn, California: The Audio Partners Publishing Corp., Mystery Masters ISBN 1-57270-362-8 February 2004, audio CD (unabridged, read by Michael Prichard)

2010, New York: Bantam Crimeline ISBN 978-0-307-75607-7 May 26, 2010, e-book