WHERE THERE'S A WILL. A Nero Wolfe Mystery.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original red cloth with black titles to the upper board and spine, without dustwrapper. Top edge dark green. Deckled fore-edge. With a black and white illustration facing page 121. Publisher's device to the copyright page, as called for. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth with perhaps a touch of fading to the spine, and a little rubbing to the extremities. The contents, with some offsetting to the endpapers, are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps.

The eighth Nero Wolfe novel, originally released in an abridged format in the May 1940 issue of 'The American Magazine', under the title 'Sisters in Trouble'. This first edition in book form was published in June 1940. The UK first edition, published by Collins, The Crime Club, followed in March 1941. Upon first publication, the story drew attention from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau had already been monitoring Rex Stout for some time and suspected that he used symbolism in his Nero Wolfe stories to conceal Communist sympathies. For his book 'Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors' (1988), Herbert Mitgang gained access to, and reviewed 183 of the 301 heavily censored pages of Stout's personal FBI file, and derides the organisation's "highly imaginative" attempts to turn Stout's fiction into fact, arguing that "When it served its purposes, agents of the FBI could turn into literary critics, finding, however ludicrous, damning symbols in fiction" (p 222).