Alphabet Hicks by Rex Stout

Alphabet Hicks was working as a cab driver when he was employed on his first case as a detective. Alphabet had graduated from Harvard Law School, worked one year as a lawyer, and then was disbarred. All of this had been written up in an article in The New Yorker. His passenger had read the article and wanted to employ him to solve her problem. She was Judith Dundee, and her husband, Richard I. Dundee, was a successful manufacturer of plastics. (Alphabet does ask "What are plastics? This was in 1941) It seems that Richard had accused her of giving secrets of his business to his chief competitor, Jimmy Vail, and says that he has evidence to prove it. Judith says that she knows nothing about the business, and could not have told anything.

Alphabet takes the case and a chance overheard conversation leads him to track

a woman to Katonah, New York. Katonah is the site of the Richard Dundee manufacturing factory. It is here that his chief research scientist, Herman Brager, works with Richard's son Ross. Their secretary is a young woman named Heather Gladd. One of the products they have been working on is the sonogram. The sonogram is a recording device, much like a music record, which can be used to record people's conversations both with and without their knowledge.

On the afternoon that Hicks arrives in Katonah, Martha Cooper is murdered there. She is Heather Gladd's sister, and the woman that Hicks had followed to Katonah. No motive is found for her murder, and her husband, George Cooper is suspected of the murder. Further complications follow along with another murder. Hicks does find both the murderer and the perpetrator in the industrial espionage. The high tech modern technology of the sonogram plays a large part in the solution of the crime.

This book, published in 1941, was part of an effort by Rex Stout to create other detectives beside the very well know Nero Wolfe. This is the only Alphabet Hicks book he wrote. Other detectives he would create would be Tecumseh Fox (3 books) and Dol Bonner (one book). Though the book is interesting, the personality of Alphabet Hicks is not very well developed. He cannot be distinguished from any other investigator of this period, and I can see why Rex Stout did not write another book featuring him.