Agatha

Taking a break from the Roman Empire with a brisk Agatha Christie, 'Dead Man's Folly' where we are, again, having something which would seem evident hidden beneath a large, fashionable hat. Typically, she does something sly and unconventional as well, ignoring the murderers nearly entirely- leaving encounters with them out of the last third or even half of the book, and never confronting them, nor showing their reactions to being unmasked.
And after a long troop through "Pagans and Christians" I came across a Rex Stout Nero Wolfe mystery. My first/ his last "A Family Affair". Written in the 1970's, Watergate is mentioned with peculiar frequency as it is not even peripherally related to the plot. Also women's lib and women's libbers- in fact the limp clue to the mystery (the name of the murderer) is on a scrap of paper glued inside a copy of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" again, entirely unrelated to anything. The motive is sketchy and unexplored "He was going to ruin me!" Wolfe himself is obdurate to the point of fossilizing on the page. Alexander Woollcott maintained that he was the model for Wolfe which Stout denied, and contemporary accounts never described Woollcott as laconic. Stout was a guest on the radio show at which Woollcott suffered his fatal heart attack. I'm not accusing anyone. But.