Her Forbidden Knight

By: Rex Stout

Narrated by: Jonah Cummings

An innocent young telegraph operator becomes a counterfeiter’s target.

Once, the Lamartine Hotel was a quiet refuge for New York’s stuffy fashionable set. But by the 1890s, fashion has moved uptown, and the lobby of the Lamartine has been overtaken by natty young sports, who pass their afternoons with billiards or shows of noisy derring-do. Their preferred damsel is Lila Williams, a delicate young telegraph operator whose shyness so charms them that they resolve to defend her against any ill-behaved characters. They are about to face their fiercest challenger, who rides in the gleaming armor of a millionaire.

His name is John Knowlton, and from the first telegram she writes for him, Lila is charmed. He has money, good looks, and a criminal secret, and his insidious charisma will demand heroic effort from the knights of the Lamartine billiard table.

©1997 Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Fun listen for a Nero Wolfe fan

Simple, but intriguing throughout. Stout is an excellent writer, and this period piece does not disappoint.

Story has serious plausibility issues...

I wasn't able to finish this one. The story just became more and more absurd as the chapters went on. To hold my attention, a book needs to be BELIEVABLE. There are a group of friends who hang around a pool room in a big hotel in New York... always seeming to be there, none really seeming to have jobs or any mentioned sources of income. Their actions as a group simply border on the ridiculous.... so it's just odd that the author seems to think these individuals could seem remotely real.

This thing is a real mess.

A Damon Runyon-Style Confection

Rex Stout’s very first book, set in the same “mean streets” frequented by his later characters. You can easily imagine a young Nero Wolfe moving in into his brownstone a few blocks away from the hotel in which the present action’s centered. Though Stout’s early style needs tightening up, and the characters are stereotypically two-dimensional and melodramatic, the seeds of his greatness are detectable. The plot would make a great “Guys and Dolls” type musical. Though the ending was predictable, the local color and phrasing were enthralling, I couldn’t put it down.

This is a very fun book!

This is a very fun book! It is also a complete departure from Rex Stout's usual genre. Jonah Cummings is a fine narrator. 🙂

This narrator

Wish somebody had told this narrator that the word "a" is not pronounced "eh". It's pronounced "uh". And yet this guy pronounced every one of them like he's reading the first letter in the alphabet: A. "He had A beer and A sandwich and sat on A bench." Lordy.
Sounds like a small annoyance until you get to the 100th one.

It’s not Nero Wolfe nor is it Michael Prichard

This was Rex Stout’s first book, written 20 years before his first Nero Wolfe mystery. It’s good evidence that you can improve as a writer over the course of 20 years. The reading is rather stilted also - the narrator struggles to pronounce words, has extremely poor accents, and generally isn’t fun to listen to. The plot also struggles. As someone who has listened to all of Michael Prichard’s recordings of the Nero Wolfe books, I’d have to recommend against listening to this one.

Just as Good as Stout's Nero Wolfe Novels

Rex Stout is best known for his Nero Wolfe mysteries, but he has some other novels out there and this was a good one. I wouldn’t actually term this a mystery although at times it almost felt like one. Back in the 1890s in New York City, several men have taken it upon themselves to protect a young woman employed as a telegraph operator. She didn’t ask them to do this, but they have devoted themselves to her in a somewhat chivalric fashion and look out for her. She sees them as friends but gets annoyed when they interfere with her life as they do when they decide that a man who is romantically interested in her is not good enough for her. On the surface, they appear correct. They learn through one of their number that he is a counterfeiter. But they don’t know the whole story and they don’t know that one of their own has evil designs on the woman.

So this is a crime story, but not the crime the counterfeiting may lead you to think it is. And it leads to an exciting courtroom drama in which the young and extremely honest woman is expected to be the lead witness against the man who has captured her heart. There are a couple of nice twists and turns in the story and the ending feels like a solution Nero Wolfe would have come up with. I really enjoyed it.

Too many Gentlemen can cause confusion!

Good premise. Good reader. Just not as good as other Rex Stout stories I have read. Still worthwhile because the writer is better then many mystery writers.

Not a mystery

This is a romantic comedy or a comic romance and not at all a mystery. There is no detective work, there is no Nero Wolfe like character, and there is no Archie Goodwin like character. It is performed well by the narrator, and I could not stop listening.

The chivalry

A lovely love story. I hadn’t read a Nero Wolf story in a long time, so this isn’t really what I remember. The innocence of the age is so much fun!