If Death Ever Slept
by Rex Stout
  

Viking: New York, 1957
186 pages

Collins: London, 1958
192 pages

collected in —

Three Trumps

So as not to keep you in suspense, I'll share — without plot-spoiling — the secret of the title. A young woman in the novel, as a child long before the story opens, shot a squirrel in a city park. She still feels bad about this, and recited to Archie Goodwin a scrap of of the verses she wrote as a memorial of that sad event. Neither the girl nor Archie know what the phrase means, and as a title it seems to have as little to do with the novel as the squirrel.
  

But, you say, there must be something good about If Death Ever Slept. Really, not so much. There is of course a modicum of the Wolfe and Goodwin wittiness. The plot is an actual murder mystery, with characters.

Reading this unexciting novel sank me into boredom during the third quarter or so, and I kept reading only through momentum and faint hope. It revives a little in the wrapup. I'd consign it to the nether zone of for completists only.