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The Gold Solution (Gold #1)

Herbert Resnicow

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Jun 22, 2024 thefourthvine rated it liked it

Shelves: mystery

In my teens, I was book hungry all the time. I read everything I could get my hands on, from any bookshelf I had access to. (Did I steal books from my friends' houses? No. I read them while I was over and technically supposed to be interacting with the friend.) I also read a lot of random paperbacks from the used bookstore near my house. So I'm not sure exactly where teen me found this specific book (used bookstore is my best guess), but it made an impression on me, enough that I still remember In my teens, I was book hungry all the time. I read everything I could get my hands on, from any bookshelf I had access to. (Did I steal books from my friends' houses? No. I read them while I was over and technically supposed to be interacting with the friend.) I also read a lot of random paperbacks from the used bookstore near my house. So I'm not sure exactly where teen me found this specific book (used bookstore is my best guess), but it made an impression on me, enough that I still remember some elements of the story. I thought of it the other day, and my wife found it in ebook for a dollar, so I bought it.

And now that I've read it, I am not sure why this book made such a big impression on teenage me.

I absolutely get how a person could read Nero Wolfe novels and go, "GOSH this is cool. I wish I could write this!" I myself have had that thought! But it's a pretty bold next step to go, "I absolutely CAN do this," and that is the next step Resnicow took. In this series, Wolfe is Alexander Gold, a consulting engineer who turns to solving crime after a heart attack. Archie is Norma Gold, Alexander's wife, a former industrial research librarian. They are assisted in solving crime by their next door neighbor, Pearl. (And, yes, it's very much patterned on Stout's work, right down to Alexander randomly calling Norma Archie at one point.)

The thing is, Resnicow was not exactly a master of characterization or dialogue, and Stout was, and that makes a difference. (Resnicow, who took up writing mysteries after a career as an engineer, was a master of describing buildings and pretty good at making puzzles, based on this book.) The characters -- okay, so first. Changing Archie and Wolfe into a married couple and trying to keep the same love-hate loyally antagonistic relationship between them was not a great idea; it REALLY hits different. Also, the suspects are, uh. Well, let's just say it has been a minute since I've seen the old psychopath gay dude stereotype, and I did not miss it. There's also a Catholic religious freak stereotype. And then three generic white dudes, including one whose only real character note is wearing a lot of purple and gold, and one white woman whose stereotype is "dummy."

But this all overlooks the weirdness inherent in this book. The victim has a weird Freudian fixation on women who look like his mother did when he was born, which is. Odd. There is an incredibly intense fixation on IQ that hasn't aged well (and would, I suspect, have been kind of weird even when this was published). The relationship between the married couple is by turns manipulative, hostile, and loving, and it left me concerned that maybe Resnicow thought this was what marriage was supposed to be like. The gender relations in general feel lodged firmly in 1957, while the book appears to set in approximately 1980. It's all just a bit. Off. Realistic this book isn't.

But! It is readable and it is a puzzle that can be solved. (I do want to note, to be fair, that the puzzle borrows loosely from several Stout novels, so if you've read all those, solving it is not much of a challenge.) I may, if I can find it, read the next book in the series? I'm curious to know if Resnicow got better or worse (and I really want to know what Stout parts he's going to recycle next). ...more

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