"They were trying it with a bogy, but for a bogy to be effective its terrors must be known to the victim." This is the actual Rex Stout book chosen for John Dickson Carr's 10 Best Detective Novels , and I realized on cracking open the first chapter that I had read it in high school, despite remembering nothing about it. JDC chose Stout for his "literary" skill and character work: In the powerful story called The League of Frightened Men, with its tortured figure of Paul Chapin, you will find Wolfe the psychologist drawing a moral which might well be heeded by many writers of the too-hard-boiled school. A group of Harvard boys seriously injure an underclassman in a hazing prank, leaving him with a permanent leg disability. They guiltily form a "League of Atonement" to take care of him. What they don't realize is that their victim is Moriarty. Twenty-five years later, he is apparently taking his revenge by killing off the League one by on...

"If this is all true—you knew it last night, didn't you? Why the hell didn't you spill it when the sheriff was there? When the cops were there on the spot?" "I represented no interest last night, sir." Part of my motivation for reading Some Buried Caesar was that I came away from John Dickson Carr's essay 'The Grandest Game in the World' thinking that it was his one of his favourite mystery novels . When I looked up the essay again recently, I realized that the full list was written out elsewhere in the book it was collected in (if I had just turned back a couple chapters) and this was not one of them. Egg on my face, and the post has been amended accordingly. Well, I can still point to the other motivation, David Bordwell's lengthy and fascinating essay on Rex Stout's novels, which points out that in this one, Wolfe forces the killer to commit suicide. What on earth leads up to that? Some Buried Caesar is an atypical entry i...