The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe — 1951

Steven Denby pays Wolfe to preside over a card game between the two men who jointly own the Candy Club. Archie works out the reason: one of the players is expected to be death -- and Archie himself is put up as the stake.

It takes a black orchid to move Wolfe: he agrees to travel upstate to see Mr. Finley's rare strain. The killing that gives the case its name has nothing to do with the flowers, and began somewhere else entirely.

Threatening notes have kept Doris Moray shut in her hotel room. Archie is nobody's fool, except in the one reliable way -- and Miss Moray is a beautiful woman.

Wolfe accepts Mrs. Collins's cocktail invitation and then delegates the attending to Archie -- who arrives to find that this particular party has death on the guest list.

Young Dr. Benjamin Sloan earns the name that stuck to the case, in a killing salted with false clues throughout. It starts on a sunny afternoon, when his nurse Grace Banks steps into his private office.

Archie is midway through his standing lecture about the household finances when a stranger calling himself John Blake telephones in some urgency -- and names a thousand-dollar fee.

A burglar named Willy Ince did a tidy job of a house and one careless thing: he left a print on the door on his way through. A woman is afterwards found dead in that room, and Ince comes to Wolfe to keep the murder off him.

Dinner at the Merle house does not go ahead as planned. Wolfe has barely arrived before the host, Arthur Merle, is discovered stabbed.

Five hundred dollars turns up with an unsigned note attached. Following the money takes Wolfe into a household of decidedly peculiar people, and a death by poison.

Tom Wilcox walked free on a charge of killing a singer, and now wants an hour of Wolfe's time. He does not get to the end of the phone call: a shot cuts him off, and Archie is left holding a dead line.

The papers had it that a blind industrialist, Horace Kraile, had welcomed home a daughter he believed dead for thirteen years. Kraile suspects an impostor, and asks Wolfe to stop a murder before it happens.

The caller from the Port Hotel gets as far as naming her room number and her price -- a thousand dollars -- before the line goes wrong. By the time Archie reaches room 304 the client is beyond hiring anyone.