Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk (USA 2015)

From the Publisher:
From the New York Times-bestselling author of the Rabbi Small Mysteries: Eight tales about a witty, crime-solving college professor.
Before creating the widely popular Jewish sleuth Rabbi Small, Harry Kemelman authored a series of short stories featuring another quick-witted and wisecracking amateur sleuth: college professor Nicky Welt. Collected in The Nine Mile Walk, the Nicky Welt stories are a mix of ingenious logic puzzles and brilliant detective work, revealing that Kemelman has always been a master of the genre.

In the collection's title story, Welt overhears a simple phrase: "A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain," and from this evidence alone he not only figures out that a crime is about to be committed, but also realizes how to stop it. Whether chasing a kidnapper or puzzling over a dead man's chessboard, Welt is armed with the most powerful weapon on earth: the human mind.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk. The Nicky Welt Stories. Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781504016148 (August, 2015), eBook, 533 KB (ca. 176 p.), $7.99.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories (UK 1971)

From the Publisher:
Why was Claude Bennett battered to death with a swastika-encrusted dagger-haft when there was a perfectly lethal concentration camp guard's bludgeon just as handy?

Surely a man about to commit suicide would never open his last chess game with the deadly but difficult Logan-Asquith Gambit?

How the hell could Professor Nicholas Welt possibly solve a crime he didn't know had been committed?

Nicky Welt is probably crime fiction's most successful armchair detective. His hunches are logically unfaultable, his insight obscure but supreme. He is the criminological know-all whose conclusions are just that much more conclusively conclusive. But even though he always lets you know he'll get his man - he'll get you too.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories. Penguin, ISBN: 0140032118 (March, 1971), 144 p., 25p 5/-.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk (USA 1968)

From the Publisher:
ORDER PUZZLES WITH A FLAIR
Mystery fans who have been following the famous Nicky Welt stories will be enchanted with this harvest of ingenious puzzles starring the smart professor who solves murders left and right just by raising an eyebrow."...Nicky wears his thinking cap as effectively as Rabbi David Small..."

"Rejoicing is in order. Mr. Kemelman... gives a thoroughly refreshing change from the booze-and-broads and/or cool-spies-and-hot-pants atmosphere.... For this we honor him - and even more for providing us with the classic cool of a cerebral sleuth." - Book World

"Harry Kemelman, who had the audacity to write two best-sellers which failed to contain a single dirty word, has done it again... Recommended for anyone who likes a detective story, boy, girl, man or woman. You can leave it lying around the house, read it on the bus without hiding the jacket, or give it to a friend... Delightful... - The Detroit News

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk. The Nicky Welt Stories. Fawcett Crest R1194 (October, 1968), 186 p., ¢60.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk (UK 1968)

From the Publisher:
Author of Friday the Rabbi Slept Late and Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry the two internationally acclaimed bestsellers -- Harry Kemelman has now assembled in this single volume his popular Nicky Welt stories.

'In a sense,' Mr Kemelman remarks in his introduction, 'Rabbi David Small can be said to be the son of Professor Nicholas Welt' -- and many mystery fans will already know Nicky Welt, Snowdon Professor of English Language and Literature at a small college, from the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

The title story is an acknowledged classic of the genre and, to quote Ellery Queen, 'We think Mr Kemelman is perpetuating the purest form of the detective story with the author playing absolutely fair with the reader from first word to last'. This collection will therefore be enthusiastically welcomed by the connoisseur of the puzzle story as well as by the many thousands who admired the author's two full-length 'Rabbi' novels.

Acclaim from America for The Nine Mile Walk
Anthony Boucher
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW:
The delightful novels about Rabbi David Small by Harry Kemelman are among the very top best sellers, in hard covers, in the history of the formal detective story... I hope that I am not destroying the sales potential of Mr. Kemelman's newest book when I reveal that this time all the characters are (so far as one knows) goyim. I trust that the countless Kemelman fans will nevertheless take to their bosoms The Nine Mile Walk; it's a lovely book.

Since 1947 Kemelman has been publishing, far too infrequently, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine a series of stories about Nicky Welt, which is among the brightest gems in the literature of pure armchair detection.

Here are all eight of them, from the carliest (the title story, which still dazzles me on the nth rereading) to the latest, longest and most intricate. Formally, these are faultless.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk. London: Hutchinson, 1968, ISBN: 0090897307, 190 p., £?.??.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk (USA 1967)

From the Publisher:
Great news for mystery fans! Harry Kemelman -- winner of the Mystery Writers of America "Edgar" for the best first mystery novel of the year for Friday the Rabbi Slept Late and best-selling author of Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry -- has now assembled in a single volume his popular Nicky Welt mystery stories.

Nicky Welt is nearly as well known to mystery fans as Mr. Kemelman's other "detective," Rabbi David Small. "In a sense," Mr. Kemelman remarks in his Introduction to THE NINE MILE WALK, "Rabbi David Small can be said to be the son of Professor Nicholas Welt."

As readers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine -- in which all the stories have appeared -- will know, Nicky Welt is Snowdon Professor of English Language and Literature at a small college. The Nicky Welt stories fall into what is commonly called the detection, or puzzle, category. Ellery Queen has described them this way: "We think Mr. Kemelman is perpetuating the purest form of the detective story... with the author playing absolutely fair with the reader from first word to last."

In the title story, for example, the only information Nicky has to go on, is an overhear comment: "A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain." On the basis of this meager information he is able to project the fact that a crime is about to be committed!

One of the stories in the present volume -- "The Man on the Ladder" -- is the most recent piece of fiction to have been written by Harry Kemelman since the publication of his bestselling Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry.

Contents: The Nine Mile Walk -- The Straw Man -- The Ten O'Clock Scholar -- End Play -- Time And Time Again -- The Whistling Tea Kettle -- The Bread And Butter Case -- The Man On The Ladder.

Harry Kemelman: The Nine Mile Walk. The Nicky Welt Stories. New York: Putnam, 1967, 186 p., $5.95 (?).