Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar/The Golden Spiders. So you’ve never read a Nero Wolfe mystery and want to know the best way to make the acquaintance of the portly detective who raises orchids, never leaves his New York brownstone on business, and leaves the legwork (and narration) to his trusty assistant Archie Goodwin. What’s your next move? I suggest that you order a copy of this double-decker Bantam paperback that reprints two of the best Wolfe novels, the first originally published in 1939 and the second in 1953. Rex Stout’s witty, fast-moving prose hasn’t dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I’ve spent the past three decades reading and re-reading Stout’s novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor (TT).

The River. Jean Renoir’s 1951 screen version of Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel about expatriate life in India is one of the permanent masterpieces of adolescence, a gentle tale of innocence and experience filled with lush Technicolor images of a land of lost content. Renoir summed it up like this: “The discovery of love by small girls, the death of a little boy who was too fond of snakes, the rather foolish dignity of an English family living on India like a plum on a peach-tree: above all, India itself.” David Thomson captured the essence of The River in eleven words: “So little happens, yet you feel the wheel of the world” (TT).

Mel Tormé and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette (Bethlehem). Originally recorded in 1956, this immensely sophisticated collection of pop standards teamed Tormé with a ten-piece jazz ensemble whose arrangements were based on the influential 1949-50 recordings of Miles Davis’ “Birth of the Cool” nonet and played by such heavy West Coast hitters as Bud Shank, Red Mitchell, and Mel Lewis. It established Tormé as a world-class jazz singer at a single stroke and remains wonderfully listenable to this day. The opening track, “Lulu’s Back in Town,” became one of Tormé’s trademark songs, though his sensitively sung version of Harold Arlen’s “When the Sun Comes Out” is, if possible, even better (TT).

Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II. This book, originally published in 1992 as Round Up the Usual Suspects, is not a standard-issue piece of celebrity-oriented fluff but a snappily written, hugely entertaining primary-source history that delves deeply into the genesis of the iconic studio-system picture of the Forties. It may well be the most informative book ever written about the making of a Hollywood picture, and among many other useful things, it leaves the attentive reader in no possible doubt that the auteur theory of film is utterly irrelevant to the creation of an assembly-line film like Casablanca (TT).

Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (Rizzoli, $35). If you want to get up to speed on Morandi, this lavishly illustrated monograph, published in 1998, is the place to start. The most lucid and sensible of present-day art critics, Wilkin explains with perfect clarity why the Italian painter’s soft-spoken, deceptively repetitive tabletop microcosms rank among the greatest achievements of twentieth-century art. Look first, then read–then look again (TT).

Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five (JSP, five CDs). After Fats Waller, Louis Jordan was the great exponent of good-time small-group jazz whose entertainment value cunningly concealed its musical sophistication. A superb alto saxophonist who had a knack for singing (and picking) comic songs, Jordan put together a “jump band” so appealing that it was successfully marketed to blacks and whites alike, in the process leaving an indelible stamp on both R&B and early white rock and roll. This budget-priced, gorgeously remastered five-CD box set contains all 131 of the recordings Jordan and his combo cut for Decca between 1938 and 1950, not a few of which topped the charts. Like Waller’s recordings, they never fail to hit the spot–especially after a long, tiring day at the office. Listen to them in tandem with John Chilton’s excellent 1994 biography of Jordan (TT).

Act of Violence. A hard, unrelenting 1949 film noir about a World War II vet (Van Heflin) who made a bad mistake and the crippled ex-friend (Robert Ryan at his tortured best) who means to make him pay for it. Directed with exceptional skill by Fred Zinnemann, this tough tale of postwar angst also features strong supporting performances by Janet Leigh (as Heflin’s innocent young wife) and Mary Astor (as an aging hooker) and a memorable score by Bronislau Kaper. Noir wasn’t MGM’s strong suit, but this film is an exception to the rule (TT).

Sybille Bedford, A Legacy (Counterpoint, $16). All of the adjectives Sybille Bedford’s writing brings to mind belong to the same family: sharp, acute, penetrating, piercing, and so on. In her most famous novel, two marriages, inauspicious in different ways, bind together the fates of three families in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany. How could it have taken me this long to discover Bedford? Why isn’t a writer with her observational powers, slicing wit, and historical grasp–a woman whose work no less a cutting edge than Dorothy Parker found “almost terrifyingly brilliant”–better known? The curious can start with A Legacy, whose certainties and mysteries stand in perfect balance (OGIC).