CLICK

LINK FOR YOUR OWN COPY

A geek, a nerd and

two tough-as-nails ranch women fight rubber rustlers during WWII – when rubber was

worth big money!

A masterpiece of screwball romcom from Clarence Budington Kelland, the man who

invented the genre, set against the background of the Homefront during theSecond World War. The Puzzle of Archibald the Great is filled with his trademarkdelirious, pixilated battle-of-the-sexes dialogue. Archibald Cloyd was anubergeek and as pedantic as it is possible to be. He looked like Napoleon, hestrutted like Napoleon, so naturally, he made himself the world's greatestexpert on the Little Corsican. Naturally, Hollywood hired him at thousands ofdollars a week as the technical director on a movie about Napoleon.

Wilson Page, Cloyd's secretary, was a nerd. He didn’t fit in anywhere, and when

the Air Force turned him down due to a childhood heart problem, Wilson gave upon life. He figured he didn't deserve anything better than being nursemaid to astrutting egomaniac like Archibald Cloyd. He looked down on himself and Cloydin equal measure.

But when Archibald fell for a gangster’s moll, the gangster took exception to

the relationship, and the pompous little geek proved too stuck-up to back downeven when faced with torture. Wilson Page discovered he had developed affectionfor the pigmy popinjay and swore to extract Cloyd from the situation.

Then the movie company moved to Arizona to shoot desert scenes about Napoleon's

Egyptian venture, and with Archibald now thousands of miles away from thehot-tempered gangster, Wilson Page breathed a sigh of relief.

But his relief didn't last long. In the desert, Page discovered a complication

he had never dreamed of, when they encountered the Widow Hammer, an outsizedwoman with an outsized voice that could call the cattle home from a rangebeyond the mountains in a different state, who took a shine to Archibaldbecause, as she said, "He talks beautiful. He don't always makesense a body can understand, but the sound of it is lovely."

And matters became even more complicated for Wilson Page when he fell for the

irritating Miss Jemima Ward, a young woman who was used to running her ownranch, which she had inherited from her father, and looked down on soft men whoearned their keep at soft jobs sitting in chairs, like secretaries to academicpedants, and looked down even further on young men who were not enlisted andoff fighting in defense of their country against the fascist regimes of Italyand Germany.

Just when it looked like things couldn't get more complicated, Page and Jemma

discovered an old abandoned mine filled with a fortune in stolen rubber tires,one of the homefront's least obtainable and most valuable commodities. And whodid it belong to? The same hot-tempered gangster who had sworn to do the dirtyto Archibald the first chance he got.