Gambit

She was staring up at me. "He's burning up a dictionary?"
"Right. That's nothing. Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup."

    — Archie, explaining Wolfe's reaction to a dictionary that allows the use of "imply" in place of "infer," in Gambit, chapter 1.

A chess prodigy is poisoned during a club tournament, and the police arrest the member who served the victim hot chocolate. Wolfe is hired to exonerate the suspect, but finds that no one else has either an adequate motive or the requisite opportunity.

Gambit employs three distinctive plot elements found in other Wolfe stories. The means by which poison is administered is very similar to the means used in "Cordially Invited to Meet Death". A tape recording is made in an Italian restaurant, one which also appears in "Poison à la Carte". And the part that a gambit plays in a murder echoes "Method Three for Murder".