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A geek, a nerd and\\ntwo tough-as-nails ranch women fight rubber rustlers during WWII \\u2013 when rubber was\\nworth big money!

A masterpiece of screwball romcom from Clarence Budington Kelland, the man who\\ninvented the genre, set against the background of the Homefront during the\\nSecond World War. The Puzzle of Archibald the Great is filled with his trademark\\ndelirious, pixilated battle-of-the-sexes dialogue. Archibald Cloyd was an\\nubergeek and as pedantic as it is possible to be. He looked like Napoleon, he\\nstrutted like Napoleon, so naturally, he made himself the world\'s greatest\\nexpert on the Little Corsican. Naturally, Hollywood hired him at thousands of\\ndollars a week as the technical director on a movie about Napoleon.

Wilson Page, Cloyd\'s secretary, was a nerd. He didn\\u2019t fit in anywhere, and when\\nthe Air Force turned him down due to a childhood heart problem, Wilson gave up\\non life. He figured he didn\'t deserve anything better than being nursemaid to a\\nstrutting egomaniac like Archibald Cloyd. He looked down on himself and Cloyd\\nin equal measure.

But when Archibald fell for a gangster\\u2019s moll, the gangster took exception to\\nthe relationship, and the pompous little geek proved too stuck-up to back down\\neven when faced with torture. Wilson Page discovered he had developed affection\\nfor 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\\nEgyptian venture, and with Archibald now thousands of miles away from the\\nhot-tempered gangster, Wilson Page breathed a sigh of relief.

But his relief didn\'t last long. In the desert, Page discovered a complication\\nhe had never dreamed of, when they encountered the Widow Hammer, an outsized\\nwoman with an outsized voice that could call the cattle home from a range\\nbeyond the mountains in a different state, who took a shine to Archibald\\nbecause, as she said, "He talks beautiful. He don\'t always make\\nsense 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\\nirritating Miss Jemima Ward, a young woman who was used to running her own\\nranch, which she had inherited from her father, and looked down on soft men who\\nearned their keep at soft jobs sitting in chairs, like secretaries to academic\\npedants, and looked down even further on young men who were not enlisted and\\noff fighting in defense of their country against the fascist regimes of Italy\\nand Germany.

Just when it looked like things couldn\'t get more complicated, Page and Jemma\\ndiscovered an old abandoned mine filled with a fortune in stolen rubber tires,\\none of the homefront\'s least obtainable and most valuable commodities. And who\\ndid it belong to? The same hot-tempered gangster who had sworn to do the dirty\\nto Archibald the first chance he got.