Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19

Rex Stout

R
EX
S
TOUT
, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but, by the age of nine, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel,
Fer-de-Lance
, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them
Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang
, and
Please Pass the Guilt
, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and as a member of several national committees. After the war, he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. A month before his death, he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery,
A Family Affair
. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in
Death Times Three
.

The Rex Stout Library

Fer-de-Lance
The League of Frightened Men
The Rubber Band
The Red Box
Too Many Cooks
Some Buried Caesar
Over My Dead Body
Where There’s a Will
Black Orchids
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Silent Speaker
Too Many Women
And Be a Villain
The Second Confession
Trouble in Triplicate
In the Best Families
Three Doors to Death
Murder by the Book
Curtains for Three
Prisoner’s Base
Triple Jeopardy
The Golden Spiders
The Black Mountain
Three Men Out
Before Midnight
Might As Well Be Dead
Three Witnesses
If Death Ever Slept
Three for the Chair
Champagne for One
And Four to Go
Plot It Yourself
Too Many Clients
Three at Wolfe’s Door
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Homicide Trinity
The Mother Hunt
A Right to Die
Trio for Blunt Instruments
The Doorbell Rang
Death of a Doxy
The Father Hunt
Death of a Dude
Please Pass the Guilt
A Family Affair
Death Times Three

I
first encountered Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe the summer before my senior year of high school while I was camping out in California’s Sequoia National Forest with my good friend Cecil Nelson Widdifield. Now, this was a real he-guy outing. Two men’s men seated around the campfire pondering the meaning of life while puffing on big, smelly cigars and savoring the subtle bouquet of Red Mountain Hearty Burgundy. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. No shaving. No girls—none would come with us. No matter. This was what men did.

Mostly, we froze. Our campsite was a good 9,000 feet up in the mountains. When the sun was directly overhead it warmed the forest floor to a toasty 50 degrees. Nights and mornings the temperature plunged into the 20s. We were desperate for hot showers and our mommies (not necessarily in that order), but we were too proud to come down off that mountain. So we stayed up there for five days and nights wrapped in our sleeping bags, teeth chattering. We read a ton. We’d brought along an excellent supply of he-guy literature. Ian Fleming’s James Bond was this particular teen’s absolute favorite. I loved everything about Agent 007.
His cars. His women. His Beretta .25 in the chamois holster (I pronounced it cha-
moize
). But after three days we’d run through our supply of Bond adventures and were down to the handful of other books Cecil had grabbed off his father’s shelf. One of them was a Nero Wolfe—
Some Buried Caesar
, as it happens.

From the moment I opened its cover I knew I had happened onto something truly special. I immediately wanted to be Archie Goodwin. I wanted to know Nero Wolfe. Who wouldn’t want to know Wolfe? A man who has his life
exactly
the way he wants it. A man who is sure of who he is and what he knows—and what you don’t. I was hooked instantly, a goner. I even tingled all over, though that may have been the onset of frostbite. A lifelong love was born.

You don’t read the Nero Wolfe books, you belong to them. Archie and Wolfe aren’t mere characters—they’re real people. Think about how well you get to know Wolfe, all one-seventh of a ton of him. Think about how quickly you can rattle off his traits and preferences. Likes: The London
Times
crossword puzzle, his orchids, his beer, Fritz Brenner’s mouth-watering meals, the old town house on New York’s West 35th Street. Dislikes: Leaving the old town house on West 35th Street, women, physical exertion of any kind, discussing business while eating, shaking hands with strangers, anything that causes a break in his daily routine, which is anchored by the four hours he spends tending his orchids with Theodore Horstmann. Wolfe is gruff, grouchy, and superior. He scowls, he snorts, he bellows. When he’s thinking deep thoughts he pushes his lips in and out. You know the man as well as you know a member of your own family. His house is your house. The plant rooms. The pool table in the basement. His office, with the red leather chair for his most important
guests (and yellow chairs for everyone else). You even know how many steps there are from the sidewalk up to the front door—seven.

And then there’s Archie, our storyteller, who is everything Wolfe is not. Archie is young and chipper, a ladies’ man, a wisecracker. He does Wolfe’s legwork, sleeps under his roof, takes his criticisms and, on occasion, his praise (“Satisfactory” is the great detective’s highest accolade). Wolfe is a master of deduction, a pure intellect. Archie is a man of action and something of a romantic. Indeed, his answer to what’s wrong with our civilization is that we’ve quit drinking champagne from ladies’ slippers. It’s safe to say that Archie and Wolfe would be lost without each other. I know we readers of crime literature would be lost without them.

I think the highest compliment you can pay any murder-mystery novel is to say that you’d enjoy it even if nobody got killed. This is definitely the case with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfes. The characters are so well drawn, the relationships so engaging, the dialogue so sharp that they make for highly entertaining reading without any crime whatsoever. Ah, but crime there is, of course, and at this Stout was a master. His plots are absorbing and baffling, yet remarkably free of contrivance. They’re seamless. They’re what we who write mysteries aspire to.

The one you are holding,
Murder by the Book
, is the story of three murder victims—a legal clerk, an editor, and a typist—and of the unsolicited novel that may or may not tie their deaths together. This one happens to be a particular favorite of mine, I guess because it takes place in the world of New York publishing. The publishing scene has changed some in the forty years since Stout wrote it. Quaint, tweedy little family-run houses like his Scholl and Hanna have largely given way to
huge, multinational media conglomerates. The business isn’t nearly as gentlemanly or personal as it once was, and it’s a lot more about money than it is great literature. All of which makes it even more appropriate to ask the vital question Stout poses here: Is there such a thing as a manuscript worth killing for? To be honest, I know of at least two agents and a half-dozen editors who would promptly reply yes—provided they were sure they could get away with it. But that’s in the so-called real world. In the world of Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe is on the case. And when he is, nobody gets away with anything.

Through the years I’ve come back to Wolfe again and again. It never seems to matter if I’ve read the book before. If anything, Wolfes improve on a second reading. They are a precious resource. If you’re new to them,
Murder by the Book
will make for a splendid introduction. Pull up a chair. If you’re an old friend, then Nero Wolfe needs no introduction whatsoever and I’m merely holding up your progress.

I leave you to it.

—David Handler

S
omething remarkable happened that cold Tuesday in January. Inspector Cramer, with no appointment, showed up a little before noon at Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street and, after I had ushered him into the office and he had exchanged greetings with Wolfe and lowered himself into the red leather chair, he said right out, “I dropped in to ask a little favor.”

What was remarkable was his admitting it. From my chair at my desk I made an appropriate noise. He sent me a sharp glance and asked if I had something.

“No, sir,” I told him courteously, “I’m right on top. You just jolted that out of me. So many times I’ve seen you come here for a favor and try to bull it or twist it, it was quite a shock.” I waved it away tolerantly. “Skip it.”

His face, chronically red, deepened a shade. His broad shoulders stiffened, and the creases spreading from the corners of his gray-blue eyes showed more as the eyelids tightened. Then, deciding I was playing for a blurt, he controlled it. “Do you know,” he asked, “whose opinion of you I would like to have? Darwin’s. Where were you while evolution was going on?”

“Stop brawling,” Wolfe muttered at us from behind his desk. He was testy, not because he would have minded seeing either Cramer or me draw blood, but because he always resented being interrupted in the middle of a London
Times
crossword puzzle. He frowned at Cramer. “What favor, sir?”