Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 07
Read Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 07 Online
Authors: Over My Dead Body
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #New York (N.Y.), #Wolfe; Nero (Fictitious Character), #General, #Private Investigators, #Private Investigators - New York (State) - New York, #Political, #Mystery Fiction
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 he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas but he 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 and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that 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 from 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 Erie 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 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-eight. 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
.
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
met Rex Stout in the aftermath of a crime. Beg pardon, alleged crime. The creator of Mr. Wolfe and Archie didn’t believe any crime had been committed.
The year was 1962; the place, Rochester, New York. I was working there as a copywriter in an ad agency whose major account was Eastman Kodak, irreverently known as Big Yellow. I was also one of the youngest, if not the youngest, board members of the Friends of the Rochester Public Library. This was the first of several Friends groups I became associated with out of my general love of, and need for, libraries, and it stands out as one of the most vigorous and progressive.
The crime, so-called, was not the kind that figures in one of these fine Stout reprints. It was what some term a victimless crime. But to the authorities in Rochester, especially the district attorney, whose press statements seemed to reek of puritanical hellfire and political ambition, it was a crime of the most dangerous kind.
To wit: selling a book.
The book was the Grove Press edition of Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
. Sale of the allegedly obscene book was prohibited in New York State and a lot of other states as well. The alleged perp was a smallish,
mild-appearing bookseller, whom I’ll call Norman B. Norman B. ran a large independent store not far from the massive granite block of the main library, on the bank of the Genesee River. Along with the usual array of semilurid girlie magazines and sexy paperbacks, in which the raciest word was something like “nipples,” the bookstore offered Miller’s novel for sale.
Which got Norman B. in a peck of trouble.
Now I honestly don’t remember whether he was actually served with an arrest warrant, or just ordered by the D.A. to get rid of the Miller or else. But I do remember the quick response. Certain members of the Friends, including several stouthearted technical writers from Kodak, formed an ad hoc group called Audience Unlimited. Its purpose was to advertise and write letters objecting to the law coming down hard on Norman B. and, more pertinently, on the freedom to read. Yours truly was part of the new group.
Norman B. himself immediately took countermeasures, instituting a legal action to overturn the
Tropic
ban. In 1964 the case was decided in his favor by the New York State courts, some four months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the book not obscene.
In the midst of the
Sturm und Drang
unleashed by the
Tropic
affair, Mr. Stout came to town.
He came not to defend Norman B. or Henry M. but as a guest speaker at the sixth annual Friends Literary Award presentation. The award that year was given to Lewis Stiles Gannett, a native of Rochester and a journalist, author, and at that time editor of Doubleday’s marvelous Mainstream of America series of historical studies.
The award ceremony was held in the great main hall of the Rochester library, with a small social gathering preceding. As a Friends board member, I was invited to attend the reception. The words “high excitement” hardly describe my state; the honored
guest was a Famous Name Writer, and I was a devoted fan of his mysteries.
I vividly recall my first sight of Rex Stout, who was at that time seventy-five. His hair was white and so was his splendid long beard, and I remember thinking that he looked like an American cousin of Shaw. Of course he was a godlike figure to me—I was thirty, slogging along fairly unsuccessfully with one third-rate pulp novel after another. But I approached him, shook his hand, muttered a few words, and I remember that he was friendly and humorous: kindness personified.
He was less friendly and humorous when it was his turn to speak. Of course he was appropriately warm and complimentary to his friend Gannett. But then he launched into a jeremiad against book-banners. He said, “Efforts to censor what people read are not justified under the American system.” He thrilled me with his remarks. The audience gave him an ovation when he finished.
Which brings me around to the real point of this Introduction.
Rex Stout was a lifelong champion of writers, and a lifelong foe of those who would take advantage of them or suppress their work. As a highly successful writer himself, he obviously believed in giving something back to the profession for the benefit of others who weren’t so successful.
Virtually his whole life testifies to this. Stout became a member of the Authors League in 1915. He was president of the League, the umbrella organization for the Authors Guild and the Dramatists Guild, from 1951 to 1955 and again from 1961 to 1969.
He served the Authors Guild as president from 1943 to 1945 and was a member of the Guild Council from 1942 until the time of his death in 1975. As the Guild’s
Bulletin
said in its obituary, “He was always ready to give of his time and spirit to Guild business.” Of his many activities, probably none was more important than his presidency of the Authors League Fund, which helps professional writers who happen to fall into dire financial distress.
A man named Olin Miller has said, “Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.” That’s more than a little self-serving; millions of men and women in other jobs would make the same statement about their work. But it’s also true that writers have few defenders beyond themselves.
That’s why the Authors League was formed, and its two guilds as well.
That’s why Rex Stout gave so much of himself to Guild and League causes.
That’s why he came to Rochester and spoke out against the immoral banning of Miller’s novel. (Who knows what he thought of the book? He might have hated it; I’ve never been wild about it myself. But it was a serious book, and if you allow the yahoos to ban one such, you open the door to suppression of all of them—and a lot of other art besides. Which is hardly big news but is, regrettably, a recurring problem.)
Rex Stout gave me great pleasure through his novels. I expect he has done the same for you and will certainly do so again in
Over My Dead Body
.
But he also gave me great pride in my chosen profession and a sure knowledge that, someday, if ever I could, I had to give something back too.
I’ll never forget the day Rex Stout came to Rochester. If you’d been there, you wouldn’t either.
—John Jakes
T
he bell rang and I went to the front and opened the door and there she was. I said good morning. “Pliz,” she said, “I would like to see Misturr Nero Wolfe.”
Or you might have spelled it plihz or plizz or plihsz. However you spelled it, it wasn’t Middle West or New England or Park Avenue or even East Side. It wasn’t American, and naturally it irritated me a little. But I politely invited her in and conducted her to the office and got her a chair, and then extracted her name, which I had to ask her to spell.
“Mr. Wolfe will be engaged until eleven o’clock,” I told her, with a glance at the wall clock above my desk, which said ten thirty. “I’m Archie Goodwin, his confidential secretary. If you’d like to save time by starting on me …”
She shook her head and said she had plenty of time. I asked if she would like a book or magazine, and she shook her head again, and I passed her up and resumed at my desk, where I was heading up a bunch of hybridizing cards for use upstairs. Five minutes later I had finished and was checking them over when I heard her voice behind me:
“I believe I would like a book. May I?”
I waved at the shelves and told her to help herself and went on with the checking. Presently I looked up when she approached and stood beside me with a volume in her hand.
“Misturr Wolfe reads this?” she asked. She had a nice soft low voice which would have sounded all right if she had taken the trouble to learn how to pronounce words. I glanced at the title and told her Wolfe had read it some time ago.
“But he stoodies it?”
“Why should he? He’s a genius, he don’t have to study anything.”