The Mother Hunt

REX STOUT, 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 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 sight-seeing 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
can’t help it: I’m a sucker for quality and an admirer of someone who can take a set of basic materials and use simple tools to transform them into something vibrant, unique, and enduring. And that’s exactly what Rex Stout has done in the Nero Wolfe series.

Even before I met him on the pages of a book fifteen years ago, I knew quite a lot about Nero Wolfe. His reputation had preceded him: he was an imposing giant of a man who holed up in a spectacular midtown Manhattan brownstone, grew orchids, was a beer aficionado … and he was distinctly uncomfortable in the company of women.

Despite some initial reluctance to spend a whole book’s worth of time with a man who flirted with misogyny, I took the plunge. Wolfe, after all, had the good sense to live in Manhattan, and besides, you had to like a man who surrounded himself with exotic tropical plants, consumed epicurean meals, and had the chutzpah to make the universe conform to his rules. And when I met Archie Goodwin, his ebullience and his earthy, rakish charm won me over.

Hooked, I devoured as many Nero Wolfe books as I
could find in one gluttonous wintertime reading orgy. Toward the end of the tenth book I realized that, cabin fever aside, I was getting impatient. I wanted to see Wolfe shaken up a little; the man was becoming downright complacent. And in
The Mother Hunt
that’s exactly what happens: Nero Wolfe not only leaves his brownstone, he actually sleeps in a strange bed in a different house. And to make matters more tenuous for the great man, he’s forced into several face-to-face meetings with women.

Delicious! With these challenges to the known and predictable world, Wolfe is thrown off balance. Will he wobble into ineffectiveness? Will the resounding fall make front-page headlines in all of New York City? Devoted readers of the series grow breathless wondering about the effects of everything tossed topsy-turvy. Suspense abounds as the bodies pile up and Nero Wolfe is forced to search for a solution without the solace of his orchids and his routine, his so-very-rational thought processes in danger of being corrupted by close contact with a woman.

Wolfe, of course, declines to be undone and he triumphs. Critical to solving the case is Archie’s delight in the company of women, in direct proportion to the discomfort his boss feels. From the vantage of the 1990s, Archie seems especially astute. Following a conversation with a woman, Archie observes, “Her reaction to the report had been in the groove for a woman. She had wanted to know what Carol Mardus had said, every word, and also how she had looked and how she had been dressed. There was an implication that the way she had been dressed had a definite bearing on the question, was Richard Valdon the father of the baby? but of course I let that slide.
No man with
any sense assumes that a woman’s words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.”

The italics are mine but the observation is pure Archie and way ahead of its time. Not until the nineties did gender differences in communication styles become a hot topic. I wonder whether Rex Stout considered himself a pioneer.

Despite Wolfe’s daring foray beyond Thirty-fifth Street,
The Mother Hunt
is really vintage Stout: lots of grumbling and fine dining and brilliant thinking on Wolfe’s part, while Archie has a grand old time out and about in the world. Rex Stout made the most of the contrast between thinker and doer, achieving a delicate, ever-changing balance between the curmudgeonly detective and his bubbly assistant. Yet just when Wolfe seems a purely cerebral being, his physical bulk and the very corporeal acts of eating and drinking remind you that he is indeed a creature of the flesh. Whenever Archie appears to be all action, chasing from button manufacturer to baby-sitter to a beachfront rendezvous with the shapely client in the name of detection, he comes up with a brilliant ploy proving that he is no slouch in the thinking department.

Between them, Wolfe and Archie ensure that justice will ultimately prevail, and they do it within a classic structure. The reader in me recognizes that the opening of
The Mother Hunt
is a staple of private-eye fiction, the ending a fixture of the “cozy village” mystery. The book begins with a client coming to Wolfe for help, and at once questions arise. Is she all that she seems, or is there a womanly abundance of secrets lurking in her past? Does she really want a solution to the question she hired Wolfe to answer, or is she after something else? Given Wolfe’s feelings about women,
it’s easy to project duplicity all over the place. And after a Wolfe-thinks-Archie-does investigation, the final scene gathers the suspects together for a drawing-room confrontation/revelation.

The writer in me admires Rex Stout’s ability to shape those elements into something uniquely his.

I understood something about Rex Stout’s skill as a writer when I had the personal good fortune to meet one of his daughters, Rebecca Stout Bradbury, a warm, intelligent woman with a forthright gaze and a gracious charm that immediately put me at my ease. During the morning I spent with her, we talked about her father, our own children, and the state of the American economy. And she showed me several pieces of furniture—a desk and a dresser stand out in my memory—that her father had made.

The wood was so smooth it glowed with a burnished light. Strong and true joints (no nails used here!) held together the graceful, sturdy pieces, carefully crafted and lovingly made. When I was in school, girls took home ec. while boys went to shop. Harder, more mysterious than French toast, for sure, making furniture still seems to me to be just short of magic. The lightness of each element contributes to a whole somehow greater, more pleasing in its finished state than its parts would suggest.

The same can be said of Rex Stout’s mysteries, I realized on my way home that day. He chose his materials with care—characters with zest and a good share of quirky charm; a setting so palpable and familiar you can practically smell it; plots that play on readers’ assumptions—and he crafted them with the same attention to detail, sure hand, and joy in the act of creation that it takes to make fine furniture.

Lingering visions of rollt op desks and dressers with hidden jewelry compartments danced in my head as I drove home. And inspiration struck as I walked in my front door and nearly tripped over one of the piles of books that seem to sprout everywhere in my house.

Aha, I thought, maybe Rex Stout would have suggested a little extracurricular woodshop: learn how to make mortise-and-tenon joints for a new set of book- cases and thicken my plot at the same time….

W
hen the doorbell rang a little after eleven that Tuesday morning in early June and I went to the hall and took a look through the one-way glass panel in the front door, I saw what, or whom, I expected to see: a face a little too narrow, gray eyes a little too big, and a figure a little too thin for the best curves. I knew who it was because she had phoned Monday afternoon for an appointment, and I knew what she looked like because I had seen her a few times at theaters or restaurants.

Also I had known enough about her, part public record and part hearsay, to brief Nero Wolfe without doing any research. She was the widow of Richard Valdon, the novelist, who had died some nine months ago—drowned in somebody’s swimming pool in Westchester—and since four of his books had been best sellers and one of them,
Never Dream Again
, had topped a million copies at $5.95, she should have no trouble paying a bill from a private detective if and when she got one. After reading
Never Dream Again
, five or six years ago, Wolfe had chucked it by giving it to a library, but he had thought better of a later one,
His
Own Image
, and it had a place on the shelves. Presumably that was why he took the trouble to lift his bulk from the chair when I ushered her to the office, and to stand until she was seated in the red leather chair near the end of his desk. As I went to my desk and sat I was not agog. She had said on the phone that she wanted to consult Wolfe about something very personal and confidential, but she didn’t look as if she were being pinched where it hurt. It would probably be something routine like an anonymous letter or a missing relative.

Putting her bag on the stand at her elbow, she turned her head for a look around, stopped her big gray eyes at me for half a second as she turned back, and said to Wolfe, “My husband would have liked this room.”

“M-m,” Wolfe said. “I liked one of his books, with reservations. How old was he when he died?”

“Forty-two.”

“How old are you?”

That was for my benefit. He had a triple conviction: that a) his animus toward women made it impossible for him to judge any single specimen; that b) I needed only an hour with any woman alive to tag her; and that c) he could help out by asking some blunt impertinent question, his favorite one being how old are you. It’s hopeless to try to set him right.