Where There's a Will (2 page)

I also learned from Rex Stout, among others, that popular fiction, regardless of genre, can be ambitious and can have more than a little something worthwhile to say to the reader. Archie Goodwin (who is, actually, more the central figure of this series than Nero Wolfe himself) is Huck Finn brought into the modern age,
Huck with his emancipator's soul intact but less naive, more cynical—yet strangely more hopeful, too. Nero Wolfe's exceptional intellect has allowed him to see too deeply into our modern world, and he has turned away from it, perhaps out of despair or disgust or both, taking refuge in a life of special private pleasures of the mind and body, redeemed only by a strict personal code and an adherence to the values that built civilization but which “civilized” society seems to have forgotten or abandoned. Without Archie Goodwin—the archetypal good man who wins; what a name!—Wolfe would be ineffective, a hermit and curmudgeon not worth reading about. Together, each bringing his strengths and weaknesses to the drama, they play out allegories of various aspects of the human condition with a grace that should make this series of novels timeless.

Having said all of this, I would be remiss if I did not warn the new reader that, while always engaging, these are not tales of fast action. They contain little blood—a smear there, a drop here. More often than not, the major events take place offstage, and the lead characters only discuss them after the fact! The pleasure for the reader lies, instead, in the fascination of the characters (which grows with every book one reads) and the play of the mind. The play of the mind … Yet these are not puzzle stories in the classic sense, like some Agatha Christie. In fact you often don't care that much
who
killed whom. Stout was concerned more with the why of murder and with exploring how essentially ethical men, like Wolfe and Goodwin, differ from the muck of humanity in their methods of thinking.

I will not claim that Stout's prose is without fault.
For the most part it is supple, so clear that it appears simpler than it really is, and strong. But in some of the books, including
Where There's A Will
, the great man trips up and shows us he's human. For example, Wolfe “snaps” his dialogue when such a manner of speaking is patently impossible; try snapping a line yourself, with the attempt to sound like thumb clicking forefinger or like a mousetrap being sprung, and you'll see what I mean; only someone wearing bad dentures has a chance of “snapping” out words, much to his embarrassment. But the slips are few and minor, and the story usually sweeps the reader along so well that the flaws are never noticed.

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels had such an impact on me, in my formative years as a writer, that I now collect the hard-to-get first-edition hardcovers. They are not cheap, these rare volumes. But I've had a little writing success of my own, and I would rather indulge a sentimental streak than spend the money on cashmere socks and ancient bottles of bordeaux. If you read my books, you'll be hard-pressed to see where I write at all like Rex Stout. But a piece of him is in there; believe me.

For better or worse, this is one way a writer lives after his death, other than in his own books: in the indelible imprint he leaves when you crack the covers of his novels and give him the chance to leave his fingerprints all over your soul. It's not an invasion of privacy, but a small crime of kindness, a breaking and entering with the intention of giving rather than taking.

Enjoy.

—Dean R. Koontz

I
put the 1938–39 edition of
Who's Who in America
, open, on the leaf of my desk, because it was getting too heavy to hold on a hot day.

“They were sprinkled at discreet intervals,” I stated aloud. “If they didn't fudge when they supplied the dope, April is thirty-six, May forty-one, and June forty-six. Five years apart. Apparently their parents started at the middle of the calendar and worked backwards, and also apparently they named June that because she was born in June, 1893. But the next one shows an effort of the imagination. I prefer to suppose it was Mamma who thought of it. Although the baby was actually born in February, they named it May …”

There was no sign that Nero Wolfe was listening as he leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, but I went on anyhow. On that hot July day, in spite of the swell lunch Fritz had served us, I would have sold the world for a dime. My vacation was over. The news from Europe was enough to make you want to put signs at every ten yards along the seacoast, “Private
Shore. No Sharks or Statesmen Allowed.” I had bandages on my arms where the black flies had bored for blood in Canada. Worst of all, Nero Wolfe had gone in for a series of fantastic expenditures, the bank balance was the lowest it had been for years, and the detective business was rotten; and just to be contrary, instead of doing his share of the worrying about it he seemed to have adopted the attitude that it would be impertinent to attempt to interfere with natural laws. Which had me boiling. He might be eccentric enough to find pleasure in a personal and intimate test of the operations of the New Deal WPA, but if I had my way about it the only meaning WPA would ever have for yours truly would be Wolfe Pays Archie.

So I went on buzzing. “It all depends,” I declared, “on what it is that's biting them. It must be something pretty painful, or they wouldn't have made an appointment to call on you in a body. The death of their brother Noel has probably taken care of their financial potentialities. Noel's in here too.” I frowned at the
Who's Who.
“He was forty-nine, the eldest, three years older than June, and was next to Cullen himself in Daniel Cullen and Company. Did it all himself, started there as a runner in 1908 at twelve bucks a week. That was in his obit in the
Times
, day before yesterday. Did you read it?”

Wolfe was motionless. I made a face at him and resumed.

“They're not due for twenty minutes yet, so I might as well give you the benefit of my research. There's more in this magazine article I dug up than in
Who's Who.
A lot of rich and colorful details. For instance, it says that May has worn cotton stockings
ever since the Japs bombed Shanghai. It says that Mamma was an amazing woman because she was the mother of four extraordinary children. I have never understood why, in cases like this, it is assumed that Papa's contribution was negligible, but there's no time to go into that now. It's the extraordinary children we're dealing with.”

I flipped a page of the magazine. “To sum up about Noel, who died Tuesday. It seems he had a row of buttons installed on his desk in the Wall Street offices of Daniel Cullen and Company; one for each country in Europe and Asia, not to mention South America. When he pressed a button, that country's government resigned and they telephoned him to ask who to put in next. You can't say that wasn't extraordinary. The eldest daughter, June, was, as I say, born in June, 1893. At the age of twenty she wrote a daring and sensational book called
Riding Bareback
, and a year later another one entitled
Affairs of a Titmouse.
Then she married a brilliant young New York lawyer named John Charles Dunn, who is at the present moment the Secretary of State of the United States of America. He sent a cogent letter to Japan last week. The magazine states that Dunn's meteoric rise is in great part due to his remarkable wife. Mamma again. June is in fact a mamma, having a son, Andrew, twenty-four and a daughter, Sara, twenty-two.”

I shifted to elevate my feet. “The other two extraordinaries are still named Hawthorne. May Hawthorne never has married. They are thinking of prosecuting her under the anti-trust law for her monopoly on brain cells. At the age of twenty-six she revolutionized colloid chemistry, something about
bubbles and drops. Since 1933 she has been president of Varney College, and in those six years has increased its endowment funds by over twelve million bucks, showing that she has gone from colloidal to colossal. It says her intellectual power is extraordinary.

“I was wrong when I said the other two are still named Hawthorne. In April's case I should have said ‘again' instead of ‘still'. While she was taking London by storm in 1927 she glanced over the prostrate nobility at her feet and picked out the Duke of Lozano. Four other dukes, a bunch of earls and barons, and two soap manufacturers committed suicide. But alas. Three years later she divorced Lozano, while she was taking Paris by storm, and became April Hawthorne again, privately as well as publicly. She is the only actress, alive or dead, who has played both Juliet and Nora. At present she is taking New York by storm for the eighth time. I can confirm that personally, because a month ago I paid a speculator five dollars and fifty cents for a ticket to
Scrambled Eggs.
You may remember that I tried to persuade you to go. I figured that since April Hawthorne is the acknowledged queen of the American stage, you owed it to yourself to see her.”

Not a flicker. He wouldn't rouse.

“Of course,” I said sarcastically, “it is deplorable that these extraordinary Hawthorne gals have no more consideration for your privacy than to come charging in here before you finish digesting your lunch. No matter what is biting them, no matter if their brother Noel left them a million dollars apiece and they want to pay you half of it for putting a tail on
their banker, they ought to have more regard for common courtesy. When June phoned this morning I told her—”

“Archie!” His eyes opened. “I am aware that you call Mrs. Dunn, whom you have never met, by her first name, because you think it irritates me. It does. Don't do it. Shut up.”

“—I told Mrs. Dunn it was an intolerable invasion of your inalienable right to sit here in peace and watch the bank balance disappear in the darkening twilight of the slow but inevitable dispersion of your mental powers and the pitiful collapse of your instinct of self-preservation—”

“Archie!” He thumped the desk.

It was time to side-step, but I was rescued from that necessity by the door's opening and the appearance of Fritz Brenner. Fritz was beaming, and I could guess why. The visitors he had come to announce had probably impressed him as something unusually promising in the way of clients. The only secrets in Nero Wolfe's old house on 35th Street near the Hudson River were professional secrets. It was unavoidable that I, his secretary, bodyguard, and chief assistant, should be aware that the exchequer was having its bottom scraped; but Fritz Brenner, cook and gentleman of the household, and Theodore Horstmann, custodian of the famous and expensive collection of orchids which Wolfe maintained in the plant rooms on the roof—they knew it too. And Fritz was beaming, obviously, because the trio whose arrival he was announcing looked more like a major fee than anything the office had seen for weeks. He did it in style. Wolfe
told him, with no enthusiasm, to show them in. I took my feet off the desk.

Though the extraordinary Hawthorne gals did not strongly resemble one another, my discreet glances of appraisal as I got them arranged into chairs made it credible that they were daughters of the same amazing mother. April I had seen on the stage; now that I got a look at her off it, I was ready to concede that she could probably take Nero Wolfe's office by storm if she cared to let loose. She looked hot, peevish, beautiful and overwhelming. When she thanked me for her chair I decided to marry her as soon as I could save up enough to buy a new pair of shoes.

May, the intellectual giant and college president, surprised me. She looked sweet. Later, seeing how determined her mouth could get, and how cutting her voice, when the occasion required it, I made drastic revisions, but then she just looked sweet, harmless, and not quite middle-aged. June, Mrs. Dunn to you, was slenderer than either of her younger sisters, next door to skinny, with hair that was turning gray, and restless dark burning eyes—the kind of eyes that have never been satisfied and never will be. Where they all looked alike was chiefly the forehead—broad, rather high, with well-marked temple depressions and strong eye ridges.

June did the introducing; first herself and her sisters, and then the two males who accompanied them. Their names were Stauffer and Prescott. Stauffer was probably under forty, maybe five years older than me, not a bad-looking guy if he had been a
little more careless with his face. He was living up to something. The other one, Prescott, was nearer fifty. He was medium-short, with a central circumference that made it seem likely he would grunt if he bent over to tie his shoestring. Nothing, of course, like Nero Wolfe's globular grandeur. I recognized him from a picture I had seen in the rotogravure when he had been elected to something in the Bar Association. He was Glenn Prescott of the law firm of Dunwoodie, Prescott & Davis. He had on a Metzger shirt and tie, and a suit that cost a hundred and fifty bucks, and wore a flower in his buttonhole.

The flower was the cause of a little diversion right at the beginning. I have given up trying to decide whether Wolfe does those things just to establish the point that he's eccentric, or because he's curious, or to spar for time to size someone up, or what. Anyhow, they had barely got settled in their chairs when he aimed his eyes at Prescott and asked politely:

“Is that a centaurea?”

“I beg your pardon?” Prescott looked blank. “Oh, you mean my buttonhole. I don't know. I just stop at the florist's and select something.”

“You wear a flower without knowing its name?”

“Certainly. Why not?”

Wolfe shrugged. “I never saw a centaurea of that color before.”

“It isn't,” Mrs. Dunn put in impatiently. “A centaurea cyanus has a much closer formation—”

“I didn't say centaurea cyanus, madam.” Wolfe sounded testy. “I had in mind centaurea leucophylla.”

“Oh. I've never seen one. Anyway, that isn't a centaurea leuco-anything. It's a dianthus superbus.”