Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25

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 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 freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and 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 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
.

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
The Hand in the Glove
Double for Death
Bad for Business
The Broken Vase
The Sound of Murder
Red Threads
The Mountain Cat Murders

I
find comfort in friendship. I am a social animal, and even though I mouth off about being a rugged individualist, iron-willed and resolute, standing alone against all odds like some sort of hyperheroic Clint Eastwood, when push comes to reverse head kicks I am as much a creature of the herd as, say, dingoes or chacma baboons or lions in the veld. I seek family and friends and the patterns of human interaction, and that is why, when I sat down to write Elvis Cole, I gave him Joe Pike.

My publisher labels these books of mine “An Elvis Cole Novel.” That is but a half-truth, no more complete than suggesting Holmes without Watson, Nick without Nora, Batman without Robin. Elvis and Joe are yin and yang, two halves of a whole, the light and dark of but one character. Theirs is a gestalt of friendship that hopefully yields a sum to the reader far greater than either might yield on his own. Sort of like Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.

Let me be honest with you. I never gave a damn about Nero Wolfe. Here was this fat guy who sat around his house, futzing with orchids and gorging himself on a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet and acting like a spoiled and peevish child when things didn’t go his way. Think about it. If Nero Wolfe were real instead of fictional, and you or I actually had to deal with him instead of simply reading about him from the comfortable distance of our armchairs, neither of us would like him very much. Nero Wolfe was a dick.

I think Rex Stout knew that.

And so he gave us Archie Goodwin, the filter through which we see Wolfe and an appealing anchor for our emotions. It is Archie in whom we invest ourselves, not Wolfe. It is Archie whom we like and care for, not Wolfe. Wolfe is interesting and intriguing, to be sure, but could
you
take that holier-than-thou pout of his, that superior air? Not me, friends. Wolfe without Archie would surely have died an unlamented death, like so many other pulp-era category fiction creations, long gone and never loved.

But there was Archie, and Archie saved him.

Here was Archie Goodwin, whom we liked, telling us by his friendship toward Wolfe that Wolfe, in fact, was not a hideous bloated slug of a twerp, after all. If Archie could find value in the man, then maybe we had judged too quickly. Maybe there was more to Wolfe than an incisive intellect and an offensively eccentric life-style.

I loved Archie Goodwin, so let me tell you how we came to meet. Years ago, when I was growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and struggling with the first temptations of becoming a professional writer in an environment that valued only the oil industry and Southeast Conference football, I used to haunt a bookshop that sold secondhand paperbacks, underground comic books, and discreetly displayed on a shelf above two cardboard boxes of coverless men’s magazines, against the wall in the rear of the place, devices best described as “marital aids.” It was a grungy, dirty, seedy kind of place, but I discovered Chandler there, as well as Ted Mark and Don Westlake and Don Westlake writing as Richard Stark. A paperback cost nineteen cents. If it had no cover, it cost a dime. I had gone through the Chandlers and was working on the Hammetts and I walked into the little store that day very much wanting a copy of
Red Harvest
. The stacks were divided by category (western, mystery, science fiction, etc.) but were rarely alphabetized, so if you wanted a particular author, you had to look through
all
the mysteries, ofttimes a tedious process. There was only a single copy of
Red Harvest
, and some yo-yo had written BITE ME across the cover in green ink, so that ended that. I won’t buy a book with BITE ME on the cover. Not even for half price. But I was in the store and I continued through the stacks, and that’s when I stumbled upon five or six titles written by this guy Rex Stout. I picked one and skimmed the first pages and found the narrator coming home late one night while his boss, this other guy named Wolfe, was pissing and moaning about it because he’d been put out, really coming down hard on the first guy, demanding to know where he’d been and sort of whining about it and acting snappish and spoiled. You see? A dick. But already I’m liking the narrator, so who cares about this guy Wolfe? Rex Stout has given the narrator a clean, appealing voice, just enough attitude to show that he’s nobody’s chump, and a wit like Marlowe’s on a day when all the biorhythms are up. So I’m reading and liking this guy—the narrator—and then the client walks in and the narrator says, “He didn’t look tough, he looked flabby, but of course that’s no sign. The toughest guy I ever ran into had cheeks that needed a brassiere.” Right then and there, sitting on the floor in front of the mystery section in that crummy bookstore with that ragged paperback and its sticky cover, Archie Goodwin
owned
me. The book was
If Death Ever Slept
, and I still own that very edition, bought then, over twenty years ago, for nineteen cents and now tucked away in a box somewhere here in my house in Sherman Oaks.

Stout gave us Archie because Archie is us, or who we would like to be if we could get away with it. Smart, sharp, physically confident, and tough. We can identify with Archie, but not with Wolfe. Wolfe is just the freak in the house—a turd in a cage who grows flowers and draws Sherlockian conclusions from insufficient data; fun to watch, but would you really want to share your time with the guy?

Yet Archie does, and it isn’t just for pay. Oh, Archie is Wolfe’s employee, to be sure, but read the books and you will see that these two are more than employer/employee; they exist in a sort of symbiosis that transcends mere environmental or biological need or employment security. If that’s all there was to it, no one would give a damn. As fine and wonderful and entertaining as Archie is, there has to be more here for the reader. There has to be something that speaks to that innermost part of us and keeps these books vital and alive in the marketplace through the passing decades. There is.

Archie and Nero are family. They are friends. As we read the books, as we immerse ourselves in that world of theirs on West Thirty-fifth Street, so we share the warmth of that friendship and seek to return to it again and again, as if by returning we receive an affirmation of that which we seek not in fiction but in our lives. For these books, these novels by Rex Stout tell us things that we want very badly to hear.

Stout says to us, “Here are two friends. Here are two people sharing their lives. As you wish for friendship, share in theirs. As you seek companionship, share in theirs. As you search for love, share in theirs.” Rex Stout invites us into the family and offers warmth and security and certainty. He affirms what we all seek on some primal level. If such disparate individuals as Wolfe and Goodwin can share friendship and love and caring and life, cannot we? That’s the strength here. That’s the message and the feelgood inherent in the voice and character that Rex Stout has given to Archie Goodwin. In this cold world it is a fire at which we may warm our hands. Holmes and Watson. Nick and Nora. Spenser and Hawk. Isaac Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw and Lije Baley. Tom and Huck and Jim. It runs deep in us, from literature to movies to comic books to television. Cagney and Lacey. Hope and Crosby. Batman and Robin. Cisco and Pancho. Is there any wonder that “buddy pictures” are so often successful? Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. The appeal of friendship is
old
, and the pleasures inherent in such fictional pairings are no less valid today than they were in the days of Holmes and Watson, or in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies—the incredible five decades through which Stout published Nero Wolfe. Check out
Thelma and Louise
.

When I write about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, I am defining their friendship, and exploring it, and expressing a profound belief in its value. Not just in the friendship that Elvis and Joe enjoy, but in the friendship that we all might share, or hope to.

I think Stout believed in this. He certainly illustrated it through his work.

Read this book and enjoy it, then read the others. They are a testament to our humanness. They are also rollicking good yarns.

—Robert Crais

N
ot that our small talk that Tuesday evening in April had any important bearing on the matter, but it will do for an overture, and it will help to explain a couple of reactions Nero Wolfe had later. After a dinner that was featured by one of Fritz’s best dishes, squabs with sausage and sauerkraut, in the dining room of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, I followed Wolfe across the hall to the office, and, as he got some magazines from the table near the big globe and went to his chair behind his desk, asked if there were any chores. That was insurance. I had notified him that I intended to take Thursday afternoon off for the opening of the baseball season at the Polo Grounds, and when Thursday came I didn’t want any beefing about my letting things pile up.