Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe

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 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 sight-seeing guide and 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 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 Eric 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.

For the record, let me state unequivocally that Rex Stout is not responsible for my becoming a mystery writer. My mother read too eclectically in the genre for that.

The stack of mystery novels she borrowed from our county bookmobile each month weren't all written by Rex Stout, though heaven knows the man was prolific and did write stacks of books. After I finished reading the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys she borrowed for me, I browsed among hers: not only Rex Stout but also Mary Roberts Rinehart, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Hughes, Stuart Palmer, Margery Allingham, Eric Ambler, Carter Dickson, Daphne du Maurier, and others now lost to memory.

Of them all, though—including the excessively literate Miss Sayers, who kept me thumbing through
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
—Rex Stout was the one who sent me to the dictionary most frequently. Has anyone else ever created a detective who kept an unabridged Merriam-Webster within swiveling distance of his desk chair? As a linguist who probably spoke Serbo-Croatian as his first language (there are those who speculate that he was the illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler),
Nero Wolfe had a lover's passion for words and their precise definition.

On page two of “Poison à la Carte,” a member of the Ten for Aristology asks to borrow Wolfe's chef to cook their annual dinner:

In “Method Three for Murder,” a man wants to speak to Wolfe confidentially without Archie Goodwin present. “‘You're dealing with both of us,' Wolfe told him. ‘Professionally, we are indiscrete.'”

When I read that sentence, I thought at first it was a typo. Yet surely no detective would confess to being “indiscreet”?

A quick scramble for my own dictionary (
not
within swiveling distance, alas) informed me that indiscrete means “not separated into distinct parts.” Wolfe uses the word advisedly and as much for Archie's benefit as for their visitor's, since this particular tale begins with Archie's hotheaded resignation. He wishes to make it quite clear that he considers Archie part of the whole.

Which brings us to another of the joys of this series. Archie Goodwin may play Dr. Watson to Wolfe's Sherlock Holmes or Captain Hastings to Wolfe's Hercule Poirot, but he does not share their awe of the great men to whom they give allegiance. Archie is no yes-man trundling along at Wolfe's heels. Poirot and Holmes could function very
adequately without Hastings and Watson, but if Archie really did resign Nero Wolfe would be helpless. Beyond the walls of the brownstone on West 35th Street, sociable Archie Goodwin is the asocial detective's eyes and ears. Wolfe never insults Archie by telling him how to carry out a mission. He merely gives a Captain Picard-like wave of his hand and voices a version of “Make it so.” Which Archie does.

He respects Wolfe's intelligence, but delights in detailing his boss's laziness, his selfishness, his total preoccupation with food.

Indeed, food is often the reason for Wolfe's involvement in murder. In “Poison à la Carte,” he is lured from his brownstone by the promise of an unforgettable gourmet dinner. In “The Rodeo Murder,” the misogynist is even willing to bury the hatchet with Archie's good friend Lily Rowan in return for an invitation to partake of young blue grouse in her penthouse dining room.

Who could read those mouthwatering descriptions of exotic food and not long to taste them too? Evidently enough people must have pestered Rex Stout for recipes, because he did compile a cookbook. In the early ′70s, at a time when I was reading Ruth Stout more fervently than her brother Rex—she was a regular contributor to
Organic Gardening
and was as eloquent on mulch as he was on murder—I copied out his recipe for Saucisse Minuit. My husband and I had caught bucolic plague and were back “on the land” baking bread and raising geese, free-range chickens, and an occasional pig. We jellied or made wine from everything that hung on vines or could be plucked from trees. I actually did cook this once, substituting the dark meat of our surplus cockerels for the specified pheasant.

I began by saying Rex Stout was not responsible for my becoming a mystery writer; but I end by realizing that he influenced me more than I knew. Why else would I have created an unmarried rotund character who adores food and loves to create new recipes? (Unfortunately, his concoctions are often inedible. If Roman Tramegra and Nero Wolfe were musicians, Wolfe would have perfect pitch and Tramegra would be tone deaf.) In my office, as in Wolfe's, are a globe and an unabridged dictionary. In my head is a desire to use words as precisely as he. In my heart is a permanent soft spot for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

—Margaret Maron

Poison à la Carte

Method Three for Murder

The Rodeo Murder

I slanted my eyes down to meet her big brown ones, which were slanted up. “No,” I said, “I'm neither a producer nor an agent. My name's Archie Goodwin, and I'm here because I'm a friend of the cook. My reason for wanting it is purely personal.”

“I know,” she said, “it's my dimples. Men often swoon.”

I shook my head. “It's your earrings. They remind me of a girl I once loved in vain. Perhaps if I get to know you well enough—who can tell?”

“Not me,” she declared. “Let me alone. I'm nervous, and I don't want to spill the soup. The name is Nora Jaret, without an H, and the number is Stanhope five, six-six-two-one. The earrings were a present from Sir Laurence Olivier. I was sitting on his knee.”

I wrote the number down in my notebook, thanked her, and looked around. Most of the collection of attractive young females were gathered in an alcove between two cupboards, but one was over by a table watching Felix stir something in a bowl. Her profile was fine and her hair was the color of corn silk just before it starts
to turn. I crossed to her, and when she turned her head I spoke. “Good evening, Miss—Miss?”

“Annis,” she said. “Carol Annis.”

I wrote it down, and told her my name. “I am not blunt by nature,” I said, “but you're busy, or soon will be, and there isn't time to talk up to it. I was standing watching you, and all of a sudden I had an impulse to ask you for your phone number, and I'm no good at fighting impulses. Now that you're close up it's even stronger, and I guess we'll have to humor it.”

But I may be giving a wrong impression. Actually I had no special hankering that Tuesday evening for new telephone numbers; I was doing it for Fritz. But that could give a wrong impression too, so I'll have to explain.

One day in February, Lewis Hewitt, the millionaire and orchid fancier for whom Nero Wolfe had once handled a tough problem, had told Wolfe that the Ten for Aristology wanted Fritz Brenner to cook their annual dinner, to be given as usual on April first, Brillat-Savarin's birthday. When Wolfe said he had never heard of the Ten for Aristology, Hewitt explained that it was a group of ten men pursuing the ideal of perfection in food and drink, and he was one of them. Wolfe had swiveled to the dictionary on its stand at a corner of his desk, and after consulting it had declared that “aristology” meant the science of dining, and therefore the Ten were witlings, since dining was not a science but an art. After a long argument Hewitt had admitted he was licked and had agreed that the name should be changed, and Wolfe had given him permission to ask Fritz to cook the dinner.