Death on Deadline
Authors: Robert Goldsborough
A Nero Wolfe Mystery
Robert Goldsborough
To Janet, without whom I am incomplete
Introduction
I
N REX STOUT’S
THE FATHER HUNT
(1968)
Archie Goodwin reflected, “Before long the day will come, maybe in a year or two, possibly as many as five, when I won’t be able to write any more of these reports for publication.” That valedictory note did not occur in the saga again till the final volume in the series,
A Family Affair
(1975), when Inspector Cramer, surveying Nero Wolfe’s office, observed, “This is the best working room I know. The best-looking. I mention it now because I may never see it again.” Perhaps Cramer merely was referring to his threat to have Wolfe’s license revoked, but Rex Stout was then eighty-eight, so there was ample cause to assign to Cramer’s words an ominous meaning.
Though certainly neither of the foregoing passages suggests that Rex Stout expected the Nero Wolfe series to be extended into the future by another hand once he himself had ceased to write, he did not see the series as concluded when he completed
A Family Affair.
In August 1975 he told me that, if he felt equal to it, he would begin a new Wolfe novel “along about November.” That was not to be. Death came suddenly on October 27, 1975. Had Rex lived another five weeks, he would have entered his ninetieth year. Even so, as he saw it, he had not rung down the curtain on the household at West Thirty-fifth Street. More adventures awaited Wolfe and Archie. That did not surprise me. In 1974, when
Triple Zeck
was published, I asked Rex if he had ever considered letting Wolfe perish in his final struggle with Arnold Zeck, even as Sherlock Holmes was portrayed as perishing in his final struggle with Professor Moriarty. “What then, for next year?” he snorted. “Open the tomb and drag him out?” Could he, I persisted, end the series as the Baroness Orczy had her
Old Man in the Corner
series, by letting Wolfe himself commit murder? “I would think it was silly,” he said.
Early in our acquaintance, plagued by ill health, Rex put aside unfinished the manuscript of
Death of a Dude.
I tried to jolly him into better spirits by telling him I was writing a Nero Wolfe novel myself. “Let me see a chapter,” he said. So I sat down and sweated out a dozen pages which found Archie at Harvard investigating the death of the president of Swaziland, fatally stricken when, at a midday luncheon for honorary degree recipients, someone nudged a poisoned melon ball into his fruit cup. Rex commended my effort, as politeness demanded, but, much to my relief, did not commission me to complete the novel he had left undone. “How would you feel,” I asked him later, when, restored to health, he was writing again, “if someone wanted to continue the Wolfe series after you … eh, laid aside your pen?” “I don’t know whether vampirism or cannibalism is the better term for it,” he answered. “Not nice. They should roll their own.” “Do you have any plans for rounding out the series yourself?” I asked. “For … killing off Wolfe, as Christie does with Poirot?” “Certainly not,” he said, with palpable indignation. “I hope he lives forever.”
Only on a single other occasion did the question of a series continuator come up between us and that was in another connection. I told him of a letter I had received from a suspect reader who insisted that Rex Stout had a resourceful secretary who now wrote all his books for him. “The name is Jane Austen,” he replied, “but I haven’t the address.” Rex was paying himself the ultimate compliment. Of Austen he had told me earlier, “Jane Austen had an incredible, instinctive awareness of how to use words, which words to use, how to organize them, how to organize her material, how many pages, how much weight to give to this incident and to that one. She was astonishing. No finer novelist than she has ever lived.” He said he once dreamed that Jane Austen had come back to life and started writing detective stories. He awoke, he said, in a state of panic. Jane Austen his continuator, indeed. Some bill to fill!
As a matter of record, Rex never accepted story ideas from anyone, though readers often submitted them. New York City’s celebrated Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, once sent him, for his consideration, an entire chapter of a Nero Wolfe novel he had projected. “It was awful,” Rex said. In fact, he found none of the material sent him usable. He even refused to listen to the Nero Wolfe radio dramas, based on his characters but scripted by others. “Unbearable,” he told me. On one occasion, when he outlined a plot to his friend Alan Green, Green said to him, “Why, Rex, that’s the plot of Christopher Bush’s
The Perfect Murder.”
“Indeed?” Rex said, and never spoke of it again. He was unwilling to accept story ideas even from his editors, who, encountering just once Neronian wrath, never dared to offer them again.
From the early days of the genre, readers have been reluctant to accept an author’s decision to terminate a detective series or nature’s decision to terminate it for him by terminating him. Reader demand forced Arthur Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes. In 1928, while Doyle still lived, August Derleth, dismayed at Doyle’s diminishing output, inaugurated his own series, Solar Pons being, as Robert Briney noted, “an ectoplasmic emanation of his great prototype,” and the seventy stories in which he eventually appeared, “a pastiche … of the Holmesian canon as a whole.” Later, in collaboration, Adrian Conan Doyle, Doyle’s youngest son, and John Dickson Carr sought to add to the canon. Even the collaborators themselves were displeased with the results and abandoned further efforts to keep Holmes on the active list. As for the avalanche of Holmesian pastiches that has followed, with the exception of Rick Boyer’s
Giant Rat of Sumatra,
the results have been so flawed that many readers can sympathize with Nicolas Freeling, who effectively closed out his Inspector Van der Valk series by shooting Van der Valk through the heart. In the 1940s Gerald Fairlie continued H. C. McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond series, but, since the original stories themselves were never more than thrillers, this was a feat of no great consequence. Following the death of Margery Allingham, her husband, Youngman Carter, completed her last novel,
Cargo of Eagles.
H.R. F. Keating calls it her most forgettable story.
“There should be,” says Jacques Barzun, “a collection of watchdogs—watchwolves—to keep guard over the fair fame and right significance of Nero and Archie.” Surely he spoke for legions when he protested a TV series which portrayed Wolfe “looking and talking like a stingy landlord, Archie like an ivy-league junior executive,” and Cramer making “willowy movements with his torso.” Yet, there are those fierce guardians of the sacred scroll who would look with contempt on a Nero Wolfe continuation even if an affidavit from the Archangel Gabriel vouched for its authenticity. Does Lily Rowan really have “deep blue eyes”? Is it his left eyebrow that Archie raises? Count the steps of the brownstone again. Did Rex say seven? And, what’s this? Lionel T. Cramer! Fergus, once. A slip. Never Lionel! How dare he! There’s nothing to be done with liturgical nuts, of course. They are beyond pleasing. Even when a bona fide Stout manuscript turns up (as indeed one did), they are torn apart, wondering whether to admit it to the corpus.
Rex Stout hoped that Nero Wolfe would “live forever.” Did he provide for that possibility? Yes, he did. First, he created, in the brownstone, routines which are immune to time. Second, unlike Doyle, who confined Holmes’s activities to the gaslight era and wrote about the era with increasing vagueness as the gap separating him from that era widened, Rex’s tales always were contemporaneous with his actual life while writing them. Finally, unlike Christie, whose aging Poirot solved his last case from a wheelchair (by then he was a centenarian!), he decreed, with canny foresight, that Wolfe should ever be fifty-six and Archie thirty-four. Such arable soil invites another planting.
Now we must ask, since it can be done, should it be done? The decade of mourning that followed Stout’s death is concluded. The demands of decency have been met. No continuator need feel reproach for curtailing the period of bereavement. To add to the corpus cannot diminish respect for the seventy-three tales Rex Stout wrote. Indeed, since a misbegotten television series actually rallied thousands of new readers to the corpus, why should we suppose the work of an able continuator would not bring about the same desideratum? Let us bear in mind, too, that several commentators, Julian Symons among them, now either speak of Wolfe in the past tense or suggest that the brownstone has been bulldozed and that Wolfe, in retirement, is living in Cairo, Egypt, raising guppies. For readers who are certain that life in the brownstone continues much as usual, this is intolerable. Reassurances from a continuator that Wolfe and Archie remain at West Thirty-fifth Street come as a great consolation to all loyalists. That it can be done, and that there are adequate reasons for doing it, does not mean that it need not be done with a prudence that, at all times, respects the integrity of the corpus as it has come down to us from Rex Stout. Since 1975 I have been asked to appraise the manuscripts of a score of would-be continuators. More often than not, they were sincere admirers of the corpus. More often than not, though all unwittingly, they had, by their efforts, made a farce of what Rex had achieved. There were manuscripts purporting to have been written by Fritz, Lily, Saul, and even Theodore Horstmann. There was the suggestion that Archie move a live-in girlfriend into the brownstone, to spice things up. And can you conceive of a Nero Wolfe hurtling along a Bermuda road on a motorbike? Wind surfing at Cancun? Hotdogging at Aspen? Or eating Chicken McNuggets at McDonald’s? Now here we have, out in the open, one of the major difficulties a continuator must face. Archie and Wolfe must always comport themselves in ways consistent with the expectations Rex Stout raised. That does not mean they cannot surprise us on occasion. Didn’t Wolfe once tend bar at a Christmas party, got up as Santa Claus? Didn’t he climb mountains in Montenegro? Visit a dude ranch in Montana? Didn’t he once shed half his body weight to infiltrate the organization of a master criminal? Didn’t he even take up darts for exercise? No, the continuator must not see himself as tightly shackled to the preexistent world of Nero Wolfe. He must, however, with exquisite discretion, contrive exceptions that never give offense. How easy it is to say that. How difficult to carry it off.
Bob Goldsborough, the designated continuator of the Nero Wolfe saga, emerges as winner from a pack of aspirants not because he has had crass ambitions to hitch his wagon to the Stoutian star. He came into the picture with the wholesomest of motives, and it well may be this wholesomeness that has enabled him to succeed where others failed. A midwesterner, even as Stout and Archie had been midwesterners (a factor by no means to be discounted—picture an Archie with a Southern drawl or the clipped accents of a native New Yorker), Goldsborough was introduced to Wolfe and Archie by his mother, when he was a teenager. In 1977, stricken by what was to prove her final illness, Mrs. Goldsborough one day told Bob she wished she had another Nero Wolfe novel to read. Since she had read them all, Bob, at that time an editor of the
Chicago Tribune,
did what any dutiful, gifted son (who had a mother who loved Wolfe and Archie) would do. He sat down and wrote
Murder in E Minor.
With this splendid motivation, he made his story as authentic as possible—no buffoonery, no flippancies, no absurd departures, but a story as close to the spirit of the originals as he could contrive. Maybe he did not have, as Ian Fleming said Rex had, “one of the most civilized minds ever to turn to detective fiction.” Maybe he didn’t have, as Rex did, an IQ of 185. Maybe he was not a collateral descendant of Benjamin Franklin and Daniel Defoe, as was Rex. Maybe he could not say, as Rex could, that Archie was his spontaneous self and Wolfe his achieved self (though he was not lacking Neronian astuteness and Goodwinian panache), but love covers a multitude of shortcomings (if shortcomings these be), and the end result was a novel that not only pleased his mother but everyone else who read it (including Rex’s daughters), save the most surly of watchwolves.
