Death Times Three SSC (2 page)

Notations in Rex's file on "Murder Is No Joke" disclose further writing labors for that year that were not entered in the Writing Record. On November 23, to oblige The Saturday Evening Post, he began work on an expanded version of "Murder Is No Joke." Taking only two days off, Sunday the twenty-fourth and Saturday the thirtieth, to celebrate his seventy-first birthday (when family and friends gathered at High Meadow, his eighteen-acre domain at Danbury, Connecticut), he completed the rewrite in thirteen days, having increased the original forty-eight pages to seventy-nine. Characteristically (Rex found holidays disruptive and, within reasonable limits, preferred to ignore them), he had written five pages on Thanksgiving Day and four on his birthday. Typically, also, he had not merely padded the old manuscript. He had thought the story through again, adding much that was new and enhancing what he kept. Now two different versions of the story existed, the latter clearly the superior of the former. Since that fact was self-evident, it should logically have followed that the original was suppressed in favor of the rewrite.

Yet that is not what happened. On February 14, 1958, as "Murder Is No Joke," the original was published in And Four to Go. On June 21, June 28, and July 5, 1958, as "Frame-Up for Murder," the rewrite was published in three installments in The Saturday Evening Post. Those who owned the book probably never compared their version to the Post's version. Those who read the Post's version probably never compared it to the version in And Four to Go. Thus no one complained that thirty-one pages of vintage Stout were buried in back issues of The Saturday Evening Post. But they were, and that was deplorable. Here, after a twenty-eight-year delay, as "Frame-Up for Murder" achieves publication in book form another injustice is swept away.

In the notes that Rex Stout kept for this story--as always, on 51/2 by 81/2 goldenrod sheets--he recorded the following facts about eight of the characters: "Alec Gallant, 38, of Gallant Inc., 54th St. East of 5th. Bianca Voss, 37, who has taken charge. Carl Drew, 40, business manager & buyer. Anita Prince, 34, designer & fitter. Emmy Thorne, 26, contacts & promotion. Flora Gallant, 26, Alec's sister & handy woman. Sarah Yare, 35, has-been actress. Doris Hoft, 29, at phone." To readers of either version of the story the name Doris Hoft will come as a surprise. While Doris does have a small part to play in both versions, in neither does Rex mention her by name. More surprising to readers of "Murder Is No Joke" must be the revelation that Flora Gallant is twenty-six. In that story we are assured that she was twenty-five when she came to the United States from France, twenty years earlier, in 1937, and thus is forty-five. Rex's initial description of Flora bears this out. Archie relates, "When I opened the door to admit his sister Flora that Tuesday morning, it was a letdown to see a dumpy middle-aged female in a dark gray suit that was anything but spectacular. It needed pressing, and the shoulders were too tight, and her waist wasn't where it thought it was." In short, Flora is a frump who has seen her best days and these not lately. Nor does the ensuing dialogue encourage us to mellow toward her. She seems to be a bitter, spent woman who has outlived whatever romantic feelings she once had. With clinical detachment she dismisses the possibility of Wolfe's having a mistress, almost as one might rule out the likelihood of his catching whooping cough or breaking out in pubescent acne. We resent this woman who addresses Wolfe as though she were a case-hardened clinician talking to a eunuch. And Flora is similarly dispassionate when she says of brother Alec, "He has an
amie intimae
, a young woman who is of importance in his establishment." The name Flora Gallant has encouraged us to expect something more. In "Murder Is No Joke" Flora is no flower. She is more of a nettle. That fact serves at least one good purpose. It makes it easy to believe that she is capable of skullduggery or even murder.

In "Frame-Up for Murder" we must begin all over with Flora. She first catches Archie's eye in the lobby of the Churchill "because she rated a glance as a matter of principle--the principle that a man owes it to his eyes to let them rest on attractive objects when there are any around." Her chin was, Archie acknowledged, "slightly more pointed than I would have specified if I had had her made to order," but otherwise her ranking is high among the women who have intrigued Archie Goodwin over the years. A shoulder spread of mink, a floppy-brimmed hat, which is at Archie's ear level--so that, as he notes, her hair might graze his chin if she removed it--and a trace of a beguiling foreign accent, are all that this Flora needs, in addition to her beauty, to intrigue Archie. When she accosts him on the uptown side of Thirty-eighth Street, he confesses, "If she had been something commonplace like a glamorous movie star," he might have gone on his way without further interest. But that does not happen. Flora's game is to get to know Archie so that he will gain her an audience with Nero Wolfe. She dines with him and dances with him to assure the success of this stratagem. Her kisses are prologue to inquisitions. Yet, she is naively obvious in her intrigues, and Archie, never for a moment taken in, finds her simple, obvious machinations (embarked on for no more sinister a purpose than to protect her brother and his business) a source of unmitigated delight. This new Flora burgeons in the opening pages of "Frame-up for Murder." Her subsequent pursuit of Archie through the streets of Manhattan and her success in bringing him down, on the wing, so to speak, stirs our interest in a way that totally eclipses the opening of "Murder Is No Joke."

Rex Stout enjoyed portraying beautiful foreign women of fierce integrity whose hearts are set on realizing some laudable goal that they pursue with a tenacity that gives consequence to their obvious ploys when they try to enlist the services of those who can get them the results they want. In his beautiful wife, the Polish-born Pola Hoffman, their friends recognized the prototype of these women. Here, in a story set in the world of high fashion, the identification is more easily made, for Pola Stout was one of America's foremost designers of woolen fabrics and her fabrics were much in favor with top fashion houses both in the United States and Europe. It was Pola's calling that gave Rex the setting and plot for several other stories, most notably The Red Box and Red Threads, and made him always attentive to the clothes his characters were wearing.

In "Murder Is No Joke," Flora Gallant offers Nero Wolfe a hundred dollars as a retainer. In "Frame-Up for Murder," as befits her upgraded status, the sum increases to three hundred, still not a princely offering from someone swathed in mink, but enough, Archie says, either to pay his salary for two days or to keep Wolfe in beer for three weeks. That Archie has mellowed toward Flora since her transformation from frog to princess is evident. In "Murder Is No Joke" he had calculated that her hundred-dollar deposit would, at most, buy beer for Wolfe for four days. But more than pecuniary advantages attach to Flora's new appearance. Her metamorphosis generated most of the new pages that expanded "Murder Is No Joke" from forty-eight pages to seventy-nine. In "Murder Is No Joke," after murder was committed it was not worth anyone's bother to bring Flora on the scene when Archie visited the offices of Gallant, Inc., to interview the chief suspects. In "Frame-Up for Murder" Flora is prominently visible, and her presence makes Archie's day. At the close of this interlude, moreover, Archie struts into Alec Gallant's office and speaks his mind with a bravado remarkable even for Archie. One has to assume that his recent smooching with Flora has produced such a rush of adrenaline that he is ready to take on the world. Perhaps that also accounts for his boast to Emmy Thorne that he can chin himself twenty times.

Nero Wolfe likewise appears to better advantage in the rewrite of "Murder Is No Joke," and not solely because a younger, demure Flora declines to speculate in jaded tones on his sex life. A vital Flora generates more excitement all around. Archie cares more about the case that evolves out of her visit to the brownstone and so, inevitably, does Wolfe. Wolfe's speculations concerning the authenticity of the phone call made to Bianca Voss come forth more promptly and do not seem, as in "Murder Is No Joke," arrived at through the instigation of Inspector Cramer. The lively exchange of comments between Wolfe and Archie when Bianca's visit ends is also one of the high moments of the rewrite since it has no counterpart in "Murder Is No Joke." One detects, too, that, once drawn into the case, Wolfe becomes, on learning of Alec Gallant's resistance activities in World War II, allied to him in sympathies. Certainly Rex's own commitments in the war years assured both his allegiance to Gallant's principles and his tacit approval of Gallant's initiative taken when the niceties of the law raised the possibility that heinous crimes against humanity would go unpunished.

At one point in "Murder Is No Joke," Nero Wolfe is grossly insulted. He is told, "You are scum, I know, in your stinking sewer! Your slimy little ego in your big gob of fat!" Even Cramer is nonplussed when these phrases are repeated to him. It is easier to believe that the drab and hostile Flora scripted these lines in "Murder Is No Joke" than to attribute them to the vivacious Flora of "Frame-Up for Murder." But happily they survived the rewrite, and that kept in the marvelous scene in which Wolfe shows how the word "gob" made him aware that "the extraordinary Billingsgate spat at me" was a prepared text. To know the words were spoken only for calculated effect makes everyone feel better--Wolfe as well as the reader. And, really, we could not spare that moment when, after Wolfe's explanation is forthcoming and he gestures at the conclusion, Archie complacently observes, "He waved 'gob' away."

In "Frame-Up for Murder," Inspector Cramer is given more to do than he was given in "Murder Is No Joke." We may commend him, perhaps, for his restraint in not pointing out that this attempt to deceive Wolfe repeats an episode from The Rubber Band. Perhaps it was Cramer's prudence on this occasion that induced Rex Stout to allow him to speak the words "Murder is no joke," which gave the story its title and accounts, as well, for Wolfe's generous reiteration of these words at a crucial moment in the story. It is surprising to observe, in scrutinizing the original manuscript, that Rex Stout once marked these words for excision. It is more surprising yet, to discover from his notes that originally he had settled on a different murderer. No harm can come from mentioning the name now, because no reasonable reader will see him as a possible suspect. We are referring to Carl Drew! It was a good day's work when Rex changed his mind.

While odd circumstances attended the writing of "Bitter End" and "Frame-Up for Murder," the history of one other Wolfe novella is even more unusual--that is, the story serialized as "The Counterfeiter's Knife" in The Saturday Evening Post, in the issues for January 14, 21, and 28, 1961. Unaltered, the same story was published the following year as "Counterfeit for Murder" in Homicide Trinity, one of the tripartite Wolfe volumes. Rex's Writing Record for this story reads: "73 pp. Began 3/6/59, finished 3/31/59. 9 days out, 17 days writing time." His breakdown of days shows that he actually worked on it on twenty-three different days, but sometimes only for short intervals, which he recorded as fractions of days. Only on the nineteenth and twentieth, when he was in New York, and on the twenty-ninth, Easter Sunday, was he away from his desk entirely. For Rex to give so much time to a single novella was unusual. But we do not have to look far for an explanation. As he noted in his Writing Record, underlining the word twice for emphasis, the story he wrote in that twenty-six-day interval was a "Rewrite." Just ahead of the entry given above he had recorded these particulars concerning the original version of the story: "'Counterfeit for Murder'-74 pp. Began 1/22/59, finished 2/11/59. 3 days out, 18 days writing time." Only on two days did he do no writing at all, the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of January, when he had to be in Providence. Fractions of days show that he could have reduced the total of working days by another three, making, in all, five days out. But, all things considered, the work had gone well; so that, quite up to his usual average, he had written four or five pages on twelve of the nineteen days he had written. Nothing in his notes suggests that he was dissatisfied with the results. Yet, less than a month later, he discarded all but the first seven pages of this story and, starting again at that point, took events in a direction so contrary to that in which they had moved before, that the lady who quickened Archie's heartbeat in the original is here hastily dispatched with a bread knife, and the dowdy boardinghouse keeper, who had promptly fallen prey to a hit-and-run motorist in the first version, here escapes with a grazing, is reanimated, and given liberty to engage Wolfe as well as Archie in some of the liveliest dialogue to be found anywhere in the corpus. She, Anthony Boucher said of Miss Hattie Annis, "is the most entertaining client to visit West Thirty-fifth Street in some time." And indeed she was.

A perusal of the two versions of "Counterfeit for Murder" shows that Hattie Annis's reappearance is so thoroughly desirable that it completely justifies Rex Stout's repudiating his folly in snuffing out a character that was endowed with her remarkable vitality. But was that the actual reason for his decision? We can only conjecture because, on July 11, 1972, when I asked Rex why he had rewritten this story, he said, "There must be a reason, but I have forgotten what it was." We know, at least, that Rex was not acting on the advice of anyone else, either editor or friend, because, in the twenty-three-day interval that elapsed between his completing the original and beginning the rewrite, he had shown the manuscript to no one. He arrived at the decision entirely on his own. Only one possible explanation can be offered. In that interval Rex had spent a fishing holiday, at Paradise Island, Florida, with his friend Nathaniel Selleck (the second of the three Nathaniel Sellecks who were Rex's physicians successively over a forty-five-year period). On the day that Rex returned from Florida, word reached him that Dr. Selleck had dropped dead moments after his departure. On receipt of the news Rex resumed writing at once, perhaps, in the creative act of calling back to life someone who had died, resorting to a form of therapy mysterious to some but not at all mysterious to those who write.