Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 17

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 free-lance 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 Erie 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-nine. 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.

*
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

L
et’s face it.

We can stare at each other over designer coffee and natter on about the spiritual and intellectual benefits of immersing oneself in
haute littérature,
but most of us read fiction to get away from the drudgery of our lives.

And what a wonderful sanctuary Rex Stout has provided millions of readers for over half a century by introducing the world to Nero Wolfe.

As the century fades, Wolfe lives on, fresh and current as ever. One reason is the
way
he lives—a self-contained, blatantly self-indulgent existence in a Manhattan brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street surrounded by gleaming paneling, fine furniture, gourmet food, servants, exotic orchids, the power to control life’s nasty little intrusions. What a glorious end-of-day tonic for clock watchers, straphangers, and freeway slaves. How many of us wouldn’t commit minor mayhem in exchange for an Archie Goodwin to cheerfully run our errands and tidy up our scutwork, or a Fritz Brenner to prepare and serve our sweetbreads en croûte on bone china? With a suitable wine. (Interestingly, Wolfe’s cozy world also burlesques the
isolated, self-indulgent life of the writer and, in that sense, can be regarded as Stout’s wicked slant on the
artiste.
)

Stout had wicked slants on lots of things and a gift for phrasing and rhythm and irony that remains remarkably contemporary. Consider lines such as these: “Her chin hinges began to give”; “the sort of greasy voice that makes me want to take up strangling”; “he was slender, elegant, and groomed to a queen’s taste, if you let him pick the queen.” And let us not forget the hilariously truistic: “Escorting a murderer on a subway without handcuffs is a damn nuisance, so I chose a taxi.”

Stout’s sense of humor is at its best when it conveys a lusty misanthropy. Wolfe’s truculent view of his fellow men—and women—is delicious in an age when sectarian selfishness and emotional lobotomy masquerade as political correctness and the carny freak parade is beamed into our homes daily in the form of pretentiously mislabeled
talk
shows so self-righteously smarmy they gag the consciousness. Take a blissful moment to imagine Wolfe on
Geraldo
or
Oprah
or any of the other high-octane patholothons. I, for one, would commit
major
mayhem for the privilege of witnessing it. Hell, one good “Pfui!” directed at a celibopsychic schizoid diaper devotee would be worth it.

Then there’s Wolfe’s glorious gluttony, a perfect foil for the skeletal images and anorexic fiction promulgated with teeth-gnashing joy by the style-over-substance crowd. Stout doesn’t spare Wolfe the consequences of his hyperphagia—the Great Man is so monstrously endomorphic that when he removes his pajama top, he reveals “enough hide to make shoes for four platoons;” but he does not assault us
with cholesterol counts and dire warnings of vascular sludge. During the time we spend gourmandizing along with Wolfe, the nagging and finger-wagging of gram-counting aerobicops fade mercifully into the background. Wolfe may huff and puff during his infrequent outings into the “real” world—the description of his unplanned hike in the final story in this volume is as memorable as anything that has ever been put to paper—but he is happy with himself. And when we are with him, so are we, by God.

Of course there’s more to Wolfe than constructive agoraphobia or cream sauce. Stout’s stories are always great mysteries—whodunits, howdunits, why-dunits—and they zip along at a pace that would leave the Great Man anoxic.

Some say Stout’s talents were put to best use in the novella, and no contradiction of that judgment can be found in the three stories in this book.

Turn the page, then, and prepare yourself for a well-deserved getaway: the funny, phony, bloody world of high fashion as portrayed in “Man Alive.” The knife-in-the-back shenanigans of the nascent fast-food industry in “Omit Flowers” (how sadly civilized that bit of vulgarity seems compared to today’s technoburger madness). And finally, the spooky and downright nasty family psychopathology of “Door to Death,” a real chiller.

Three gems.

Three great escapes.

—Jonathan Kellerman

Foreword

Man Alive

Omit Flowers

Door to Death

Looking over the scripts of these accounts of three of Nero Wolfe’s cases, it struck me that they might give a stranger a wrong impression of him, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to put in this foreword for those who haven’t met him before. In only one of these cases did he get paid—I mean paid money—for working on it, and that might give someone a woolly idea which could develop into a nuisance. I want to make it clear that Wolfe does not solve murders just for the hell of it. He does it to make a living, which includes me, since he can’t live the way he likes to without signing my pay check each and every Friday afternoon. Also please note that in the other two cases he did get something: in one, the satisfaction of doing a favor for an old and dear friend, and in the other, a fill-in for Theodore.

With that warning, I like the idea of putting these three cases together because they make a kind of complicated pattern of pairs. In two of them Wolfe got no fee. In two of them he had to forget a document to get a crack started. In two of them the homicide was strictly a family affair. In two of them I became acquainted with a young female, not the same one, who
might have sent my pulse up a beat if she hadn’t been quite so close to a murder. So I think they’ll be a little more interesting, in a bunch like this, provided they don’t start people phoning in to ask me to ask Wolfe to solve murders as a gift. I’m just telling you.

Archie Goodwin

She said, in her nicely managed voice that was a pleasure to listen to, “Daumery and Nieder.”

I asked her politely, “Will you spell it, please?”

I meant the Daumery, since I already had the Nieder down in my notebook, her name being, so she had said, Cynthia Nieder.

Her lovely bright blue eyes changed expression to show that she suspected me of kidding her—as if I had asked her to spell Shakespeare or Charlie Chaplin. But I was so obviously innocent that the eyes changed again and she smiled.

She spelled Daumery and added, “Four ninety-six Seventh Avenue. That’s what we get for being so cocky about how famous we are—we get asked how to spell it. What if someone asked you how to spell Nero Wolfe?”

“Try it,” I suggested, smiling back at her. I extended a hand. “Put your fingers on my pulse and ask me. But don’t ask me how to spell Archie Goodwin, which is me. That would hurt.”

Wolfe grunted peevishly and readjusted a few
hundred of his pounds in his built-to-order high-test chair behind his desk. “You made,” he told our visitor, “an appointment to see me. I supposed you needed a detective. If so tell me what for, without encouraging Mr. Goodwin to start caterwauling. It takes very little to set him off.”

I let it go by, though I am much more particular than his insult implied. I felt like indulging him because he had just bought a new Cadillac sedan, which meant that I, Archie Goodwin, had a new car, because, of the four men who lived in Nero Wolfe’s brownstone house on West 35th Street not far from the river, I was the only one who drove. Wolfe himself, who suspected all machinery with moving parts of being in a plot to get him, rarely left the house for any reason whatever, and never—well, hardly ever—on business. He stayed in his office, on the ground floor of the house, and used his brain if and when I could pester him into it. Fritz Brenner, chef and supervisor of household comforts, knew how to drive but pretended he didn’t, and had no license. Theodore Horstmann, curator of the orchids in the plant rooms on the roof, thought walking was good for people and was still, at his age, trying to prove it.

That left me. In addition to being chief assistant detective, bookkeeper and stenographer, the flea in the elephant’s ear, and balance wheel, I was also chauffeur and errand boy. Therefore the new car was, in effect, mine, and I thought I ought to show my appreciation by letting him call me a tomcat at least once. Another thing, the car had cost plenty, and we hadn’t been offered an acceptable job for over a week. We could use a fee. The blue-eyed female treat looked as if she wasn’t short on cash, and if I riled Wolfe about a little thing like a personal insult he might
react by broadening out and insulting her too, and she might go somewhere else to shop.