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
.

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R
ex Stout is as American as Cheerios, Wonder Woman, and Norman Rockwell. It is possible to grow up and not notice, not read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. But not read, not notice Rex Stout, not love Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin? Not possible. That’s like not noticing that Elvis brought a new dimension to kinetic pelvic motion.

To reflect on Rex Stout is to think of Nero Wolfe, and rightly so. Like others before him—Sherlock Holmes and his Watson, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade—he is instantly recognizable, lovable in a curmudgeonly fashion, and unforgettable.

He is also an old-fashioned good guy. Forget bad guys made to look good: mafiosi eulogized for their strong family values and loyalty and never mind all those busted knuckles, blown-out knees, machine guns in violin cases, and widows and orphans. Forget vigilante justice and the private investigator who anoints himself judge, jury, and executioner. Forget rogue cops hollering, “Make my day, scumball!” and blasting away with a .345 Magnum in each hand and hitting and killing the bad guys, who just happen to outnumber the good guys by 37 to 1.

No, Nero Wolfe is a different kind of good guy, a man of intelligence, finesse, method, and high moral standards. A man who wears yellow silk pajamas and expensive tailored suits, with matching elegance galore, and who weighs in at a seventh of a ton. A man with a hothouse of orchids that would dazzle and daze a bevy of debutantes, a gourmet palate, and an ear for the finer points of English language and literature. A man who works within the system and with the police and the district attorney’s office, albeit often grudgingly and always in his own way and time. Not a knight in shining armor, not
that
old-fashioned, but, well, close.

And Archie Goodwin? He is equally unforgettable, equally delightful. Quick-witted, quick on his feet, ever-handy with notepad and typewriter, he is business partner, personal companion, perfect secretary. Add a dash of wit, a splash of irreverence and cockiness, a slight unpredictability and his winning way with the ladies, and who could resist?

Nero Wolfe and Archie, as indispensable, appealing, and delectable as toast (homemade bread from Fritz’s oven) and jam (imported marmalade, no doubt).

Stout gives us these familiar and delightful characters in an equally familiar setting. There is a charm and comfort to this, as easy and relaxed as a summer afternoon, swimming, volleyball, and cold beer. But that’s California, that’s what I know, and to think of Nero Wolfe is to think of New York, of Manhattan, and that I don’t know. I go there quite a bit, but I don’t
know
it. I don’t see, feel,
understand
the
real
New York. I know this because New Yorkers tell me so with a sad, sometimes patronizing, look in their eyes. But Nero Wolfe’s New York? That I do know and understand. I need only open a book and there it is. The brownstone on West Thirty-fifth, the cabs, the restaurants and nightclubs, the particularly and peculiarly New York establishments and ways and weather.

The wonderful thing about mystery in general and Rex Stout in particular is the satisfaction of a good, well-crafted, well-plotted story. Once this was common, once we could take it for granted, even be blasé about it; but not now, not so. I am reminded of this often as I browse through current titles at the bookstore. Good stories, gripping plots that actually make sense, a book with a beginning, middle, and end: Is this passé? Is this too much to ask? No. And it is there in Stout. The final satisfaction, the element as familiar, comfortable, and comforting as the characters and setting, as the story? The ending. The good guys figure it out, they (and we) win; the bad guys get nabbed; good triumphs over evil. Consider, in Dickensian fashion, Archie’s name: Goodwin. I rest my case.

To pick up a Rex Stout novel is to find standards, codes, an eminently civilized man living in an eminently civilized manner. Stout comes down squarely on the side of civilization, of justice and decency and the proprieties, large and small, of life. He shares all this with us, and in the process we, too, are a bit refined and improved. To pick up a Rex Stout novel is to enjoy the comfort of an old, dear, honest, and exacting friend.

The strength of Stout’s work is not in any one book but in the body of work and, most particularly, in the Nero Wolfe novels.
The Mountain Cat Murders
breaks with several of the things we, or I at least, too readily assumed. It is not a Nero Wolfe novel, nor does it take place in New York. The central characters are young, even naive, winsome and fresh rather than seasoned, experienced, mildly eccentric. And it is a love story. What a contrast this is to the opinionated Nero Wolfe, who abjures the company of women in his personal life, whose colleague-secretary, cook-housekeeper, and outside investigators are all male, and who does not disagree when Archie comments that he, Wolfe, is allergic to women.

But
The Mountain Cat Murders
is the exception, not the rule, a novel written in a period when Stout was particularly prolific: five novels in a single year. I have found no other references to Delia Brand and Ty (move over Matt) Dillon, the main characters here, nor am I aware of any other work with a western setting. Romantic themes, too, are an anomaly.

The book takes place in Cody, Wyoming, and though I am a native of California and not Wyoming, it is a state I know and love. It is evident that Stout’s knowledge was more limited. His characters strike me as Easterners gone west but not western, not native; transplants, not local stock. Corruption hinted at is decidedly big city stuff, not small western town; there is confusion about the roles of sheriff and police chief and a policeman walking a beat, virtually unheard of in a small western town. There are brick buildings one is unlikely to see in Cody, or indeed in most parts of the West, and equally questionable clothes. References to corrals, bridles, broncos, pronghorns, and such are liberally used, often misused. Colorful but unlikely expressions—“Tickle my horse and watch him laugh!”—are introduced. All the cowboys I’ve ever known are more likely to eat their horse than talk like that. A boy refers to a gun as a gat. In Cody? Oh sure.

Still, these are small things, ones that merely point to Stout’s strength in eastern rather than western settings, to his deeper understanding of the eastern rather than the western character. In context, this book becomes a fascinating piece of the whole, giving a sense of the dimension and breadth of Rex Stout’s work.

Cheerios, Wonder Woman, apple pie, Norman Rockwell, the Fourth of July, Rex Stout: great American traditions all!

—Karen Kijewski