Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 02

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 free-lance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and as 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,” a 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.

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

T
he League of Frightened Men
, published both by the
Saturday Evening Post
(in serialization) and by Farrar & Rinehart in 1935, was Rex Stout’s second Nero Wolfe novel, appearing the year after
Fer-de-Lance.
It ranks as a personal favorite, for several reasons.

First, the story’s pivotal figure, the quirky, brilliant, and depraved Paul Chapin, supplies Wolfe with his most complex adversary, a far more intriguing character, for instance, than the megalomaniacal underworld kingpin Arnold Zeck, who makes his appearance several books deeper into the series.

Chapin, author of “obscene” novels probing the dark side of the human spirit, was badly crippled as the result of a college hazing incident at Harvard. Chagrined classmates formed a “League of Atonement,” which paid his hospital bills and through the years tried in other, less tangible ways to make amends. Although accepting the group’s money and sympathy, Chapin remained bitter, sardonically reacting to their efforts.

Now, at a class reunion, one member of the league falls to his death from a seaside cliff, and the others
receive copies of a poem apparently authored by Chapin in which he claims credit for the act. Then another of the group dies violently, followed by another poem suggesting that more deaths will occur. And when a third member of the league disappears, Nero Wolfe is hired by remaining members to “stop Chapin.”

Although famed clinician Karl Menninger praised the Wolfe stories because the detective “never dives into the realm of psychiatry” or “pretends to believe that murderers are mostly sick,” John McAleer wrote in his biography of Stout that in the early Wolfe stories, the author “still was close to his own interlude as a psychological novelist.” McAleer went on to suggest that “possibly such characterizations [as Paul Chapin] were intended to counterpoint Rex’s unannounced probing of his own psyche.” Whatever Stout’s motivation, Chapin remains the most interesting psychological study in the series, and one whom Wolfe comes to know primarily through reading his novels.

In addition to the compelling characterization of Chapin, the book is a treasure trove for lovers of the corpus. In no other volume, for instance, do we find such a rich variety of Wolfean aphorisms:

The Archie Goodwin in this book, as in other early Stout works, is markedly more rough edged and unsophisticated than the smoother version who evolved in the postwar years. His grammar is deficient (“… the obscenity don’t matter” and “Where’s the other club members?”), but that is as integral to his street-smart persona as his colorful phrasing. For example, he complains of inactivity to Wolfe: “If you keep a keg of dynamite around the house you’ve got to expect some noise sooner or later. That’s what I am, a keg of dynamite.” Or his threat to a would-be tough guy: “Don’t try to scare me with your bad manners. I might decide to remove your right ear and put it where the left one is, and hang the left one on your belt for a spare.”

Inspector Cramer shows an uncharacteristically self-effacing side in
League
, when he tells Archie that “I arrested a man once and he turned out to be guilty, that’s why I was made an inspector.” And in what other Wolfe book does the cigar-chomping Cramer actually
light
one of his stogies? And smoke a pipe, too? You can look it up.

Cramer’s match-lighting moments are only two of several singular occurrences in
League.
A sampling of others:

Back to the psychopathic genius Paul Chapin, who makes Archie nervous (“for once Wolfe might be underrating a guy”) and Wolfe cautious (“He is possessed of a demon, but he is also, within certain limits, an extraordinarily astute man”). Chapin refers to one of Wolfe’s ploys as “vulgar and obvious cunning,” and later he tells the detective that he, Wolfe, will be a character in an upcoming Chapin novel. “You will die, sir, in the most abhorrent manner conceivable to an appalling infantile imagination. I promise you.”

We are never to learn whether Paul Chapin indeed dispatched the detective in print, but the suggestion was enough for Archie to “permit myself a grin at the thought of the awful fate in store for Nero Wolfe.”

—
Robert Goldsborough

W
olfe and I sat in the office Friday afternoon. As it turned out, the name of Paul Chapin, and his slick and thrifty notions about getting vengeance at wholesale without paying for it, would have come to our notice pretty soon in any event; but that Friday afternoon the combination of an early November rain and a lack of profitable business that had lasted so long it was beginning to be painful, brought us an opening scene—a prologue, not a part of the main action—of the show that was about ready to begin.

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia. I was reading the morning paper, off and on. I had read it at breakfast, and glanced through it again for half an hour after checking accounts with Hortsmann at eleven o’clock, and here I was with it once more in the middle of the rainy afternoon, thinking halfheartedly to find an item or two that would tickle the brain which seemed about ready to dry up on me. I do read books, but I never yet got any real satisfaction out of one; I always have a feeling there’s nothing alive about it, it’s all dead and gone,
what’s the use, you might as well try to enjoy yourself on a picnic in a graveyard. Wolfe asked me once why the devil I ever pretended to read a book, and I told him for cultural reasons, and he said I might as well forgo the pains, that culture was like money, it comes easiest to those who need it least. Anyway, since it was a morning paper and this was the middle of the afternoon, and I had already gone through it twice, it wasn’t much better than a book and I was only hanging onto it as an excuse to keep my eyes open.

Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, “He’s in a battle with the elements. He’s fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That’s the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination.” I said aloud, “You mustn’t go to sleep, sir, it’s fatal. You freeze to death.”

Wolfe turned a page, paying no attention to me. I said, “The shipment from Caracas, from Richardt, was twelve bulbs short. I never knew him to make good a shortage.”

Still no result. I said, “Fritz tells me that the turkey they sent is too old to broil and will be tough unless it is roasted two hours, which according to you will attenuate the flavor. So the turkey at forty-one cents a pound will be a mess.”

Wolfe turned another page. I stared at him a while and then said, “Did you see the piece in the paper about the woman who has a pet monkey which sleeps at the head of her bed and wraps its tail around her wrist? And keeps it there all night? Did you see the one about the man who found a necklace on the street and returned it to its owner and she claimed he stole two pearls from it and had him arrested? Did you see the one about the man on the witness-stand in a case
about an obscene book, and the lawyer asked him what was his purpose in writing the book, and he said because he had committed a murder and all murderers had to talk about their crimes and that was his way of talking about it? Not that I get the idea, about the author’s purpose. If a book’s dirty it’s dirty, and what’s the difference how it got that way? The lawyer says if the author’s purpose was a worthy literary purpose the obscenity don’t matter. You might as well say that if my purpose is to throw a rock at a tin can it don’t matter if I hit you in the eye with it. You might as well say that if my purpose is to buy my poor old grandmother a silk dress it don’t matter if I grabbed the jack from a Salvation Army kettle. You might as well say—”