In July 1949, The New Yorker published a two-part profile of Rex Stout, “banker, barker, bookworm, bookkeeper, yeoman on the Presidential yacht Mayflower, boss of three thousand writers of propaganda in World War II, gentleman farmer and dirt farmer, big businessman, cigar salesman, pueblo guide, hotel manager, architect, cabinetmaker, pulp and slick magazine writer, propagandist for the world government, crow trainer, jumping-pig trainer, mammoth-pumpkin grower, conversationalist, politician, orator, potted-plant wizard, gastronome, musical amateur, president of the Authors Guild, usher, ostler, and pamphleteer.”
Oh, and he wrote some damn fine books, too.
In 33 novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and 1975, Stout did something unique: he married the British Golden Age, puzzle-solving school of mystery fiction with the street-smart, hardboiled, thoroughly American detective novels of Chandler and Hammett to come up with a seamless blend of thought and action, narrated in a prose that was unfailingly literate, witty, and engaging.
His two heroes made the perfect odd couple: Nero Wolfe, in his late 50s, is fat, imperious, pedantic, brilliantly deductive, devoted to both his meals and his orchids, famously loath to leave his brownstone on West 35th Street, and upon occasion, capable of extraordinary nimbleness and passion. Archie Goodwin, in his 30s, is his smart-mouthed legman, tough, intuitive, tenacious, decent, possessed of a photographic memory, highly appreciative of the opposite sex, and the narrator of all the books, the voice that keeps us coming back for more.
Archie is the self-admitted “heart, liver, lungs and gizzard of the private detective business of Nero Wolfe, Wolfe being merely the brains” (Too Many Women, 1947). “I know pretty well what my field is. Aside from my primary function as the thorn in the seat of Wolfe’s chair to keep him from going to sleep and waking up only for meals, I’m chiefly cut out for two things: to jump and grab something before the other guy can get his paws on it, and to collect pieces of the puzzle for Wolfe to work on” (The Red Box, 1937).
He is also Wolfe’s bookkeeper, and that “thorn” function means that he is constantly reminding Wolfe that the house is low on money and so he’d better accept that case that just walked in the door, or he won’t be able to pay the weekly salaries of his nonpareil cook Fritz Brenner, his orchid specialist Theodore Horstmann, or, ahem, Archie himself.
Wolfe, for his part, is highly appreciative of Archie’s abilities, even if he has his own way of expressing it: “I have noted, perhaps in more detail than you think, your talents and capacities. You are an excellent observer, not in any respect an utter fool, completely intrepid, and too conceited to be seduced into perfidy” (The Silent Speaker, 1946).
That doesn’t mean that Archie’s constant digs don’t annoy him sometimes: “Some day, Archie, when I decide you are no longer worth tolerating, you will have to marry a woman of very modest mental capacity to get an appropriate audience for your wretched sarcasms” (Fer-de-Lance, 1934).
And that doesn’t mean that for all his gibes, Archie doesn’t get worried sick when he thinks something might happen to Wolfe. When Wolfe disappears suddenly from an orchid show, he’s beside himself: “The damn hippopotamus. He’ll get lost. He’ll be kidnapped. He’ll fall in a hole….I spat a snowflake as it sailed by. Our little Nero, I thought, on such a night and no coat. The big fat flumpus” (“Black Orchids,” Black Orchids, 1942).
“You are headstrong and I am magisterial,” Wolfe comments in Champagne for One (1958). “Our tolerance of each other is a constantly recurring miracle.” But it is the miracle that makes every one of the books work so well. Wolfe’s highest accolade at a job well done is, “Satisfactory.” Archie’s typical response is on the order of, “Don’t strain yourself,” but he secretly treasures it. These books are definitely satisfactory.
Archie doesn’t have much backstory. In the novella “Fourth of July Picnic” (And Four To Go, 1958), he describes it succinctly: “Born in Ohio. Public high school, pretty good at geometry and football, graduated with honor but no honors. Went to college two weeks, decided it was childish, came to New York and got a job guarding a pier, shot and killed two men and was fired, was recommended to Nero Wolfe for a chore he wanted done, did it, was offered a full-time job by Mr. Wolfe, took it, still have it.” He has been with Wolfe for seven years as the series opens.
Wolfe’s history is more complicated. He was born in Montenegro, grew up to be a strong, athletic boy, spied briefly for the Austrians, then quit, and when World War I broke out, joined the Montenegrin army while still a teen. “I then believed that all misguided or cruel people should be shot, and I shot some. I starved to death in 1916….When the Austrians came and we fought machine guns with fingernails. Logically, I was dead, a man can’t live on dry grass” (Over My Dead Body, 1940). When the U.S. entered the war, he walked 600 miles to join them. He describes this period and what followed laconically in “Fourth of July Picnic”: “At the age of sixteen, I decided to move around, and in fourteen years I became acquainted with most of Europe, a little of Africa, and much of Asia, in a variety of roles and activities,” before moving to New York City in 1930. He also has a daughter from that period, an orphan girl he adopted and hasn’t seen since she was three, until she pops up suddenly as an adult in Over My Dead Body and starts causing trouble. Then, in The Black Mountain (1954), she and Wolfe’s friend Marko Vukcic are murdered by “Tito cutthroats and Albanian thugs,” in separate incidents related to Montegro’s struggle to become independent of Yugoslavia, spurring a furious Wolfe to fly to Montenegro with Archie to track down the killers.
This is a very unusual move for Wolfe, because, as previously noted, he hates going anywhere. Normally, he can’t abide vehicles, as expressed graphically in Some Buried Caesar (1939)—”My distrust and hatred of vehicles in motion is partly based on my plerophony that their apparent submission to control is illusory and that they may at their pleasure, and sooner or later will, act on whim”—and in The Red Box—“’Sir, I would not enter a taxicab for a chance to solve the Sphinx’s deepest riddle with all the Nile’s cargo as my reward.’ He sank his voice to an outraged murmur. ‘Good god. A taxicab.’”
He also cannot abide leaving his home no matter what the mode of transportation: “I am not immovable, but my flesh has a constitutional reluctance to sudden, violent or sustained displacement” (The Red Box). Sometimes, though, he has no choice. The opportunity to view rare orchids presents itself (“Black Orchids”) or to attend a culinary extravaganza (Too Many Cooks, 1938) or he must venture out in order to resolve an infuriating personal inconvenience, as when he must get Archie back on the job in NYC (Death of a Dude, 1969) or find a temporary replacement for the invaluable Theodore Horstmann in the wilds of Westchester County on a raw, wet December morning. There he meets with predictable indignity:
“Nero Wolfe took a long stretching step to clear a puddle of water at the edge of a graveled driveway, barely reached the grass of the lawn with his left foot, slipped, teetered, pawed wildly at the air, and got his sixth of a ton of flesh and bone balanced again without having actually sprawled.
“’Just like Ray Bolger,’ I said admiringly.”
(“Door to Death,” Three Doors to Death, 1950)
Sometimes, of course, the occasion is more serious than that: Wolfe is forcibly dragged down to the police station (Prisoner’s Base, 1952; The Silent Speaker); those close to him are murdered (The Black Mountain); or partway through In the Best Families (1950), a dire threat causes him to actually vacate the premises for…months (more on that later).
While in those premises a multitude of cases are solved, using a variety of methods. There is logical deduction, of course, often signaled by some of Wolfe’s facial tics: his lips pushing out and back, just a tad; his eyelids raising and lowering slowly in a sign of approval; and, in a sign of total abandon, “the folds of his cheeks pulled away a little from the corners of his mouth; when he did that he thought he was smiling” (Fer-de-Lance).
Archie’s legwork is key, of course, as well as that of three other detectives that Wolfe likes to use to supplement Archie: “One of the reasons they are better than most is that none of them look it. Saul Panzer, under-sized and wiry, with a big nose, could be a hackie. Fred Durkin, broad and burly and bald, could be a piano mover. Orrie Cather, tall and trim and dressy, could be an automobile salesman” (“Counterfeit for Murder,” Homicide Trinity, 1962).
And then there’s trickery. Wolfe loves to set up traps by withholding information or evidence, or by pretending to know more than he does, and this often prompts drastic, desperate actions by the murderer. Sometimes these actions take place in the brownstone itself, after Wolfe has assembled a covey of suspects and witnesses together and picked apart the case in front of them, causing much consternation and occasional violence.
Often at these meetings and occasions is Wolfe’s ever-exasperated police foil, Inspector Cramer. Cramer’s “big, round, red face” (The Silent Speaker) is often even redder because he’s yelling at the two of them, but there’s still an odd kind of respect among them. Cramer tends to jump to conclusions prematurely, but he’s a decent policeman and no thug (unlike a few of his colleagues), and he knows Wolfe and Archie are good at what they do. But they do tick him off: “You know, son, you have one or two good qualities. In a way, I even like you. In another, I could stand and watch your hide peeling off and not shed any tears. You have undoubtedly got the goddamnedest nerve of anybody I know except Nero Wolfe” (Over My Dead Body).
However, Cramer keeps going back to that brownstone, and, oh, the things that go on there: guns pulled, arrests made, lunges leaped, fistfights galore. A man is poisoned right in front of Wolfe and Archie (The Red Box); another dies when a bomb in his coat pocket explodes (A Family Affair, 1975); a woman is strangled in Wolfe’s own office (“Disguise for Murder,” Curtains for Three, 1951); another is strangled in Wolfe’s own office with his own necktie (“Eeny, Meeny, Murder Mo,” Homicide Trinity); Wolfe himself is attacked with a knife (Over My Dead Body); and his desk booby-trapped with a poisonous snake (Fer-de-Lance). Corpses turn up on his sidewalk (“Before I Die,” Trouble in Triplicate, 1949) and in a taxi directly outside (“Method Three for Murder,” Three at Wolfe’s Door, 1960). And then there are the big events: the machine-gunning of his plant rooms (The Second Confession, 1949); the tear-gas bomb in his kitchen (In the Best Families). It’s a wonder anyone goes to see Wolfe.
Usually, Wolfe and Archie take all this in stride, but sometimes a case just gets under their skin. The murders in The Black Mountain are one, of course, and the death of a twelve-year-old boy in The Golden Spiders (1953). In The Silent Speaker, both men are highly impressed by the intelligence and determination of a woman named Phoebe Gunther, and her murder on their doorstep wears on them both: “I am a brainless booby. So are you, Archie. Neither of us has any right, henceforth, to pretend possession of the mental processes of an anthropod.” In Prisoner’s Base, a woman who had sought refuge at Wolfe’s, and been refused, is found strangled, and Archie takes it hard: “She was here and wanted to stay, and we kicked her out, and she got killed.” When Wolfe declines to investigate, Archie takes a leave of absence and walks out, to investigate on his own.
Sometimes, too, such cases take on even darker aspects for Wolfe. His political views can be strong, as are his views on war, violence, and bullies, both individual and institutional: “War doesn’t mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread” (Over My Dead Body); “Half of my share goes for taxes which are used to make bombs to blow people to pieces” (“Cordially Invited to Meet Death,” Black Orchids); “If personal vengeance was the only factor I could, as you suggested go and stick a knife in him and finish it, but that would be accepting the intolerable doctrine that man’s sole responsibility is to his ego. That was the doctrine of Hitler, as it is now of Malenkov and Tito and Franco and Senator McCarthy; masquerading as a basis of freedom, it is the oldest and toughest of the enemies of freedom” (The Black Mountain); “The manufacturer of baby carriages, caught himself in the system’s web and with no monopoly of greed, entraps his workers in the toils of his necessity. Dolichocephalic patriots and brachycephalic patriots kill each other, and the brains of both rot before their statues can get erected. A garbageman collects table refuse, while a senator collects evidence of highly placed men—might one not prefer the garbage as less unsavory?” (Too Many Cooks, 1938).
* * *
Wolfe held strong views because Rex Todhunter Stout held strong views—and they started young. He came from a Quaker background, and as a boy in Kansas, he loved to argue. When his Sunday school teacher enthused over Jesus turning water into wine, Stout handed him a statement signed by five of the town’s seven apothecaries affirming that it was impossible. When he was seven, a teacher asked him the color of the ocean and, having never seen it, he said, “Pink.” No, the teacher said, it’s blue. “How do you know?” “It says so in the book.” Over the next several days, Stout consulted every book he could find. He found the ocean described as green, gray, emerald, violet, amber, silver, wine-dark, and iron-bosomed. “Blue” was only one adjective among many, so why couldn’t it be pink, too? The teacher, who had never seen the ocean either, had to back down.
Yes, Stout was that guy.
He was also a bit of a prodigy—when he was eight, his math teacher found he could blindfold Stout with his back to the blackboard, chalk up a long column of figures, remove the blindfold, and, within a second or two, Stout would give him the total. His father owned a library of some 1,200 volumes of history, philosophy, and science; by the age of eleven, Stout had read them all.
After high school, he concluded, like Archie, that college had little to offer him, joined the Navy and was assigned to Teddy Roosevelt’s yacht, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for him, bought himself out and spent five years roaming around the country: “I saw every goddamn state and must have had at least 150 jobs in 150 different cities.”
Meanwhile, he started writing for the pulp magazines, but he spent the money as fast as he made it, and cast around for something more lucrative. He found it in 1916. Banks needed depositors, he figured, and all those children saving their pennies and nickels needed banks, so he and his brother put together an arrangement whereby the children could do it through their school systems, earning the kids interest and themselves royalties from the banks.
By 1926, Stout was half a million dollars richer, and he retired, moved to Paris, and started writing in earnest—emphasis on the “earnest.” They were literary novels, heavy on the psychology and well-reviewed, but they didn’t sell particularly well—and then the Great Depression hit, wiping out most of Stout’s investments.
“I realized that I was a good story-teller, but would never make a great novelist….Whatever comments I might want to make about people and their handling of life could be made in detective stories as well as any other kind.”Once again, he needed to make money—and Nero Wolfe was born: “I realized that I was a good story-teller, but would never make a great novelist….Whatever comments I might want to make about people and their handling of life could be made in detective stories as well as any other kind.” They were an immediate hit, and Stout settled into a routine: “Every book takes me from 35 to 41 days to write. I don’t know why that is,” he told Life magazine [elsewhere, he claimed that number as 37 or 38, but no matter]. “I’ve tried to get it down to 30 or 31, depending on the length of the month, but it won’t work. I don’t drink while I’m writing because it fuddles my logical processes, but when I finish a book I go down to the kitchen and pour myself a big belt.”
“Before starting,” he said, “I put up in front of me a handwritten list of characters, but I’ve never written out a single word of any plot. The plots come when I’m shaving, watering the plants, puttering around. Sometimes I think of them for three weeks, sometimes for three days. If you keep the main facts firmly in mind, and you don’t let anything contradict you, you can move around freely.”
The one thing that did slow him down, however, was World War II. Taking the fight against Hitler as a personal crusade, he joined organizations, hosted radio shows that debunked Nazi propaganda, spoke at forums and rallies, and chaired the War Writers Board, which mobilized thousands of writers into the Allied propaganda effort. After the war, he resumed his writing schedule, but he was just as vocal, advocating for the United Nations and other world federation initiatives and against the horrors of nuclear war—so strongly, in fact, that it attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and earned him a lengthy file, and also piqued the interest of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Stout swatted both away, dealing with Hoover in The Doorbell Rang (see below) and HUAC’s chairman, Martin Dies, with the following: “I hate Communists as much as you do, Martin, but there’s one difference between us. I know what a Communist is and you don’t.”
He also served as the long-term president of the Authors Guild, where he lobbied hard to reform domestic and international copyright law, as well as the industry’s royalty structures. Oh, and did I mention? He was a founder and president of Vanguard Press and was one of the first board members of the American Civil Liberties Union.
He was also, as he noted to Martin Dies, very anti-Communist, which later led him to become a proponent of the Vietnam War, which did not win him favor in some quarters. There was some comment, too, about another quote he gave: “I used to think that men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen.” It was nice that he liked Austen, everyone felt, but what did that say about the rest of womankind?
This is as good a place as any to address what is widely seen as Nero Wolfe’s misogyny. “You can depend on a woman for anything except constancy” is a Wolfe saying that Archie quotes in The League of Frightened Men (1935), and there’s this in The Rubber Band (1936): “When they stick to the vocations for which they are best adapted, such as chicanery, sophistry, self-advertisement, cajolery, mystification, and incubation, they are sometimes splendid creatures.” Other such statements pop up throughout the books.
Yet, Archie Goodwin insists, “He was elegant with women” (Fer-de-Lance) and when a woman confronts Wolfe with an accusation of misogyny in Too Many Cooks, he does an interesting thing. He shakes his head. “I couldn’t rise to that impudence,” he says. “Not like women? They are astonishing and successful animals. For reason of convenience, I merely preserve an appearance of immunity which I developed some years ago under pressure of necessity.”
An appearance of immunity? Under pressure of necessity? It brings to mind the passage in Over My Dead Body: “I carry this fat to insulate my feelings. They got too strong for me once or twice….I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I’ve got it in hand.”
What does he mean by all this? A clue is offered in The League of Frightened Men: “The things a woman will think of are beyond belief. I knew a woman once in Hungary whose husband had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted application of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of a penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. The result was gratifying to her. The man on whom she tried the experiment was myself.”
So—a dedicated misogynist or a man with a protective shell because his wife came close to murdering him…or both? I’ll leave it to others to decide.
Archie, on the other hand, loves women inordinately. He is forever getting gobsmacked and telling us things like this—“It isn’t often that at first sight, in the very first minute, a girl gives you the feeling that no one on earth but you knows how beautiful she is (Too Many Women)—and this—“She looked hot, peevish, beautiful and overwhelming. When she thanked me for her chair, I decided to marry her as soon as I could save up enough to buy a new pair of shoes” (Where There’s a Will, 1940).
However, even though there are some women that he’s felt especially intrigued by—Lucy Valdon on The Mother Hunt (1963), Phoebe Gunther in The Silent Speaker, Julie Jaquette in Death of a Doxy (1966)—there’s only one that’s been a constant. Rich socialite Lily Rowan only appears in a handful of books, but her presence is felt throughout—Archie’s always mentioning a date or a dinner or a phone call. They first meet in Some Buried Caesar, and he’s immediately warned: “She’s a vampire. She’s dangerous….If she wasn’t too lazy to make much of an effort, there’s no telling how many men she might ruin.” But they immediately sense a kindred spirit in one another, an honesty and lack of pretension that guarantees they can be their natural selves around each other:
“’Help me up.’
“I grabbed hold, gave a healthy jerk, and she popped up and landed flat against me, and I enclosed her with both arms and planted a thorough one, of medium duration, on her mouth, and let her go.
“’Well,’ she said, with her eyes shining. ‘You cad.’”
Why does this relationship, for all its longevity, or any of Archie’s other amours, not result in anything more permanent? Archie has his thoughts on this: “I’m funny about women. I’ve seen dozens of them I wouldn’t mind marrying, but I’ve never been pulled so hard I lost my balance….I guess the trouble is I’m too conscientious. I love to do a good job more than anything else I can think of, and I suppose that’s what shorts the line” (The League of Frightened Men).
Wolfe, though, thinks otherwise: “The sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife, his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster” (The Golden Spiders).
I’m with Wolfe. Archie can be a bit of a player, and marriage would make such impulses seem skeevy. They sometimes come close to it as it is. It’s not for nothing that a woman in “Black Orchids” refers to him as “that ten-cent Clark Gable there that thinks he’s so slick he can slide uphill.”
For Stout himself, however, there were no such qualms about marriage. His first one ended in divorce, but his second marriage to Pola Hoffman was by all accounts a happy one and lasted for forty-three years, until Stout’s death in 1975.
“One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there’s always some reason to live another year.”That was the same year as his last book, A Family Affair. The plot of that book tied in tightly with Watergate and “the skullduggery of Richard Nixon and his crew.” A few years earlier, in 1971, Stout had said in an interview, “One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there’s always some reason to live another year. And I’d like to live another year so that Nixon won’t be President. If he’s re-elected, I’ll have to live another four years.”
He didn’t have to. Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974. Stout died in October 1975. He’d received his wish.
He’d also received the MWA’s Grand Master Award in 1959, and in 2000, Bouchercon nominated him as Best Mystery Writer of the Century, and the Nero Wolfe books as Best Mystery Series of the Century. And now, every year, on the first Saturday in December, the Wolfe Pack, a society devoted to the books, holds a Black Orchid Banquet and presents the Nero Award and the Black Orchid Novella Award for excellence in the mystery genre.
Stout had another wish, as well. In 1973, he gave an interview to Publishers Weekly and said, “The only thing I want is something I can’t have; and that is to know if, a hundred years from now, people will still buy my books.”
Fer-de-Lance was published in 1934, so we don’t have long to wait. Something tells me he has nothing to worry about.
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The Essential Stout
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With any prolific author—in this case, very prolific—readers are likely to have their own particular favorites, which may not be the same as anyone else’s. Your list is likely to be as good as mine – but here are the ones I recommend.
The Silent Speaker (1946)
Cheney Boone, the director of a government regulatory bureau is just about to address approximately three billion dollars’ worth of industrialists with no love for him, when he is found dead in an adjacent room, his head bashed in by five blows of a monkey wrench. Soon, Nero Wolfe is actively investigating. But who is his client? Everyone wants to know—the police, the FBI, the hotel detectives, the industrialists’ organization. The truth is, he doesn’t have one, but he does have a payroll, on which he is a little light, so he’s sent Archie to poke around ostentatiously in order to stir one up.
It works, but the simple explanation, that it’s someone connected with the no-love-lost contingent, quickly turns out to be far more complex when a vital clue—a leather case filled with dictation cylinders—disappears. Boone’s secretary, Phoebe Gunther, knows something about it, but it is quickly apparent that she is smarter than Archie, maybe even smarter than Wolfe—his interrogation of her somehow becomes her interrogation of him—and that is all Archie needs to fall in love.
When she’s caught between two options—whether to go with Archie to Wolfe’s or with the police to the station, she looks at him in a way that practically makes his knees buckle, and says, “You know, you have a way of suggesting things that appeal to me. With all I know about cops and their attitude toward people with power and position and money, and with the little I know about you….I almost think I would let you hold my purse if I had to fix my garter. So you decide for me.”
He does, and it leads to her death—and from then on, it’s not just about money for Wolfe and Archie, it’s about justice. It’s an emotional case, with some startling actions on Wolfe’s part, a great payoff, and real fireworks along the way.
In the Best Families (1950)
This is actually the third of three consecutive books detailing Wolfe’s run-ins with his very own Moriarty—Arnold Zeck, the mastermind of a vast criminal enterprise. You don’t need to have read the first two, And Be a Villain (1948) and The Second Confession, to appreciate what’s going on here. It helps, of course, but Stout fills you in on anything you need to know, and the book packs a wallop.
In the first book, all we know of Zeck is a voice on the other end of the phone warning Wolfe to stay clear of his affairs. In the second book, he calls again, and delivers a stronger message in the form of two men machine-gunning Wolfe’s plant rooms, ruining $100,000 worth of glass and equipment and “turning 8,000 valuable orchid plans into a good start on a compost heap.”
This time, after a woman named Sarah Rackham hires Wolfe to look into the lavish spending of her husband Barry, it quickly becomes apparent that Barry is part of Zeck’s outfit. First, Wolfe gets a present—a tear-gas bomb in his kitchen. Second comes Zeck’s call: “That little package could have been something really destructive….Twice previously, you have disregarded similar requests from me, and circumstances saved you. I advise strongly against a repetition.” Third, Archie arrives at the Rackhams’ estate in Westchester County to find his client, Sarah Rackham, dead.
None of that, however, is equal to the shock Archie gets when he returns home to the brownstone. The front door is open. A note says, “AG: Do not look for me. NW,” later augmented by an instruction: “You are to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.” And a notice in the Gazette reads: “MR. NERO WOLFE ANNOUNCES HIS RETIREMENT FROM THE DETECTIVE BUSINESS.”
Archie is plenty ticked off, but he remembers something Wolfe told him two years before: “Archie, you are to forget that you know that man’s name. If ever, in the course of business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work—and sleep and eat if there is time for it—and stay there until I have finished.”
Months go by. Fritz leaves. Theodore leaves. Archie bites the bullet and opens his own detective agency. And finally Wolfe reappears. I won’t tell you how or why or what he’s been doing, but the changes are drastic, and so are the ferocious consequences, all leading up at last to the final bloody confrontation with Zeck himself, a man whose looks are as evil as his deeds: “[His] eyes were the result of an error on the assembly line. They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless.”
It’s one hell of a novel.
The Doorbell Rang (1965)
This is the book that first made me a Rex Stout fan, when I picked up a $1.25 Bantam paperback way back in the early/mid 70s sometime. The mystery itself is fine, but it was Stout’s anti-establishment anger at J. Edgar Hoover that really appealed to me, the fact that he could get away with it, and the last line has stuck with me ever since.
A wealthy businesswoman comes to Wolfe, angry, she says, because Hoover and the FBI are tailing her, tailing her family, tapping their phones, and questioning her employees. The fact that she bought up 10,000 copies of a controversial new book, The FBI Nobody Knows, and sent it to influential people all across the country might have a little bit to do with it. She’s not afraid, as most people would be, she’s annoyed, “and I want him stopped. I want you to stop him.”
Archie thinks taking the case is ill-advised: “They have six thousand trained men, some of them as good as they come, and three hundred million dollars a year. I would like to borrow the dictionary to look up a stronger word than ‘preposterous.’” He changes his tune, however, when a clandestine meeting at a hotel turns out to be with Inspector Cramer, of all people, who warns Wolfe that the commissioner’s getting pressure to yank his license. Cramer’s also sure the FBI had something to do with a recent murder of a muckraking journalist: “That goddamn outfit, I’d give a year’s pay to hook them and make it stick. This isn’t their town, it’s mine. Ours.”
If Wolfe and Archie can prove Cramer right, they’ll have leverage to get the FBI off their client’s back, but the solution doesn’t come until after plenty of complications, switcheroos, and a nifty piece of trickery.
And now I’m going to do something unusual and give you the last lines of the book, because it doesn’t make any difference to the mystery and it’s what made me fall in love with Stout:
“The doorbell rang. I got up and went to the hall and saw a character on the stoop I had never seen before, but I had seen plenty of pictures of him. I stepped back in and said, ‘Well, well. The big fish.’
He frowned at me, then got it, and did something he never does. He left his chair and came. We stood side by side, looking. The caller put a finger to the button, and the doorbell rang.
’No appointment,’ I said. ‘Shall I take him to the front room to wait a while?’
’No. I have nothing for him. Let him get a sore finger.’ He turned and went back in to his desk.
I stepped in. ‘He probably came all the way from Washington just to see you. Quite an honor.’
’Pfui. Come and finish this.’
I returned to my chair. ‘As I was saying, I may have to tell her privately….’
The doorbell rang.”
According to Herbert Mitgang’s Dangerous Dossiers, “About one hundred pages in Stout’s file are devoted to the novel, the FBI’s panicky response to it, and the attempt to retaliate against the author for writing it.”
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Book Bonus
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Stout wrote twenty other novels besides the Wolfes. Thirteen of them were assorted crime, fantasy, adventure, historical, and romance novels, plus the literary novels that he abandoned to write the Wolfes. One was a political thriller, The President Vanishes (1934), which he originally published anonymously, hoping that people would think it was written by a Washington insider.
The remaining six were detective novels. Three of them featured Tecumseh Fox, known as “Tec,” who worked out of Westchester County—one of these books was later rejiggered to become a Nero Wolfe story, “Bitter End.” Another book featured Alphabet Hix, an over-educated young lawyer scratching out a living after getting disbarred, who falls into a case filled with quirky characters. A fifth was Red Threads (1939), which gave Inspector Cramer a chance to claim the center spotlight. And then there was Theolinda “Dol” Bonner. In 1936, Stout’s editor asked him to create a detective to switch off with Wolfe so people wouldn’t get tired of him (!), and Stout opted for a woman—smart, decisive, and beautiful, a “gasper” with coal-black lashes and caramel-colored eyes, who doesn’t like men and loathes being touched “by anyone whatsoever.” The Hand in the Glove (1937) is far from the best detective novel in the world, and there are some clunky elements, but she’s got nerve and that makes the book entertaining.
Stout didn’t like any of them. “There are two kinds of characters,” he said in an interview. “One is the created character, the born character, and the other is the synthetic character, and the only ones that are any fun are the created ones, which come out of the subconscious. The minute you have to ask yourself questions about a character—is he tall? is he fat?—he is a purely synthetic character. I have written stories about three other detectives. They weren’t created at all; they were contrived. The stories are just as good….but they really weren’t worth a damn because the detective was just a made-up guy.” Dol did pop up briefly in two other Wolfe novels and one novella (If Death Ever Slept (1957), Plot It Yourself (1959), “Too Many Detectives,” Three For the Chair, 1957), so he still found some use for her, and if you should want to try one of the non-Wolfe books, The Hand in the Glove is the one I’d recommend.
An additional note: after his death, the estate of Rex Stout approved the publication of more cases for Wolfe and Archie, and journalist Robert Goldsborough was brought on to write them. To date, there are thirteen new adventures. I must confess I haven’t read any of them—but to get to thirteen books, they’ve obviously got plenty of fans.
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Movie/Radio/TV Bonus
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Plenty to report here!
Two theatrical movies were made from the books, 1936’s Meet Nero Wolfe, with Edward Arnold as Wolfe and Lionel Stander as Archie, and 1937’s The League of Frightened Men, with Stander again and Walter Connolly as Wolfe. Stout disliked them both: “They were both so awful I wouldn’t have any more.” About the only item of interest is the fact that Wolfe’s client in the first film was played by Rita Cansino, who would go on to change her name to Rita Hayworth.
Radio, however, saw four different Wolfe drama series: The Adventures of Nero Wolfe (ABC, 1943-44), The Amazing Nero Wolfe (Mutual Broadcasting System, 1945), The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe (NBC, 1950-51), and Nero Wolfe (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1982). The CBC series was widely praised. Of the others, the most notable was NBC’s, starring Sydney Greenstreet as Wolfe. It’s been credited as the series most responsible for popularizing Wolfe on radio, but reputedly Greenstreet tended to overact and insisted that it was the Archies that were at fault, with the result that four different actors played the part over a six-month span.
Television! When Perry Mason became a hit, everybody wanted Nero Wolfe, too. CBS purchased the rights, cast Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and William Shatner (!) as Archie, and the series was set for September 1959…until it wasn’t. The comedy Hennessey filled the time slot instead. Why? I dunno. But apparently the pilot’s available on DVD and Blu-Ray on Television’s Lost Classics: Volume 2.
In 1976, Paramount purchased the entire Wolfe series for Orson Welles (!), planning to begin with an ABC-TV movie of The Doorbell Rang and hoping to continue with a series. Then Welles bowed out, and after much searching, they cast Thayer David from the horror soap Dark Shadows, which was then a big hit. The movie, called Nero Wolfe, was made—and then David died, and the movie languished until it was finally run off in late 1978—at midnight. “It wasn’t very good,” said an executive.
Paramount kept working on it, though. After an unsuccessful attempt to lure Welles back once again, they made fourteen episodes of Nero Wolfe, which ran in 1981, featuring William Conrad as Wolfe and Lee Horsley as Archie. The reviews were, alas, okay at best, the critics laying the blame for the series’ failure on “inane scripts.”
Finally, in 2000, Wolfe and Archie found the right match. A two-hour A&E TV movie of The Golden Spiders starred Maury Chaykin as Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie, and it was popular enough for A&E to make it into a series for two seasons. I remember both men being great in it, and a key reason it was better than anything attempted before is that every episode was based on one of the actual Rex Stout stories, and they emphasized character and dialogue (always the best parts of the Wolfe books) over artificial plots and commercial-break cliffhangers. The episodes just felt like the books. They’re available on DVD from A&E and streamable (like the Conrad/Horsley series) from YouTube.
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Book Bonus #2: Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe on Books
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“I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn’t have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you’re guilty, you’ll get it on the neck, and if you’re innocent, you can’t possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.”
—Rex Stout
“Maintaining integrity as a private detective is difficult, to preserve it for the hundred thousand words of a book would be impossible for me, as it has been for so many others. Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book; the myriad temptations are overwhelming.”
—Nero Wolfe, declining a publisher’s offer, The Mother Hunt
[A joint committee of authors and publishers have asked Wolfe to help squelch a plagiarism scam]
“[Writer] Philip Harvey cleared his throat. ‘In a plagiarism suit, it’s the author that gets stuck, not the publisher. In all book contracts, the author agrees to indemnify the publisher for any liabilities, losses, damages, expenses –‘
“[Publisher] Reuben Imhof cut in. ‘Now, wait a minute. What is agreed and what actually happens are two different things. Actually, in a majority of cases, the publisher suffers – ‘
“’The suffering publisher!’ Amy Wynn cried, her nose twitchy.
“Wolfe raised his voice. ‘If you please!….If the interests of author and publisher are in conflict, why a joint committee?’
“’Oh, they’re not always in conflict.’ Harvey was smiling, not apologetically. ‘The interests of slave and master often jibe.’”
—Plot It Yourself (1959)
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Dyspeptic Author Bonus
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“To the Viking Copy Editor:
“Dr. Johnson said: “Such excess of stupidity is not in nature.” Do you think Archie Goodwin should write and talk like a grade-school English teacher? Having written nearly three million of his words I know quite well how he handles them. Not a single one of the changes you suggest makes any sense…..
“If I am hurting your feelings that’s fine. They certainly should be hurt.
Rex Stout”
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23and – Who? Bonus
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Wolfe aficionados know this speculation, but I doubt everybody does, so before you make a belated visit to the online baby registry, here are a few things to take into account.
In 1956, John D. Clark theorized that Nero Wolfe was the offspring of an affair between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, in Montenegro in 1892. Other commentators have noticed a likelier resemblance to Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. Still others have noted in a play-it-backward-Paul-is-dead vein that the names of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe contain the exact same vowels in the exact same order. It has been dubbed “The Great O-E Theory.”
Still more theorists have suggested that French gentleman thief Arsene Lupin was Wolfe’s father, since in one story Lupin has an affair with the queen of a Balkan principality—which could have been Montenegro. And the name Wolfe in French is loup. Loup-Lupin – come on, man, are you blind?
Rex Stout himself never said anything about Wolfe’s paternity, although he did have a sly bit of fun with the Holmes contingent. At a meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars in 1941, he stood to deliver earthshaking news. Dr. Watson…was a woman! She was really Irene Watson, the very same Irene Adler, and she was married to Sherlock Holmes. So take that.
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One More Bonus…Because It’s Lovely
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“The odds are overwhelming that when historians look at the bright blue late October of 1975, the only thing they will keep about the twenty-seventh is that it was the day Rex Stout died.”
- Harry Reasoner, ABC Evening News, October 27, 1975
