Rex Stout
REX STOUT, 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 freelance articles and worked as a sight-seeing guide and itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that 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 Eric 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.
The Rex Stout Library
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
The Hand in the Glove
Double for Death
Bad for Business
The Broken Vase
The Sound of Murder
Red Threads
The Mountain Cat Murders
Introduction
For the record, let me state unequivocally that Rex Stout is not responsible for my becoming a mystery writer. My mother read too eclectically in the genre for that.
The stack of mystery novels she borrowed from our county bookmobile each month weren’t all written by Rex Stout, though heaven knows the man was prolific and did write stacks of books. After I finished reading the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys she borrowed for me, I browsed among hers: not only Rex Stout but also Mary Roberts Rinehart, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Hughes, Stuart Palmer, Margery Allingham, Eric Ambler, Carter Dickson, Daphne du Maurier, and others now lost to memory.
Of them all, though—including the excessively literate Miss Sayers, who kept me thumbing through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—Rex Stout was the one who sent me to the dictionary most frequently. Has anyone else ever created a detective who kept an unabridged Merriam-Webster within swiveling distance of his desk chair? As a linguist who probably spoke Serbo-Croatian as his first language (there are those who speculate that he was the illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler), Nero Wolfe had a lover’s passion for words and their precise definition.
On page two of “Poison à la Carte,” a member of the Ten for Aristology asks to borrow Wolfe’s chef to cook their annual dinner:
When Wolfe said he had never heard of the Ten for Aristology, Hewitt explained that it was a group of ten men pursuing the ideal of perfection in food and drink. … Wolfe had swiveled to the dictionary on its stand at a corner of his desk, and after consulting it had declared that “aristology” meant the science of dining, and therefore the Ten were witlings, since dining was not a science but an art. After a long argument Hewitt had admitted he was licked and had agreed that the name should be changed.
In “Method Three for Murder,” a man wants to speak to Wolfe confidentially without Archie Goodwin present. “‘You’re dealing with both of us,’ Wolfe told him. ‘Professionally, we are indiscrete.’”
When I read that sentence, I thought at first it was a typo. Yet surely no detective would confess to being “indiscreet”?
A quick scramble for my own dictionary (not within swiveling distance, alas) informed me that indiscrete means “not separated into distinct parts.” Wolfe uses the word advisedly and as much for Archie’s benefit as for their visitor’s, since this particular tale begins with Archie’s hotheaded resignation. He wishes to make it quite clear that he considers Archie part of the whole.
Which brings us to another of the joys of this series. Archie Goodwin may play Dr. Watson to Wolfe’s Sherlock Holmes or Captain Hastings to Wolfe’s Hercule Poirot, but he does not share their awe of the great men to whom they give allegiance. Archie is no yes-man trundling along at Wolfe’s heels. Poirot and Holmes could function very adequately without Hastings and Watson, but if Archie really did resign Nero Wolfe would be helpless. Beyond the walls of the brownstone on West 35th Street, sociable Archie Goodwin is the asocial detective’s eyes and ears. Wolfe never insults Archie by telling him how to carry out a mission. He merely gives a Captain Picard-like wave of his hand and voices a version of “Make it so.” Which Archie does.
He respects Wolfe’s intelligence, but delights in detailing his boss’s laziness, his selfishness, his total preoccupation with food.
Indeed, food is often the reason for Wolfe’s involvement in murder. In “Poison à la Carte,” he is lured from his brownstone by the promise of an unforgettable gourmet dinner. In “The Rodeo Murder,” the misogynist is even willing to bury the hatchet with Archie’s good friend Lily Rowan in return for an invitation to partake of young blue grouse in her penthouse dining room.
Who could read those mouthwatering descriptions of exotic food and not long to taste them too? Evidently enough people must have pestered Rex Stout for recipes, because he did compile a cookbook. In the early ′70s, at a time when I was reading Ruth Stout more fervently than her brother Rex—she was a regular contributor to Organi
c Gardening and was as eloquent on mulch as he was on murder—I copied out his recipe for Saucisse Minuit. My husband and I had caught bucolic plague and were back “on the land” baking bread and raising geese, free-range chickens, and an occasional pig. We jellied or made wine from everything that hung on vines or could be plucked from trees. I actually did cook this once, substituting the dark meat of our surplus cockerels for the specified pheasant.
SAUCISSE MINUIT
(“Proportions vary with climate, season, temperaments, wine. … [I prefer] Rioja Marques de Murrieta.”—Rex Stout, 1937)
Chop up some onions and a clove of garlic and brown lightly in a generous quantity of goose fat. Pour in enough brandy to cover onions, twice as much good red wine as brandy, and as much strong beef broth as wine. Add a pinch of thyme and one of rosemary, a dusting of ginger and nutmeg and even less of cloves. Simmer gently 10 minutes. Add enough sifted breadcrumbs to make a soft runny mush. Cook gently for 5 minutes. Add chopped boiled bacon, coarsely chopped fresh pork, twice as much coarsely cut-up roast goose as pork and as much coarsely cut-up roast pheasant as goose. Season with salt and a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper. Add a few roasted pistachio nuts and let simmer to the consistency of fresh sausage meat.
Chill completely; then fill pig intestines, tying at intervals. Broil over low flame, having pricked the skins to prevent bursting.
I began by saying Rex Stout was not responsible for my becoming a mystery writer; but I end by realizing that he influenced me more than I knew. Why else would I have created an unmarried rotund character who adores food and loves to create new recipes? (Unfortunately, his concoctions are often inedible. If Roman Tramegra and Nero Wolfe were musicians, Wolfe would have perfect pitch and Tramegra would be tone deaf.) In my office, as in Wolfe’s, are a globe and an unabridged dictionary. In my head is a desire to use words as precisely as he. In my heart is a permanent soft spot for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.
—Margaret Maron
Contents
Poison à la Carte
Method Three for Murder
The Rodeo Murder
Poison
à la Carte
I
I slanted my eyes down to meet her big brown ones, which were slanted up. “No,” I said, “I’m neither a producer nor an agent. My name’s Archie Goodwin, and I’m here because I’m a friend of the cook. My reason for wanting it is purely personal.”
“I know,” she said, “it’s my dimples. Men often swoon.”
I shook my head. “It’s your earrings. They remind me of a girl I once loved in vain. Perhaps if I get to know you well enough—who can tell?”
“Not me,” she declared. “Let me alone. I’m nervous, and I don’t want to spill the soup. The name is Nora Jaret, without an H, and the number is Stanhope five, six-six-two-one. The earrings were a present from Sir Laurence Olivier. I was sitting on his knee.”
I wrote the number down in my notebook, thanked her, and looked around. Most of the collection of attractive young females were gathered in an alcove between two cupboards, but one was over by a table watching Felix stir something in a bowl. Her profile was fine and her hair was the color of corn silk just before it starts to turn. I crossed to her, and when she turned her head I spoke. “Good evening, Miss—Miss?”
“Annis,” she said. “Carol Annis.”
I wrote it down, and told her my name. “I am not blunt by nature,” I said, “but you’re busy, or soon will be, and there isn’t time to talk up to it. I was standing watching you, and all of a sudden I had an impulse to ask you for your phone number, and I’m no good at fighting impulses. Now that you’re close up it’s even stronger, and I guess we’ll have to humor it.”
But I may be giving a wrong impression. Actually I had no special hankering that Tuesday evening for new telephone numbers; I was doing it for Fritz. But that could give a wrong impression too, so I’ll have to explain.
One day in February, Lewis Hewitt, the millionaire and orchid fancier for whom Nero Wolfe had once handled a tough problem, had told Wolfe that the Ten for Aristology wanted Fritz Brenner to cook their annual dinner, to be given as usual on April first, Brillat-Savarin’s birthday. When Wolfe said he had never heard of the Ten for Aristology, Hewitt explained that it was a group of ten men pursuing the ideal of perfection in food and drink, and he was one of them. Wolfe had swiveled to the dictionary on its stand at a corner of his desk, and after consulting it had declared that “aristology” meant the science of dining, and therefore the Ten were witlings, since dining was not a science but an art. After a long argument Hewitt had admitted he was licked and had agreed that the name should be changed, and Wolfe had given him permission to ask Fritz to cook the dinner.
In fact, Wolfe was pleased, though of course he wouldn’t say so. It took a big slice of his income as a private detective to pay Fritz Brenner, chef and house-keeper in the old brownstone on West 35th Street—about the same as the slice that came to me as his assistant detective and man Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—not to mention what it took to supply the kitchen with the raw materials of Fritz’s productions. Since I am also the bookkeeper, I can certify that for the year 1957 the kitchen and Fritz cost only slightly less than the plant rooms on the roof bulging with orchids. So when Hewitt made it clear that the Ten, though they might be dubs at picking names, were true and trustworthy gourmets, that the dinner would be at the home of Benjamin Schriver, the shipping magnate, who wrote a letter to the Times every year on September first denouncing the use of horseradish on oysters, and that the cook would have a free hand on the menu and the Ten would furnish whatever he desired, Wolfe pushed a button to summon Fritz. There was a little hitch when Fritz refused to commit himself until he had seen the Schriver kitchen, but Hewitt settled that by escorting him out front to his Heron town car and driving him down to Eleventh Street to inspect the kitchen.
That’s where I was that Tuesday evening, April first, collecting phone numbers: in the kitchen of the four-story Schriver house on Eleventh Street west of Fifth Avenue. Wolfe and I had been invited by Schriver, and though Wolfe dislikes eating with strangers and thinks that more than six at table spoils a meal, he knew Fritz’s feelings would be hurt if he didn’t go; and besides, if he stayed home who would cook his dinner? Even so, he would probably have balked if he had learned of one detail which Fritz and I knew about but had carefully kept from him: that the table was to be served by twelve young women, one for each guest.
When Hewitt had told me that, I had protested that I wouldn’t be responsible for Wolfe’s conduct when the orgy got under way, that he would certainly stamp out of the house when the girls started to squeal. Good lord, Hewitt said, nothing like that; that wasn’t the idea at all. It was merely that the Ten had gone to ancient Greece not only for their name but also for other precedents. Hebe, the goddess of youth, had been cupbearer to the gods, so it was the custom of the Ten for Aristology to be waited on by maidens in appropriate dress. When I asked where they got the maidens he said through a theatrical agency, and added that at that time of year there were always hundreds of young actresses out of a job glad to grab at a chance to make fifty bucks, with a good meal thrown in, by spending an evening carrying food, one plate at a time. Originally they had hired experienced waitresses from an agency, but they had tripped on their stolas.
Wolfe and I had arrived at seven on the dot, and after we had met our host and the rest of the Ten, and had sampled oysters and our choice of five white wines, I had made my way to the kitchen to see how Fritz was making out. He was tasting from a pot on the range, with no more sign of fluster than if he had been at home getting dinner for Wolfe and me. Felix and Zoltan, from Rusterman’s, were there to help, so I didn’t ask if I was needed.
And there were the Hebes, cupbearers to the gods, twelve of them, in their stolas, deep rich purple, flowing garments to their ankles. Very nice. It gave me an idea. Fritz likes to pretend that he has reason
to believe that no damsel is safe within a mile of me, which doesn’t make sense since you can’t tell much about them a mile off, and I thought it would do him good to see me operate at close quarters. Also it was a challenge and an interesting sociological experiment. The first two had been a cinch: one named Fern Faber, so she said, a tall self-made blonde with a wide lazy mouth, and Nora Jaret with the big brown eyes and dimples. Now I was after this Carol Annis with hair like corn silk.
“I have no sense of humor,” she said, and turned back to watch Felix stir.
I stuck. “That’s a different kind of humor and an impulse like mine isn’t funny. It hurts. Maybe I can guess it. Is it Hebe one, oh-oh-oh-oh?”
No reply.
“Apparently not. Plato two, three-four-five-six?”
She said, without turning her head, “It’s listed Gorham eight, three-two-one-seven.” Her head jerked to me. “Please?” It jerked back again.
It rather sounded as if she meant please go away, not please ring her as soon as possible, but I wrote it down anyway, for the record, and moved off. The rest of them were still grouped in the alcove, and I crossed over. The deep purple of the stolas was a good contrast for their pretty young faces topped by nine different colors and styles of hairdos. As I came up the chatter stopped and the faces turned to me.
“At ease,” I told them. “I have no official standing. I am merely one of the guests, invited because I’m a friend of the cook, and I have a personal problem. I would prefer to discuss it with each of you separately and privately, but since there isn’t time for that I am—”
“I know who you are,” one declared. “You’re a detective and you work for Nero Wolfe. You’re Archie Goodwin.”
She was a redhead with milky skin. “I don’t deny it,” I told her, “but I’m not here professionally. I don’t ask if I’ve met you because if I had I wouldn’t have forgot—”
“You haven’t met me. I’ve seen you and I’ve seen your picture. You like yourself. Don’t you?”
Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe Page 1