Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25

by Before Midnight

  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 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 IIRex 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. Amonth 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

  I find comfort in friendship. I am a social animal, and even though I mouth off about being a rugged individualist, iron-willed and resolute, standing alone against all odds like some sort of hyperheroic Clint Eastwood, when push comes to reverse head kicks I am as much a creature of the herd as, say, dingoes or chacma baboons or lions in the veld. I seek family and friends and the patterns of human interaction, and that is why, when I sat down to write Elvis Cole, I gave him Joe Pike.

  My publisher labels these books of mine “An Elvis Cole Novel.” That is but a half-truth, no more complete than suggesting Holmes without Watson, Nick without Nora, Batman without Robin. Elvis and Joe are yin and yang, two halves of a whole, the light and dark of but one character. Theirs is a gestalt of friendship that hopefully yields a sum to the reader far greater than either might yield on his own. Sort of like Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.

  Let me be honest with you. I never gave a damn about Nero Wolfe. Here was this fat guy who sat around his house, futzing with orchids and gorging himself on a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet and acting like a spoiled and peevish child when things didn’t go his way. Think about it. If Nero Wolfe were real instead of fictional, and you or I actually had to deal with him instead of simply reading about him from the comfortable distance of our armchairs, neither of us would like him very much. Nero Wolfe was a dick.

  I think Rex Stout knew that.

  And so he gave us Archie Goodwin, the filter through which we see Wolfe and an appealing anchor for our emotions. It is Archie in whom we invest ourselves, not Wolfe. It is Archie whom we like and care for, not Wolfe. Wolfe is interesting and intriguing, to be sure, but could you take that holier-than-thou pout of his, that superior air? Not me, friends. Wolfe without Archie would surely have died an unlamented death, like so many other pulp-era category fiction creations, long gone and never loved.

  But there was Archie, and Archie saved him.

  Here was Archie Goodwin, whom we liked, telling us by his friendship toward Wolfe that Wolfe, in fact, was not a hideous bloated slug of a twerp, after all. If Archie could find value in the man, then maybe we had judged too quickly. Maybe there was more to Wolfe than an incisive intellect and an offensively eccentric life-style.

  I loved Archie Goodwin, so let me tell you how we came to meet. Years ago, when I was growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and struggling with the first temptations of becoming a professional writer in an environment that valued only the oil industry and Southeast Conference football, I used to haunt a bookshop that sold secondhand paperbacks, underground comic books, and discreetly displayed on a shelf above two cardboard boxes of coverless men’s magazines, against the wall in the rear of the place, devices best described as “marital aids.” It was a grungy, dirty, seedy kind of place, but I discovered Chandler there, as well as Ted Mark and Don Westlake and Don Westlake writing as Richard Stark. A paperback cost nineteen cents. If it had no cover, it cost a dime. I had gone through the Chandlers and was working on the Hammetts and I walked into the little store that day very much wanting a copy of Red Harvest. The stacks were divided by category (western, mystery, science fiction, etc.) but were rarely alphabetized, so if you wanted a particular author, you had to look through all the mysteries, ofttimes a tedious process. There was only a single copy of Red Harvest, and some yo-yo had written BITE ME across the cover in green ink, so that ended that. I won’t buy a book with BITE ME on the cover. Not even for half price. But I was in the store and I continued through the stacks, and that’s when I stumbled upon five or six titles written by this guy Rex Stout. I picked one and skimmed the first pages and found the narrator coming home late one night while his boss, this other guy named Wolfe, was pissing and moaning about it because he’d been put out, really coming down hard on the first guy, demanding to know where he’d been and sort of whining about it and acting snappish and spoiled. You see? A dick. But already I’m liking the narrator, so who cares about this guy Wolfe? Rex Stout has given the narrator a clean, appealing voice, just enough
attitude to show that he’s nobody’s chump, and a wit like Marlowe’s on a day when all the biorhythms are up. So I’m reading and liking this guy—the narrator—and then the client walks in and the narrator says, “He didn’t look tough, he looked flabby, but of course that’s no sign. The toughest guy I ever ran into had cheeks that needed a brassiere.” Right then and there, sitting on the floor in front of the mystery section in that crummy bookstore with that ragged paperback and its sticky cover, Archie Goodwin owned me. The book was If Death Ever Slept, and I still own that very edition, bought then, over twenty years ago, for nineteen cents and now tucked away in a box somewhere here in my house in Sherman Oaks.

  Stout gave us Archie because Archie is us, or who we would like to be if we could get away with it. Smart, sharp, physically confident, and tough. We can identify with Archie, but not with Wolfe. Wolfe is just the freak in the house—a turd in a cage who grows flowers and draws Sherlockian conclusions from insufficient data; fun to watch, but would you really want to share your time with the guy?

  Yet Archie does, and it isn’t just for pay. Oh, Archie is Wolfe’s employee, to be sure, but read the books and you will see that these two are more than employer/employee; they exist in a sort of symbiosis that transcends mere environmental or biological need or employment security. If that’s all there was to it, no one would give a damn. As fine and wonderful and entertaining as Archie is, there has to be more here for the reader. There has to be something that speaks to that innermost part of us and keeps these books vital and alive in the marketplace through the passing decades. There is.

  Archie and Nero are family. They are friends. As we read the books, as we immerse ourselves in that world of theirs on West Thirty-fifth Street, so we share the warmth of that friendship and seek to return to it again and again, as if by returning we receive an affirmation of that which we seek not in fiction but in our lives. For these books, these novels by Rex Stout tell us things that we want very badly to hear.

  Stout says to us, “Here are two friends. Here are two people sharing their lives. As you wish for friendship, share in theirs. As you seek companionship, share in theirs. As you search for love, share in theirs.” Rex Stout invites us into the family and offers warmth and security and certainty. He affirms what we all seek on some primal level. If such disparate individuals as Wolfe and Goodwin can share friendship and love and caring and life, cannot we? That’s the strength here. That’s the message and the feelgood inherent in the voice and character that Rex Stout has given to Archie Goodwin. In this cold world it is a fire at which we may warm our hands. Holmes and Watson. Nick and Nora. Spenser and Hawk. Isaac Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw and Lije Baley. Tom and Huck and Jim. It runs deep in us, from literature to movies to comic books to television. Cagney and Lacey. Hope and Crosby. Batman and Robin. Cisco and Pancho. Is there any wonder that “buddy pictures” are so often successful? Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. The appeal of friendship is old, and the pleasures inherent in such fictional pairings are no less valid today than they were in the days of Holmes and Watson, or in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies—the incredible five decades through which Stout published Nero Wolfe. Check out Thelma and Louise.

  When I write about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, I am defining their friendship, and exploring it, and expressing a profound belief in its value. Not just in the friendship that Elvis and Joe enjoy, but in the friendship that we all might share, or hope to.

  I think Stout believed in this. He certainly illustrated it through his work.

  Read this book and enjoy it, then read the others. They are a testament to our humanness. They are also rollicking good yarns.

  —Robert Crais

  Chapter 1

  Not that our small talk that Tuesday evening in April had any important bearing on the matter, but it will do for an overture, and it will help to explain a couple of reactions Nero Wolfe had later. After a dinner that was featured by one of Fritz’s best dishes, squabs with sausage and sauerkraut, in the dining room of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, I followed Wolfe across the hall to the office, and, as he got some magazines from the table near the big globe and went to his chair behind his desk, asked if there were any chores. That was insurance. I had notified him that I intended to take Thursday afternoon off for the opening of the baseball season at the Polo Grounds, and when Thursday came I didn’t want any beefing about my letting things pile up.

  He said no, no chores, got all his vast bulk adjusted in the chair, the only chair on earth he approved of, and opened a magazine. He allotted around twenty minutes a week for looking at advertisements. I went to my desk, sat, and reached for the phone, then changed my mind, deciding a little more insurance wouldn’t hurt. Swiveling and seeing that he was

  scowling at the open magazine, I got up and circled around near enough to see what he was focused on. It was a full-page ad, black and white, that I and many millions of my fellow citizens knew by heart—though it didn’t require much study, since there were only six words in it, not counting repetitions. At the center near the top was a distinguished-looking small bottle, labeled in fancy script Pour Amour, with the Amour beneath the Pour. Right below it were two more of the same, also centered, and below them three more, and then four more, and so on down the page. At the bottom seven bottles stretched clear across, making the base of a twenty-eight-bottle pyramid. In the space at the top left was the statement:

  Pour Amour

  Means

  For Love

  and at top right it said:

  Pour Amour

  is

  for love

  “There are two things about that ad,” I said.

  Wolfe grunted and turned a page.

  “One thing,” I said, “is the name itself. To sixty-four and seven-tenths per cent of the women seeing it, it will suggest ‘paramour,’ and the percentage would be higher if more of them knew what a paramour is. I won’t decry American womanhood. Some of my best friends are women. Very few of them want to be or have paramours, so you couldn’t come right out and name a perfume that. Put it this way. They see the ad, and they think, So they have the nerve to suggest their snazzy old perfume will get me a paramour! I’ll show ’em! What do they think I am? Half an ounce, ten bucks. The other thing—”

  “One’s enough,” he growled.

  “Yes, sir. The second thing, so many bottles. That’s against the rules. The big idea in a perfume ad is to show only one bottle, to give the impression that it’s a scarce article and you’d better hurry up and get yours. Not Pour Amour. They say, Come on, we’ve got plenty and it’s a free country and every woman has a right to a paramour, and if you don’t want one prove it. It’s an entirely new approach, one hundred per cent American, and it seems to be paying off, it and the contest together.”

  I had expected to get the desired results by that time, but all he did was sit and turn pages. I took a breath.

  “The contest, as you probably know since you look at ads some, is a pip. A million dollars in cash prizes. Each week for nearly five months they have furnished a description of a woman—I might as well give you the exact specifications, since you’ve been training my memory for years—‘a woman recorded in non-fictional history in any of its forms, including biography, as having used cosmetics.’ Twenty of them in twenty weeks. This was the description of Number One:

  “Though Caesar fought to give me power

  And I had Antony in my grasp

  My bosom, in the fatal hour,

  Welcomed the fatal asp.

  “Of course that was pie. Cleopatra. Number Two was just as easy:

  “Married to one named Aragon,

  I listened to Columbus’ tales,

  And offered all my gems

  to pawn To buy him ships and sails.

  “I didn’t remember ever reading that Queen Isabella used cosmetics, but since nobody ever bathed in the fifteenth century she must have. I could also give you Numbers Three, Four, and Five
, but after that they began to get tough, and by Number Ten I wasn’t even bothering to read them. God knows what they were like by the time they got to Twenty—to give you an example, here’s Number Seven or Eight, I forget which:

  “My eldest son became a peer

  Although I couldn’t write my name;

  As Mr. Brown’s son’s fondest dear

  I earned enduring fame.

  “I call that fudging. Considering how many Mr. Browns have had sons in the course of history, and how many of the sons—”

  “Pah.” Wolfe turned a page. “Nell Gwynn, the English actress.”

  I stared. “Yeah, I’ve heard of her. How come? One of her boy friends may have been named Brown or Brownson, but that wasn’t what made her famous. It was some king.”

  “Charles the Second.” He was smug. “He made his son by her a duke. His father, Charles the First, on a trip to Spain in his youth, had assumed the name of Mr. Brown. And of course Nell Gwynn was the mistress of Charles the Second.”

  “I prefer paramour. Okay, so you’ve read ten thousand books. What about this one—I think it was Number Nine:

  “By the law himself had earlier made

  I could not be his legal wife;

  The law he properly obeyed

  And loved me all my life.”

  I flipped a hand. “Name her.”

  “Archie.” His head turned to me. “You have somewhere to go?”

  “No, sir, not tonight. Lily Rowan has a table at the Flamingo Room and thought I might drop in for a dance, but I told her you might need me, and she knows how indispensable I—”

  “Pfui.” He started to glare and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “You intended to go, and undertook to shift the responsibility for your absence by pestering me into suggesting it. You have succeeded. I suggest that you go somewhere at once.”

  There were three or four things I could have said, but he sighed and went back to the magazine, so I skipped it. As I headed for the hall his voice told my back, “You shaved and changed your clothes before dinner.”