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Rex Stout

kevinburtonsmith

(1886-1975)

The Writer at Work: Rex Stout in Danbury, Connecticut, on June 2, 1967 in Danbury, Connecticut.

“Compose yourself, Archie. Why taunt me? Why upbraid me? I am merely a genius, not a god.”
— Nero Wolfe humbly confesses, in Fer-de-Lance.

At first glance, Rex Stout‘s Nero Wolfe might seem out of place among the hard-bitten, world-weary, pavement-pounding P.I.s to which this site is usually devoted. Massively overweight, a cranky, agoraphobic and sedentary gourmet who virtually never leaves his Manhattan brownstone, Wolfe is in almost every sense an armchair detective. And yet, Stout provided a real shot in the arm to the then-fledgling genre when he published his first Nero wolfe novel in 1934.

Wolfe and his investigator/bodyguard/secretary Archie Goodwin are just as much “eyes” as their predecessors Holmes and Watson – but with a big helping of the American P.I. genes that defined the sub-genre.

Over Wolfe’s 40-year literary lifespan (with several additional adventures written by Robert Goldsborough, initially in the 1980s), the fat genius and his sharp-eyed, smart-mouthed assistant bring down murderers, blackmailers, wartime traitors, and even (on one memorable occasion) leave J. Edgar Hoover out in the snow. These are men who make a good living at a difficult and dangerous business —  not minor lords, plucky spinsters or churchmen who just happened to be at the garden party when the butler was stabbed. The series also serves as a vivid depiction of their life and times. “Through Wolfe and Archie,” as Marcia Kiser points out, “we see the effects of the Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Liberation and Watergate.”

* * * * *

Stout was born in Indiana in 1886 to Quaker parents and raised in Kansas. B y most accounts he was quite the precocious child, reading the Bible cover to cover (twice!) before he was four, and becoming state spelling champion at the age of thirteen. After a brief time at Kansas University, he joined the navy, and served as a yeoman on President Roosevelt’s yacht from 1906 to 1908. He worked as a bookkeeper, a salesman, a hotel manager and a store clerk, while trying to crack the burgeoning pulp market, cranking out science fiction, romance, mystery  and adventure in The All-Story Magazine and Cavalier, most of them actually serialized novels. The final one, The Last Drive, was serialized in The Golfer, and involved a murder method he would later retool for Fer-de-Lance, his first Nero Wolfe novel.

Ever practical, Stout teamed up with his brother, and established a banking business model for schools whose success would enable him to continue with his writing.

By then, Stout was already on his way to becoming something of a public intellectual, active in what we know call “social justice.” He  served as the president of the Authors Guild,  lobbying for better copyright deals for authors, and he was one of the founders of the politically charged  Vanguard Press, which initially focussed on books that mainstream publishers were wary of putting into print.

Indeed, his first book, How Like a God (1929), was published by Vanguard while Stout was serving as president, and was an off-beat, psychological thriller that follows a man climbing up the stairs of a New York City brownstone, a gun in his coat, with murder on his mind. And told in second person.

Stout published four more psychological suspense novels between 1929 and 1933, three of them put out by Vanguard, and he followed that up with The President Vanishes (1934), a more straightforward, albeit political thriller.

But it was the next book, later that year, that really exploded.

The first of his forty-seven books and countless short stories and novellas featuring Nero Wolfe and his legman Archie Goodwin, Fer-de-Lance, was published in 1934, to much popular and critical acclaim, and by the start of World War II, Stout was a full-time writer.

One thing which does set the Wolfe books apart from many others in the Shamus Game is their somewhat bouncy tone; the stories usually have reasonably happy endings.  He also wrote books featuring private eyes Dol Bonner, Alphabet Hicks and Tecumseh Fox.

But even as Stout became one of the world’s bestselling mystery authors, he kept a foot in the real world, remaining defiantly political and outspoken. In the thirties and early forties, he was a tireless promoter of the war effort, banking on his popularity by giving speeches, hosting radio shows and chairing the Writers War Board. After World War II he actively worked for groups including Friends for Democracy, Society for the Prevention of World War III and the  Writers Board for World Government. Not surprisingly,  then, HUAC and the FBI came sniffing around, not exactly pleased with his leaderships of the Authors’ League of America, but Stout managed to avoid appearing before them. Decades later, the final Wolfe novel, A Family Affair (1975), written at the height of the Watergate scandal and probably the darkest of the entire series revealed Stout to be mightily ticked off at Nixon and his cronies. (Imagine if he was around for Trump 2.0?)

But we’re here to celebrate the mystery writer. Stout was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society, and in 1958, Stout served as president of the Mystery Writers of America, who honored him with their MWA Grand Master Award in 1959.

UNDER OATH

 

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SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS

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FURTHER INVESTIGATION

(C) 1999-2002, by Don B. Hilliard and Kevin B. Smith, with further contributions from Marc LaViolette, James A. Rock, Eric Jamborsky, Alex Avenarius, Mike Harris, Brian Baker (television), Jean Quinn-Manzo(comics) and Stewart Wright (radio). Author photo from Santi Visalli/Getty Images. Please don’t sue me.

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