Rex Stout and the Two Traditions

            I’ve never been a dedicated Rex Stout fan but I recently reread the first Nero Wolfe mystery and then went on to read what many consider his best.

Fer-de-Lance (1934) is the first Nero Wolfe book, where Stout introduced the formula that wittily combines two great mystery traditions. His detective follows in the line of the Sherlock Holmes eccentric genius types, in this case a nearly three-hundred-pound gourmand who talks a kind of professor-cum-antiquary English, cultivates orchids and, in the best armchair detective fashion, rarely leaves his custom-built chair, let alone his brownstone townhouse on West 35^th Street. Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin, however, cracks wise, likes pretty girls, and throws his modest weight around like a hard-boiled detective.  Stout didn’t come up with this formula until he was 47, but it worked for at least a book a year for the rest of his life.

            In this one, the murder is not done with a fer-de-lance snake, Bothrops atrox, though the Argentinian villain, Manuel, plants one in Nero Wolfe’s office when he thinks the detective is on to him. The murder is done with poison injected by a needle fired from the grip of a golf club into the victim’s abdomen. The victim had borrowed a driver from Manuel’s father, the intended victim, during a round of golf. When he knows he is about to be caught, Manuel takes his father up for a flight in a small plane and crashes it, killing them both.

            The Doorbell Rang, which many consider the best in the series of Nero Wolfe mysteries, was written in 1965, a year after Fred Cook wrote The FBI Nobody Knows, detailing J. Edgar Hoover’s use of the FBI to pursue his private peeves and prejudices. Stout made Cook’s book the starting point for The Doorbell Rang—barely a mystery in the usual sense—in which Nero Wolfe takes on the bureau when his client, Rachel Bruner, offers him a $100,000 retainer and a fee to be named by him if he can get the FBI off her back. She was so impressed with Cook’s book she sent 10,000 copies—she’s rich as Croesus’s widow—to everyone she thought should read it, and Hoover has responded by wiretapping and tailing her and most of her employees. Against his better judgment, and Archie’s, Wolfe takes the case, and the FBI promptly begins to tail him and Archie and wiretap them.

            When a superior, after hearing from the FBI, asks him for dope to help revoke Wolfe’s and Goodwin’s licenses, Homicide Inspector Kramer not only tells his superior there is nothing to support such an action, he decides to tell Archie confidentially about it and about a murder he is investigating. A magazine reporter doing an exposé of the FBI has been murdered, and the night it happened three FBI agents were seen leaving his apartment building. None of his notes are found at the scene, nor is the gun belonging to the reporter, nor is the slug that killed him.

            Archie is able to solve the murder, though he needs the crucial bit of evidence he thinks the FBI has, namely the slug. Wolfe lures FBI agents into breaking into his brownstone townhouse when they think he is not there; then Archie, Saul Panzer and his associates get the drop on them and get them to give up their identification. Wolfe then negotiates with the FBI to drop their tails and wiretaps on him and Bruner’s people, and to give up the bullet.

The plot here is really two plots and they are interestingly handled. Once I get past the ingenuity of the combined traditions and the eccentricities of Wolfe, though, I find that I am put off by the long perorations Wolfe tends to give us in solving the crime or forcing the outcome, in this case. But Wolfe is very entertaining for a book or two, and you might find yourself hooked.