What I always enjoy about reading Stout is that I feel included in the fun, instead of condescended to. Archie knows how to make you feel like he’s talking to you, not at you. I appreciate that kind of respect.
We have had threads discussing Nero Wolfe before, including one discussing whether Fritz was gay that ran to a second page.
I’ve read that Rex Stout’s genius was not in the creation of Nero Wolfe, but in the creation of Archie Goodwin. I whole-heartedly agree.
Me too.
As I said above, I love the books, but what you say there is definitely true.
RR
I love 'em. My dad was a fan, and I tried reading them in high school but just got tired of it. Then I picked it back up in college and systematically stole every book in the series from my father. (Ok, he gave them to me.) They are the same book over and over and over and over, though. But, well, I just love 'em. I have my coffee the same way every time I have some. I like my Nero Wolfe the same way every time I have some. They’re perfect light fiction.
It’s also interesting seeing the cultural sensibilities of the characters (and also perhaps the author?) change from Depression-Era through the 20th century.
I’m still a little pissed about A Family Affair.
Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsy certainly changed through the books. I don’t know if you can really point to clear evidence of aging per se, but each book built on the previous ones in at least superficial ways, up to and culminating in Lord Peter’s relationships with women (left intentionally vague for those who have not read the books).
Any book that has Archie saying (this is from memory, so bear with me):
“With any dog that thinks of the space between us in terms of springing distance, my attitude is one of trepidant vigilance”
is not all bad. That’s the best line ever.
^^ That quote is from In the Best of Families, Bill Door. A Family Affair is the final book. And yes, I’d save it for last.
Huge, HUGE Wolfe fan here. And for Wolfe, “huge” is the perfect adjective!* Love the corpus, love the characters, wanna chat with Wolfe, marry Saul and sleep with Archie. (I’d definitely marry Archie too but if Lily couldn’t get him to the alter, he’s clearly not the marrying kind.)
That can be troublesome, but unlike most of the authors of that era who included such statements, Rex Stout – through Wolfe’s disdain for the terms – makes it very clear that these are unacceptable, as opposed to Sayers, Christie, et al. who allowed their protaganists to slur without so much as an authorial “tsk tsk.” Stout has Wolfe upbraid Archie numerous times in those earliest books where Archie’s a much rougher-hewn young guy, and before long (after WWII) Archie’s far more refined, while still as charmingly blunt, unpretentious, funny and streetsmart as ever.
Yep. Margaret Allingham’s Campion certainly ages. I believe Sayers’s Peter Wimsy does too. Christie’s Poirot gradually ages and even dies of old age, and Marple certainly seems to get older at the end. Finally, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn gets older, marries, has a son, who in turn gets old enough to star in his own mystery. And these are four of the biggest names in mystery of that era.
Otherwise, yeah, can’t think of any. 
I can’t speak for all of us, but I don’t think most of Stout’s fans read him for genius plotting. There are certainly clever twists and interesting premises aplenty over the course of seventy-some-odd stories. But the delicious feast in the corpus consists primarily of Archie’s whip-sharp narration, the interplay between Wolfe and Archie (not to mention Fritz, Saul, Fred, Orrie, Lily, Inspector Cramer and Purley Stebbins), and the evocative world Stout lets us inhabit – a classic-era New York where men wore hats, women wore gloves, and a guy could own a glorious three story townhouse complete with glass-enclosed orchid hothouses on W. 35th street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Plus the baddies get punished and the goodies usually end up winning.
It’s a great place to visit and – unlike most other mysteries, I find – incredibly worth second, third and really umpteen revisits. I know whodunnit and how and why, but it doesn’t matter; I just love the writing so damn much.
Enjoy the new world ahead, OP! Hope you’ll join and let us know what you think.
- A six-foot tall, 279 lb guy must’ve seemed much fatter at the time Stout was writing, especially to a scrawny beanpole like Stout. The way Archie and other characters react to Wolfe, you’d expect him to belong inside a circus tent! Then again, Archie admits that he tends to see Wolfe as fatter depending on whether he’s pissed off with him or not. Heh.
I’ve heard this several places, but I’ve never seen the Thayer David version, nor do I t6hink it’s on any recording. It would be interesting to see.
Yeah, I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole. But in fact retaining the age of a character, or rather, allowing the character to age a bit to accommodate the multiple cases and events of a series without aging year for year with the author, was the absolute norm for the age. It wasn’t much of an innovation.
Even the examples you cite don’t contradict this in any way. Poirot is introduced as a Belgium war refugee after a full career in his first book, published in 1920 but set in 1916. Novels with him as lead were published regularly through the 1940s and occasionally until 1972. Christie did write and set aside a “last” case to be published after her death, but it’s ludicrous to suggest that Poirot aged anything like 50 years in the novels. Miss Marple was even more elderly in her first book in 1930, and didn’t become a series regular until the 1950s. She appeared until 1971, also with a last case published in 1976. She doesn’t age 40 years over the series, which would put her age at somewhat past dead.
Wimsey had one of the shortest careers of any major detective, only 14 years, so not much fudging was needed. Campion does seemed to have aged, although I don’t know if he was presented as actually being in his 60s in his last books, even the ones not finished by her husband.
Both Wimsey and Campion - who is often considered to have been a take-off on Wimsey - were young silly upper class asses at the start of their careers, as well. Aging them improved their characters. You can’t do that with an older lead, though, not if you hope to write about them for decades.
Virtually every other detective of the time was represented by the “aging a bit” standard. It was - and is - unusual to do anything else. I’ll stand by that.
Thanks choie, I conflated two books with the word “Family” in the title.
The only flaw I can find in the Nero Wolfe stories is the tendency of Stout to pull a Deus ex machina out of the air and wrap everything up at a breakneck pace. I seem to remember one plot turning on the fact that Saul Panzer shows up with a birth certificate he obtained in Canada that solved the whole thing. I don’t even remember if Saul had appeared in the book until the last act.
I also think that Nero could have used more interaction with his nemesis, Arnold Zeck. You’re only as good as your adversary. Zeck only appeared in three novels, if I remember correctly. I thought we could have used more Zeck. I’d love to see what Wolfe was up to in In the Best of Families . Oh, and a couple more stories when Wolfe was pulled out of his environment. I think The Black Mountain was one of the best.
Old age? I think not! In Poirot’s case, it was
suicide
I loved, loved the Wolfe books. Rex Stout and Dorothy Sayers are the only writers whose detective stories so entranced me I became a “completist”, tracking down not only all their series detective stories, but all their nonseries detective stories, and then anything they’d written, whether it had anything to do with detective stories or not.
I still haven’t read all of Stout’s work, if only because some of his early stuff is still coming to light. I read all the Wolfe books and all the non-Wolfe detective novels before I’d finished college, I think. I still have copies of several of the Wolfe books. I wish I’d hung on to the non-Wolfe books; I wouldn’t mind rereading some of them, The President Vanishes in particular.
Bill door is correct about the deus ex machina thing; it crops up all across Stout’s fiction, unfortunately. He also had a remarkably bad case of a syndrome a lot of mystery writers (and TV shows) have, the syndrome of the detective “unmasking” the murderer on the basis of “evidence” you could never, ever win an actual conviction with. In one novel he “unmasked” the murderer by watching him or her pass champagne glasses in what proved to be a habitual and significant matter. As someone once said, detective stories always end just after the detective finds the murderer and just before the courts turn the murderer loose.
Being among other things, the debut of Lily Rowan, this story holds a special place in my heart.
And the lines: “I never saw a man get sent to hell by a woman who didn’t already have a ticket in his pocket, or was at least fiddling around with the timetables.”
And: “I’m going to play spoon bean with your money.”
Just a quick little nitpick: The title of the third book with Arnold Zeck is In the Best Families. No of in the title.
Hercule Poirrot and Miss Marple both aged–in their last appearances they were barely able to walk or see.
Sorry–it appears this has all been discussed already.
I love the Nero Wolfe stories. However, I’ve tried reading a few other of Stout’s books, and the magic just wasn’t there for me. YMMV, of course.
Rex Stout’s refusal to let Archie and Wolfe age had some odd effects. Example? In “Too Many Cooks,” written in the 1930s, a young black kitchen boy proves to be an important witness. In “A Right to Die,” written in the Sixties, that black kitchen boy is now a middle-aged University professor with a grown son… but Archie and Wolfe are still the same age they were in “Too Many Cooks.”
I read many of the Wolfe novels, and enjoyed most of them, but the central mystery was almost always the weakest part of each book. In some ways, Rex Stout was the anti-Agatha Christie. She had ingenious plots but paper-thin characters. Stout had delightful; characters and a lot of wit, but his mysteries were usually formulaic and rarely interesting.
But the books were worth reading because Stout created a whole world, just as P.G. Wodehouse did, and that world was populated by characters you came to like and look forward to seeing again.
I find the genius was the marriage of the classical sleuth (Holmes and Poirot) in Wolf to the hardboiled (Sam Spade and Philip Marlow) Archie. Granted Archie became a touch less hardboiled as time went on, but still the combination is delightful.
In earlier threads we have discussed who would have been the best casting for this dynamic literary duo and I think the general consensus was Sidney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart.
In any case let’s all raise a beer to the pair.
(I also enjoy the author’s pen name as an advertisement for his featured detective. Rex for king and Stout for rotund).