And Be a Villain
Authors: Rex Stout
EX
S
TOUT
And Be a Villain
Introduction by Maan Meyers
BANTAM BOOKS • NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND
Meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain…
—HAMLET, Act 1
Introduction
T
HE TIME, THE place, the detective, the puzzle. These are the basic ingredients of a classic mystery.
The time is 1934, the place is New York City. Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe mystery,
Fer-de-Lance
, is published. Annette is born in the Fifth Avenue Hospital; Martin is born in Beth Israel Hospital. The country is in the grip of the Great Depression.
As Maan Meyers, we write detective fiction about historical New York in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, requiring many hours of research. We write it on a word processor.
But we
know
the thirties and forties of Rex Stout’s early Nero Wolfe novels. We lived it; it was our time.
We remember Pearl Harbor and Bataan; we heard Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London during the Blitz as the bombs were falling. We believed that everyone across the Channel in France was a member of the underground and doing his or her best to defeat the Nazis while the
Marseillaise
played in the background.
We remember war bond drives and D day and the first shocking pictures of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters sing forever in our memories, and Glenn Miller’s orchestra plays on. Listening to the radio eased the delicious (for children) terror of the blackouts. In a small New Jersey town Annette’s father was an air raid warden, her mother an airplane spotter.
Once a week, at school, we all proudly bought savings stamps, which eventually grew into war bonds. Before and after school we collected tin cans and tinfoil, from cigarette and gum wrappers, for scrap metal drives.
The bleak early years of World War II were enlivened by radio, with Edgar Bergen and the wooden brat, Charlie McCarthy, and Jack Benny and all the others. Social life with family or friends meant sitting around a table putting together jigsaw puzzles, playing checkers or dominoes or mah-jongg, or fathoming the mysteries of a Ouija board. On nights out, there were movie musicals in glorious Technicolor, starring Betty Grable and Dan Dailey or Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. Some nights at the movies offered bingo, others free dishes.
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out, Joe Louis was heavyweight champ, Joe DiMaggio hit home runs, and Fred and Ginger danced. In supper clubs, so the movies and printed page told us, beautiful women and handsome men drank highballs and manhattans.
We ate Jell-O and were meatless on Tuesdays. Many of us still had iceboxes instead of refrigerators. Hot dogs cost a nickel. We read about shamuses and dames, gats and capers, dicks and broads. Then came VE Day. And VJ Day. Victory in Europe and Japan, and the long war was over.
It was a time of new things. The United Nations. Instant coffee. Nylon stockings, with seams. Ballpoint pens.
In 1948, the year we were fourteen,
And Be a Villain
was published. We had made it to postwar America. President Harry (Give ‘em hell, Harry) Truman surprisingly defeated Tom Dewey to win a second term in the White House. The new state of Israel was born, Gandhi was assassinated, and the transistor was invented. Typing was done on mechanical typewriters, with carbon paper copies.
•
When Annette met Marty, in 1961, the area below Fourteenth Street and east of Fifth Avenue was awash with used-book stores. We climbed on shaky ladders and pawed through dusty shelves and wooed each other with first editions of the thirties and forties Nero Wolfe.
In rereading the early Nero Wolfe canon we are struck by two particular things. One, they still work. But, two, they create a time machine. When Archie gives the housekeeper, Maria Maffei, a dollar tip in
Fer-de-Lance
, it boggles the mind to realize how much that dollar bought during the Depression.
The time, the politics, the war, the clubs where Archie took Lily Rowan dancing, the rationing Archie talks about and Nero Wolfe complains about are rooted in our personal memories.
And Be a Villain
, simply because of the passage of time, has become an historical mystery.
Rex Stout was by no means a feminist; he was a man of his time—an exceptional man, but of his time. Still, he created strong women; he allowed that they could exist. Lily Rowan, Archie’s continuing lady friend, seems to personify the carefree and caring bright young women of the day. All right, so she was rich. Poor people did not make the reader forget about the Depression or the war.
An important element in the books is the truly singular support group around Nero Wolfe with which Stout improves on Doyle’s band of loyalists for Holmes. Wolfe’s band includes Fritz Brenner, the cook; Theodore Horstmann, the orchid man; Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, Wolfe’s three main operatives; Inspector Cramer and Purley Stebbins, the two primary cops; and Lon Cohen, the newspaperman, who’s always there when Archie needs information.
And then there’s the innocence. Archie may be cynical, but the Nero Wolfe books are not. And because they are not, they stand out in a time when Stout’s contemporaries were writing such world-weary protagonists.
The Wolfe books of the thirties and forties are not at all dark. Archie’s violence is neat and efficient rather than bloodthirsty. Wolfe, the armchair detective, solves the murder by brain, not brawn, and most of the time without leaving the sanctum sanctorum on Thirty-fifth Street.
Archie, the perennial wise guy, waits for Wolfe’s solution by going out on the town with Lily, the clever society girl, to dance away the hours. Back at the brownstone, Fritz cooks elegant meals. Crassness and vulgarity are hard put to raise their heads in Wolfe’s home. Except sometimes when the annoyed murderer bridles at being caught out during the final, comfortably anticipated confrontation scene in front of Wolfe’s cherry desk.
Meals in the brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, not far from the Hudson River, were sacrosanct, the menus always fascinating. There was something unique in Rex Stout’s careful detailing of food and its preparation.
The fact that Wolfe was a connoisseur of fine food who would accept nothing but the best, even on ration coupons, and employed a full-time chef of incredible talent further distances Wolfe from any of his literary contemporaries. Even Lord Peter never had it so good. Somewhere between the hard-boiled detective story and the cozy mystery, Nero Wolfe sits alone, the master, in his huge, specially constructed brown leather Brazilian Mauro chair.
•
The past is gone forever. But if you go along with Archie, he will take you back in time (in this case, 1948), to the world of Nero Wolfe.
What a wonderful world it is.
And to anyone who disagrees, we say “Pfui.”
—Martin Meyers and Annette Meyers,
aka Maan Meyers
F
OR THE THIRD TIME I went over the final additions and subtractions on the first page of Form 1040, to make good and sure. Then I swiveled my chair to face Nero Wolfe, who was seated behind his desk to the right of mine reading a book of poems by a guy named Van Doren, Mark Van Doren. So I thought I might as well use a poetry word.
“It’s bleak,” I said.
There was no sign that he heard.
“Bleak,” I repeated. “If it means what I think it does. Bleak!”
His eyes didn’t lift from the page, but he murmured, “What’s bleak?”
“Figures.” I leaned to slide the Form 1040 across the waxed grain of his desk. “This is March thirteenth. Four thousand three hundred and twelve dollars and sixty-eight cents, in addition to the four quarterly installments already paid. Then we have to send in 1040-ES for 1948, and a check for ten thousand bucks goes with it.” I clasped my fingers at the back of my head and asked grimly, “Bleak or not?”
He asked what the bank balance was and I told him. “Of course,” I conceded, “that will take care of the two wallops from our rich uncle just mentioned, also a loaf of bread and a sliver of shad roe, but weeks pass and bills arrive, not to be so crude as to speak of paying Fritz and Theodore and me.”
Wolfe had put down the poetry and was scowling at the Form 1040, pretending he could add. I raised my voice:
“But you own this house and furniture, except the chair and other items in my room which I bought myself, and you’re the boss and you know best. Sure. That electric company bird would have been good for at least a grand over and above expenses on his forgery problem, but you couldn’t be bothered. Mrs. What’s-her-name would have paid twice that, plenty, for the lowdown on that so-called musician, but you were too busy reading. That lawyer by the name of Clifford was in a bad hole and had to buy help, but he had dandruff. That actress and her gentleman protector—”
“Archie. Shut up.”
“Yes, sir. Also what do you do? You come down from your beautiful orchids day before yesterday and breeze in here and tell me merrily to draw another man-size check for that World Government outfit. When I meekly mention that the science of bookkeeping has two main branches, first addition, and second subtraction—”
“Leave the room!”
I snarled in his direction, swiveled back to my desk position, got the typewriter in place, inserted paper with carbon, and started to tap out, from my work sheet, Schedule G for line 6 of Schedule C. Time passed and I went on with the job, now and then darting a glance to the right to see if he had had the brass to resume on the book. He hadn’t. He was leaning back in his chair, which was big enough for two but not two of him, motionless, with his eyes closed. The tempest was raging. I had a private grin and went on with my work. Somewhat later, when I was finishing Schedule F for line 16 of Schedule C, a growl came from him:
“Archie.”
“Yes, sir.” I swiveled.
“A man condemning the income tax because of the annoyance it gives him or the expense it puts him to is merely a dog baring its teeth, and he forfeits the privileges of civilized discourse. But it is permissible to criticize it on other and impersonal grounds. A government, like an individual, spends money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to, because it wants to, or simply because it has it to spend. The last is much the shabbiest. It is arguable, if not manifest, that a substantial proportion of this great spring flood of billions pouring into the Treasury will in effect get spent for that last shabby reason.”
“Yeah. So we deduct something? How do I word it?”
Wolfe half opened his eyes. “You are sure of your figures?”
“Only too sure.”
“Did you cheat much?”
“Average. Nothing indecent.”
“I have to pay the amounts you named?”
“Either that or forfeit some privileges.”
“Very well.” Wolfe sighed clear down, sat a minute, and straightened in his chair. “Confound it. There was a time when a thousand dinars a year was ample for me. Get Mr. Richards of the Federal Broadcasting Company.”
I frowned at him, trying to guess; then, because I knew he was using up a lot of energy sitting up straight, I gave up, found the number in the book, dialed, and, by using Wolfe’s name, got through to Richards three minutes under par for a vice-president. Wolfe took his phone, exchanged greetings, and went on:
“In my office two years ago, Mr. Richards, when you handed me a check, you said that you felt you were still in my debt—in spite of the size of the check. So I’m presuming to ask a favor of you. I want some confidential information. What amount of money is involved, weekly let us say, in the radio program of Miss Madeline Fraser?”
“Oh.” There was a pause. Richards’s voice had been friendly and even warm. Now it backed off a little: “How did you get connected with that?”
“I’m not connected with it, not in any way. But I would appreciate the information—confidentially. Is it too much for me?”
“It’s an extremely unfortunate situation, for Miss Fraser, for the network, for the sponsors—everyone concerned. You wouldn’t care to tell me why you’re interested?”
“I’d rather not.” Wolfe was brusque. “I’m sorry I bothered you—”
“You’re not bothering me, or if you are you’re welcome. The information you want isn’t published, but everyone in radio knows it. Everyone in radio knows everything. Exactly what do you want?”