Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31

R
EX
S
TOUT
, 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 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 sight-seeing guide and itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that 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 from 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 II Rex 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. A month 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.

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

I
first met Rex Stout sometime in the early 1950s when our daughters were classmates at Oakwood School, a Quaker boarding school in upstate New York. My husband, Lennie Hayton, and I became fast family friends with the Stouts. Rex was a kind of big, bearded Hoosier patriarch, and Pola, his beautiful
Mitteleuropean
-accented wife, was a celebrated weaver and textile designer. We were amused by the fact that Lennie, like Rex, had a beard. I remember much good conversation on the subjects of children, politics, and the artistic scene. And I remember a visit to their wonderful 1930s-modern Connecticut hilltop house—full of Pola’s rugs and Rex’s orchids. I remember walking into a place with literally thousands of orchids. I was thrilled, of course—it was just like Nero Wolfe’s plant rooms. I was as much a fan as a friend. I enjoyed the Stouts as a family, but I had been a fan of Rex’s for years before we met.

In a peripatetic “showbiz” life on the road—particularly in the 1950s, when I went from country to country, not just city to city—Nero Wolfe was a sort of solace. I was a fanatic reader traveling from hotel to
hotel and dressing room to dressing room. I read between shows and I read in the wee hours of the morning, when showbiz kept me too keyed up to sleep. I loved mysteries. Mysteries satisfied every level of excitement and enjoyment. Nero Wolfe, however, was special. I read Nero Wolfe whenever I was homesick—buying the books at Harrods in London, and in English-language bookshops all over Europe.

It wasn’t the crime element as much as the lifestyle that so attracted me to the books. It was Nero’s house, and Archie’s New York, that really spoke to me. First of all, Nero lived in a New York brown-stone. I was born in a Brooklyn brownstone that was my happiest childhood home, my only sense of roots. I could picture the house so clearly. And I could understand how Nero, despite his bulk, would never want to leave it. As an astrological Cancerian, I appreciated Nero’s nesting instinct. I especially liked how he felt about food. It was not about eating: it was more an appreciation of food as an art form. I loved reading descriptions of Fritz the chef’s meals. Next to mysteries and historical biographies, I loved reading cookbooks—maybe a reaction to a life of hotels and restaurants. I enjoyed everything about Nero: his fatness, his orchids, his Sunday-afternoon reading, his brains.

And, of course, there was Archie Goodwin, Nero’s legman. Archie had superior wit, a deadpan style, and a deceptively “unrequited” love life. Archie had depth—and he had New York. It was the New York that I missed whenever I was somewhere else. Archie knew the city streets and avenues: brownstones in the West Thirties, bars and grills on Eighth Avenue, coffee shops on Lexington, the Village. He took the
subway and buses and taxis; he read the Sunday
New York Times.
I could picture it all. It satisfied all sorts of homesickness. When I reread Nero Wolfe now, I can see that old beloved New York, and I still miss it. And I can read about Nero’s home life and remember my own.

—
Lena Horne

I
f it hadn’t been raining and blowing that raw Tuesday morning in March I would have been out, walking to the bank to deposit a couple of checks, when Austin Byne phoned me, and he might have tried somebody else. But more likely not. He would probably have rung again later, so I can’t blame all this on the weather. As it was, I was there in the office, oiling the typewriter and the two Marley .38’s, for which we had permits, from the same can of oil, when the phone rang and I lifted it and spoke.

“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“Hello there. This is Byne. Dinky Byne.”

There it is in print for you, but it wasn’t for me, and I didn’t get it. It sounded more like a dying bullfrog than a man.

“Clear your throat,” I suggested, “or sneeze or something, and try again.”

“That wouldn’t help. My tubes are all clogged. Tubes. Clogged. Understand? Dinky Byne—B-y-n-e.”

“Oh, hallo. I won’t ask how you are, hearing how you sound. My sympathy.”

“I need it. I need more than sympathy, too.” It
was coming through slightly better. “I need help. Will you do me a hell of a favor?”

I made a face. “I might. If I can do it sitting down and it doesn’t cost me any teeth.”

“It won’t cost you a thing. You know my Aunt Louise. Mrs. Robert Robilotti.”

“Only professionally. Mr. Wolfe did a job for her once, recovered some jewelry. That is, she hired him and I did the job—and she didn’t like me. She resented a remark I made.”

“That won’t matter. She forgets remarks. I suppose you know about the dinner party she gives every year on the birthday date of my Uncle Albert, now resting in peace perhaps?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“Well, that’s it. Today. Seven o’clock. And I’m to be one of the chevaliers, and listen to me, and I’ve got some fever. I can’t go. She’ll be sore as the devil if she has to scout around for a fill-in, and when I phone her I want to tell her she won’t have to, that I’ve already got one. Mr. Archie Goodwin. You’re a better chevalier than me any day. She knows you, and she has forgotten the remark you made, and anyhow she has resented a hundred remarks I’ve made, and you’ll know exactly how to treat the lady guests. Black tie, seven o’clock, and you know the address. After I phone her, of course she’ll ring you to confirm it. And you can do it sitting down, and I’ll guarantee nothing will be served that will break your teeth. She has a good cook. My God, I didn’t think I could talk so long. How about it, Archie?”

“I’m chewing on it,” I told him. “You waited long enough.”

“Yeah, I know, but I kept thinking I might be able
to make it, until I pried my eyes open this morning. I’ll do the same for you some day.”

“You can’t. I haven’t got a billionaire aunt. I doubt if she has forgotten the remark I made because it was fairly sharp. What if she vetoes me? You’d have to ring me again to call it off, and then ring someone else, and you shouldn’t talk that much, and besides, my feelings would be hurt.”

I was merely stalling, partly because I wanted to hear him talk some more. It sounded to me as if his croak had flaws in it. Clogged tubes have no effect on your esses, as in “seven” and “sitting,” but he was trying to produce one, and he turned “long” into “lawd” when it should have been more like “lawg.” So I was suspecting that the croak was a phony. If I hadn’t had my full share of ego I might also have been curious as to why he had picked on me, since we were not chums, but of course that was no problem. If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you’re surprised if a National Chairman calls to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you’re not
really
surprised.

I only stalled him long enough to be satisfied that the croak was a fake before I agreed to take it on. The fact was that the idea appealed to me. It would be a new experience and should increase my knowledge of human nature. It might also be a little ticklish, and even dismal, but it would be interesting to see how they handled it. Not to mention how I would handle it myself. So I told him I would stand by for a call from his Aunt Louise.

It came in less than half an hour. I had finished the oiling job and was putting the guns in their drawer in my desk when the phone rang. A voice I recognized
said she was Mrs. Robilotti’s secretary and Mrs. Robilotti wished to speak with me, and I said, “Is it jewelry again, Miss Fromm?” and she said, “She will tell you what it is, Mr. Goodwin.”

Then another voice, also recognized. “Mr. Goodwin?”

“Speaking.”

“My nephew Austin Byne says he phoned you.”

“I guess he did.”

“You
guess
he did?”

“The voice said it was Byne, but it could have been a seal trying to bark.”

“He has laryngitis. He told you so. Apparently you haven’t changed any. He says that he asked you to take his place at dinner at my home this evening, and you said you would if I invited you. Is that correct?”

I admitted it.

“He says that you are acquainted with the nature and significance of the affair.”

“Of course I am. So are fifty million other people—or more.”

“I know. I regret the publicity it has received in the past, but I refuse to abandon it. I owe it to my dear first husband’s memory. I am inviting you, Mr. Goodwin.”

“Okay. I accept the invitation as a favor to your nephew. Thank you.”

“Very well.” A pause. “Of course it is not usual, on inviting a dinner guest, to caution him about his conduct, but for this occasion some care is required. You appreciate that?”

“Certainly.”

“Tact and discretion are necessary.”

“I’ll bring mine along,” I assured her.

“And of course refinement.”

“I’ll borrow some.” I decided she needed a little comfort. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Robilotti, I understand the set-up and you can count on me clear through to the coffee and even after. Relax. I am fully briefed. Tact, discretion, refinement, black tie, seven o’clock.”