How Rex Stout kept it fresh

The mystery of how crime writers keep a long-running series fresh has been a great topic of discussion here. Last night, I found a beautifully simple and amusing example in Rex Stout's novella "Counterfeit for Murder," from Homicide Trinity.

Nero Wolfe has ordered Archie Goodwin to summon the trusted stable of freelance detectives whom they often use when extra manpower is called for. Fans will be familiar with the set piece. Goodwin always names the detectives, taking care to point out that Saul Panzer is the best of them. How is an author to keep such a scene, repeated so often, fresh? Here, Stout does it with a little joke:

"He spoke. `Saul and Fred and Orrie. At eight in the morning in my room.'

"My brows went up. Saul Panzer is the best operative south of the North Pole. His rate is ten dollars and hour and he is worth twenty. Fred Durkin's rate is seven dollars and he is worth seven-fifty. Orrie Cather's rate is also seven dollars and he is worth six-fifty."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Rex Stout
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Big, fat and hard-boiled

It has been said with some justification that Rex Stout was the only crime writer able successfully to combine the English tradition of the eccentric detective, in the person of Nero Wolfe, with the harder-boiled American tradition, in the person of Archie Goodwin. That’s a fair assessment, and Stout’s achievement is all the more impressive when one considers that Goodwin narrates the stories. He must thus tell a story in one style while acting in another.

How does Stout pull off this balancing act? With an ear for American slang and a playful sensitivity to contrasts of tone. There is no finer example than the third paragraph of “Invitation to Murder,” one of three long stories that make up Three Men Out. The paragraph begins as an enumeration of Wolfe’s eccentricities (“He hated to work, but he loved to eat and drink … his domestic and professional establishment in the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, including the orchids in the plant rooms on the roof, had an awful appetite for dollars.”)

So far, Archie Goodwin sounds like a Bertie Wooster. That’s the English-eccentric side of Rex Stout. Then the narration starts turning into something more typically American — the anxious client visiting the P.I.’s office asking him to take the job — while retaining its amused tone. Wolfe’s only source of dollars “was his income as a private detective, and at that moment, there on his desk near the edge," Archie tells us, edging closer to hard-boiled land before crossing defintively over: “was a little stack of lettuce with a runner band around it. Herman Lewent, who had put it there, had stated that it was a thousand dollars.”

One is tempted to salute Stout for the virtuoso transition from P.G. Wodehouse to Dashiell Hammett, turning on the gorgeous use of “lettuce” for “money.” But why invoke other writers’ names? That little piece of stylistic alchemy was Stout’s alone, at least part of what made him great.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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