Too Many Cooks, or What would Nero Wolfe have thought about pfoodies?

Too Many Cooks may be the most lavishly praised of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, “The masterpiece among three or four by Stout that deserve the name,” according to Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime, and winning applause from, among others, Agatha Christie.

I’m less than a chapter into the book, and I’m already floored that Stout could make food a subject about which men can talk seriously without seeming in the least precious, frivolous, or cozy. At the same time, Wolfe, as continental a detective as ever starred in a mystery story, defends American cuisine against the condescension of a European chef. Come to think of it, though, I’m not sure how often the word chef occurs in the chapter; Stout prefers cook.

This is all a bit of a revelation. Not only do we live in an age that worships celebrity chefs — decidedly not cooks — but the city where I live, Philadelphia, has experienced a much ballyhooed restaurant renaissance in recent years, at least one aspect of which would have earned a vociferous Pfui! from Wolfe.

Philadelphia, you see, has restaurant concepts as much as it has restaurants, with names that include Fork, Supper, Jones, and Spice, the last of which has, in a handbill posted in its front window, actually referred to itself as a “concept.” Even the occasional restaurant named for its owner or chef converts the name into a brand. Thus Marc Vetri’s acclaimed Italian restaurant is called not Vetri’s or Ristorante Vetri, as it might have been in Nero Wolfe’s time, but Vetri.

I can imagine Nero Wolfe's disgust at such foolishness. He would have had no truck with restaurant concepts. He'd have glared if you demeaned a great meal by calling it a dining experience. And you can bet that the word foodie would have made Wolfe spit up his saucisse minuit. How about you, readers? Would you rather dine at a restaurant concept, or is a good, old-fashioned restaurant enough for you?

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(Read more about Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and more at the Wolfe Pack Web site. Read this article for an apt invocation of P.G. Wodehouse in connection with Rex Stout, though it gives short shrift to Stout's affinity with the wisecracking hard-boiled tradition.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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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Warrantless surveillance? Pfui!

I’ve always enjoyed Nero Wolfe’s jousts with Inspector Cramer, in which the grouchy, orchid-loving Wolfe invariably gets the better of the splenetic New York cop. I also knew that Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, was active politically. I never put the two together, however, until the following, from “Death of a Demon”:

“`Nuts.’ Cramer stood up. … `I’m taking Goodwin. They’ll take his statement at the District Attorney’s Office, a complete report of the conversation. I’ll have a man here at two o’clock to take yours. If I took you down you’d only – '

“`I shall sign no statement. I am not obliged to. If you send a man he won’t be admitted. If you have questions, ask them.’”

Rivalry between fictional private detectives and police goes back at least to Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Purloined Letter,” and no one has done it better than Stout. Here, though, he does not merely show the private detective getting the better of the exasperated police officer, he flings a direct challenge at unwarranted exercise of police power.

A bit of research turned up Controversial Politics, Conservative Genre: Rex Stout's Archie-Wolfe Duo and Detective Fiction's Conventional Form , submitted by one Ammie Sorensen Cannon last year as a master’s thesis in English at Brigham Young University.

“Stout attempted to present radical messages via the content of his detective fiction with subtlety,” Sorensen wrote. “As a literary traditionalist, he resisted using his fiction as a platform for an often extreme political agenda. Where political messages are apparent in his work, Stout employs various techniques to mute potentially offensive messages.”

Maybe there’s more to the Wolfe-Cramer clashes than enjoyable embodiment of a detective-story tradition.

What other crime writers resort to the devious stratagem of entertainment to make a political point?

© 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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