Rex Stout

Rex Stout was an American author of detective fiction best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe.

Bad for Business

Bad for Business is a mystery novel by Rex Stout starring his detective Tecumseh Fox, first published in the Farrar & Rinehart anthology, The Second Mystery Book (1940). The book was later adapted by Stout into the Nero Wolfe short story "Bitter End," published in the November 1940 issue of The American Magazine, and in the posthumous anthology Death Times Three (1985).

• Bosh. I find a rival — but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner — I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you...
  • Dol Bonner, to her employee Amy Duncan, chapter 2

Invitation to Learning

In late January 1942 Rex Stout joined Jacques Barzun and Elmer Davis in a discussion of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on Mark Van Doren's popular CBS radio show, Invitation to Learning. Van Doren included a transcript in his 1942 book, The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times, published by Random House.

• I really mean what I say. A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221½ B Baker Street and didn't find him.
  • Rex Stout, page 244

• The incredible thing happens at the beginning of the story always, you notice, not the end. A Sherlock Holmes story is never a trick story.
  • Rex Stout, page 246

• It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.
  • Rex Stout, page 247

• I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are. There was no such conception of justice until after 1830. There was no such thing as a policeman or a detective in the world before 1830, because the modern conception of the policeman and detective, namely, a man whose only function is to find out who did it and then get the evidence that will punish him, did not exist. ... In Paris before the year 1800 — read the Dumas stories — there were gangs of people whose business was to go out and punish wrongdoers. But why? Because they had hurt De Marillac or Richelieu or the Duke or some Huguenot noble, not just because they had harmed society. It is only the modern policeman that is out to protect society.
  • Rex Stout, pp. 248–249

• Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.
  • Rex Stout, page 251

"An Interview with Mister Rex Stout"

Robert van Gelder's article appeared September 21, 1941, and is reprinted in his Writers and Writing (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946).

• There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.
  • Rex Stout, on why he turned from writing serious fiction to detective stories

"Talk with Rex Stout"

Lewis Nichols' interview appeared November 15, 1953.

• There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions — is he tall, is he short? — he had better quit.
  • Rex Stout

"Rex Stout, 85, Gives Clues on Good Writing"

Israel Shenker's interview was published December 1, 1971.

• One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there's always some reason to live another year. And I'd like to live another year so that Nixon won't be President. If he's re-elected I'll have to live another four years.
  • Rex Stout

• My God you love to get them, and good Lord you hate to answer them.
  • Rex Stout, on letters from his readers

Publishers Weekly

John F. Baker's brief article — "Rex Stout: 'No Man My Age Writes Books'" — appeared October 29, 1973 (pp. 28–29), with seven photographs by Jill Krementz.

• The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.
  • Rex Stout, who published two titles — The Nero Wolfe Cookbook and Please Pass the Guilt — in his 86th year

• There isn't a generation gap between you and me — there's two.
  • Rex Stout to photographer Jill Krementz

Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout

John McAleer, author of the Edgar-Award winning Rex Stout: A Biography, collected some of his interviews with the author in Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout (1983, Pontes Press, Ashton, Maryland).

• There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.
  • Rex Stout, page 3

About Rex Stout

• If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature.
  • Jacques Barzun, A Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout, New York: The Viking Press, 1965. Reprinted by permission in The Rex Stout Journal, number 2, Spring 1985, pp. 4–9

• Stout says to us, "Here are two friends. Here are two people sharing their lives. As you wish for friendship, share in theirs. As you seek companionship, share in theirs. As you search for love, share in theirs." Rex Stout invites us into the family and offers warmth and security and certainty. He affirms what we all seek on some primal level. If such disparate individuals as Wolfe and Goodwin can share friendship and love and caring and life, can not we? That’s the strength here. That’s the message and the feel-good inherent in the voice and character that Rex Stout has given to Archie Goodwin. In this cold world, it is a fire on which we may warm our hands.
  • Robert Crais, in the introduction http://www.robertcrais.com/articlesandessays/stout.htm to the 1995 Bantam Books edition of Before Midnight

• This fellow is the best of them all.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a marginal note found in his copy of Fer-de-Lance. Quoted in McAleer, John, Rex Stout: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977, p. 256

• Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic.
  • Michael Jaffe, executive producer of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Quoted in Vitaris, Paula, "Miracle on 35th Street: Nero Wolfe on Television," Scarlet Street, issue #45, 2002, p. 36

• Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American detective novel. With great wit and cunning, he devised a form which combined the traditional virtues of Sherlock Holmes and the English school with the fast-moving vernacular narrative of Dashiell Hammett.
  • Ross Macdonald, quoted in McAleer, John, Rex Stout: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977, p. 242

• When Stout is on top of his game, which is most of the time, his diabolically clever plotting and his storytelling ability exceed that of any other mystery writer you can name, including Agatha Christie, who invented her own eccentric genius detective, Hercule Poirot.
  • Nancy Pearl, "Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe: Too Good to Miss," Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason, Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2003, p. 226

• Stout was almost as witty as Raymond Chandler. His detective had splendid putdown lines almost as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And his mysteries were constructed a lot more smoothly than Agatha Christie's. But you do not expect Chandlerian wit from Conan Doyle, or Conan Doyle's superbly breathless sense of atmosphere and melodrama from Christie, or Christie's scathingly clear, unblinking vision of the monstrous crimes that average human nature is capable of all from the same pen. Stout gives you all of it. He is the Willie Mays or Derek Jeter of the mystery genre: a brilliant all-rounder more talented in each area than any single writer should ever dream of being.
  • Martin Sieff, United Press International, "Happy Christmas, Santa Wolfe", December 25, 2001

• Rex Stout's witty, fast-moving prose hasn't dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I've spent the past four decades reading and re-reading Stout's novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor.
  • Terry Teachout, About Last Night, "Forty years with Nero Wolfe", January 12, 2009

• Rex is a perfect writer — economical, rapid, free of cliché. Epigrammatic, intelligent, charming. What else? That's enough.
  • Mark Van Doren, quoted in McAleer, John, Rex Stout: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977, p. 507

• His narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.
  • P.G. Wodehouse, quoted in the introduction to Death Times Three, New York: Bantam Books, 1985, p. v ISBN 0553763059