Category: Books

Great Mystery Novels: “The Doorbell Rang”

Frequent readers of this blog might remember a post a did some years ago called “My Rex Stout Shout-Out,” and will therefore already know of my long and abiding admiration for Rex Stout. Specifically, for his Nero Wolfe novels, the best of which is perhaps The Doorbell Rang.

It’s one of Stout’s later novels, published in 1960, and it was also the most controversial, involving as its central, unseen villain no other than J. Edgar Hoover himself. And, yeah, that’s one reason I like it. Stout’s detestation of the American right-wing’s tendency toward fascist behavior reached a fever-pitch level, which I share. But the main reason I like the book is for its story, which is actually two interlocking plot lines, each of which complements the other in inventive and surprising ways. The central line involves a very rich widow, Rachel Bruner, who suspects that the FBI is tapping her phones and generally harassing her. She wants Wolfe—the most brilliant man in New York City—to figure out a way to stop them. (Fun fact: this is an example of a little-known sub-sub-sub-genre of detective fiction in which the P.I. serves as a kind of fixer for some rich person’s critical problem.)

Through the intervention of NYPD Inspector Cramer (a highly intelligent but belligerent recurring character, who serves as a frequent foil for Wolfe throughout the series), Wolfe learns that FBI agents are suspects in the murder investigation of a journalist. Thus, Wolfe (and Stout) sees an opportunity to connect these two lines of inquiry. That is, by solving the mystery of the murdered journalist, Wolfe might be able to get some leverage on the FBI, and thus stop its harassment of Mrs. Bruner.

It’s a devilishly clever story, and made even more entertaining by the ways in which Wolfe and his loyal “leg-man,” Archie Goodwin (the narrator of all the Wolfe novels), contrive to outwit the dunder-headed FBI agents. This involves hiring actors to copy the dress and mannerisms of both Archie and Wolfe, so that the actors can impersonate both men and lure the agents into a trap.

Every good story is, in my opinion, a kind of whodunit, if only in a psychological or philosophical sense. Every successful novel asks a question, which the reader must keep reading to discover. With actual mystery novels, this question is explicit—who did the murder and how will the P.I. catch them—but that’s the only real difference. What always amazes me about Rex Stout is how good he is at asking this essential question. In fact, in The Doorbell Rang, he essentially poses it in the opening lines of the book…

Since it was the deciding factor, I might as well begin by describing it. It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars. Signed, Rachel Bruner. It was there on Wolfe’s desk, where Mrs. Bruner had put it. After doing so, she had returned to the red leather chair.

Already, the reader is sucked in. We have to find out what’s the deal with that check, which leads us to the crux of the entire mystery.

This passage also illustrates another great strength of the Nero Wolfe novels—and it ain’t Nero Wolfe. Rather, it’s Archie. Archie’s voice. Smart. Sharp. Sardonic. But a bit noble, too. Take this example from a few paragraphs, later:

After she was in the red leather chair I put her coat, which was at least a match for a sable number for which a friend of mine had paid eighteen grand, on the couch, sat at my desk, and took her in. She was a little too short and too much filled out to be rated elegant, even if her tan woolen dress was a Dior, and her face was too round, but there was nothing wrong with the brown-black eyes she aimed at Wolfe as she asked him if she needed to tell him who she was.

I love that bit about Brunner’s eyes. Archie is, of course, an avowed heterosexual, with some kind of romantic exploit in every book. Yet here he finds himself taken with a woman (an older woman, at that) not for her looks but for her obvious intelligence and determination. It’s a great detail, of the sort Stout always delivers.

It’s also a great example of how vividly drawn Stout’s characters are, especially the recurring characters. The snarky and slightly amoral newspaper editor Lon Cohen. The fastidious and unflappable chef, Fritz Brenner. The cool and precise leg-man Saul Panzer. All of them become as familiar to us over the course of the series, like old friends.

Naturally, Wolfe and Archie manage to pull off the caper, trap the FBI agents, and solve the murder, all simultaneously. I won’t spoil it by giving away the climax of the novel, but trust me…it’s a dozy.

Check it out…

Edgar Awards De-Brief

Me and my writer friend, Carol Floriani

Well, the 2025 Edgar Awards Ceremony is over. I didn’t win my category (that honor went to Henry Wise for his excellent novel Holy City, but I still had a blast. I met a lot of cool people, including my new editor at Crooked Lane, Sara Henry, CLB founder Matt Martz, and others. Best of all, I made some new friends in writers Kerri Hakoda, Audree Lee, and Carol Floriani.

And, for a bonus, Cathy and I got to spend some time in the greatest city in the world, Manhattan. (I am writing this post from inside a Starbucks on 7th Ave.) I used to come here pretty often in the early 2000s, when I was working for software consulting company on Prince Street, and I always loved it. I was last here for fun in 2017 with my son Connor, doing the tourist thing. The city hasn’t changed that much as far as I can tell. It’s still a rambling, teeming, kinetic barrage of sights, sounds, and languages. Manhattan is one of the few places on earth where you can step into a crowded elevator and hear Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hausa, and several others being spoken.

It’s also got the best museum in the world, the Met, which Cathy and I visited, of course. We got to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit, with Sargent’s masterpiece Portrait of Madame X on prominent display. I first learned about this amazing picture (and the scandal it caused) from David McCollough’s excellent history The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, in which Sargent is one of the Paris-bound artists discussed. (Sargent painted Madame X in Paris with a well-known socialite as his subject; hence the scandal.)

So, all in all, a damn fine trip so far. I don’t know if I will ever get another Edgar nom, but if I do, you can bet I will be back.

What I’m Reading: “Tinseltown”

tinseltown

Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a deep love for classic murder mysteries like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Combine this with my obsession with history and biography—especially Hollywood biography—and you get something like William J. Mann’s Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, the true story of one of the most notorious crimes in American history.

Centered on the still-unsolved killing of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922, Mann’s book comes as close to a “nonfiction novel” as I’ve seen since Truman Capote first coined the term.  Being lit geek, I know that 1922 happens to be the year in which The Maltese Falcon is set, and Mann’s story might well have been lifted from one of Hammet’s books, filled as it with hoods, con-men, cops, junkies, sugar daddies and blackmailers.

And beautiful women, of course. Beautiful, deadly women.

The Los Angeles police implicated three women in Taylor’s murder, all actresses of some renown: Mabel Norman, a one-time star whose addiction to cocaine and booze nearly ended her career; Mary Mile Minters, a vapid teenage starlet whose romantic delusions were exceeded only by her considerable box office appeal; and Margaret “Gibby” Gibson, a former Vitagraph player (and occasional prostitute) determined to make herself into a producer.

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R.I.P. Val Kilmer

By Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0

Once again, it has taken me far too long to write a short tribute to a fine person who has passed away—Val Kilmer, who died of pneumonia on April 1. This time, it was more than just my workload that explains the delay. I had a bit of trouble discovering what I wanted to say about Kilmer, who was a great actor but also a bit of a cipher. A few years ago, I read his memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, and I enjoyed it. I was struck, however, by how little Valmer says about his filmmaking experiences. For instance, he barely mentions the production of Tombstone, the film in which Kilmer had his most celebrated film performance—playing the famous gunfighter Doc Holliday—and from which the book’s title is taken. He says even less about the making of Michael Mann’s Heat, in which Kilmer portrays a talented but slightly crazy master-burglar with pitch-perfect ferocity. 

This lack of detail was especially disappointing, to me, in part because Heat has my favorite action-sequence of all time—the shoot-out in Century City. More than any other actor in the scene, it’s Kilmer who makes it work, with his fluid transition from cool and controlled bank-robber to machine-gun wielding warrior. I read an autobiography written by a Navy Seal who wrote that he and his comrades once watched Heat together and were impressed by Kilmer’s magazine-changing speed in the film. High praise, indeed. 

This reticence on Kilmer’s part to discuss his film-making career—the very aspect of his life that made him famous across the world—suggests to me that Kilmer was deeply ambivalent about being a movie star. I suspect that, like the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, Kilmer was simply too intelligent to think that movie-making was a worthy and serious endeavor. I also suspect that, like Burton, Kilmer was much happier as a stage actor. (His one-man show of Mark Twain was universally praised.)

Unfortunately, his ambivalence somehow bled into his performances whenever he played a leading man, as he did in several major films, none of which was terribly successful. He never seemed to really have his heart in it. But that self-doubt evaporated when he played supporting roles, and these are what he will be remembered for: Iceman in the Top Gun films; Doc Holliday in Tombstone; Chris in Heat. In each of the movies, Kilmer seemed to bring his entire soul to the performance, and he was every inch the movie star.

Godspeed, Mr. Kilmer…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The War Against the Rull”

This entry in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series is both old and new. That is, it’s a modern touch-up of the cover from the October 1949 edition of Astounding Science Fiction painted by Hubert Rogers. That issue included a work by A.E. van Vogt, but not the one we are interested in here. This modern version is from a 1999 edition of van Vogt’s classic sci-fi novel, The War Against the Rull, which I distinctly remember devouring in two days when I was in eighth-grade.

I like this cover a lot. It’s not just a classic. It’s an archetype. Specifically, the archetype of the heroic (America) scientist, a buff intellectual and polymath whose ilk could be found in countless works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, and on an on. In The War Against the Rull, the man is Dr. Trevor Jamieson, a brilliant scientist who is also a fierce warrior and survival-expert. He’s stranded on an alien planet with a huge, six-legged, intelligent creature called an ezwal who wants to kill him. But when both Jamieson and the ezwal encounter a mutual enemy—a race of aggressive, centipede-like aliens called the Rull—they decide to work together to survive.

It’s a great story, like so many from the sci-fi’s Golden Age. I’ve written before about why sci-fi novels from that era are so much more enjoyable (to me, at least) than most of those written in the last ten years or so. I think it has to do with the gritty humanity of such stories. Yeah, Jamieson is essentially a comic-book character (think Doctor Quest and Race Bannon rolled into one), but van Vogt does a great job of making you believe he’s in real trouble. The ezwal, too—he’s a compelling character in his own right. You get involved in the desperate nature of their situation, and you keep reading to see how they will get out of it.

Anyway, check it out if you can…

Original Cover from Astounding
Cover from the 1970 edition that I read as a kid (by artist John Schoenherr)
Another version of the Scientist Hero Archetype (by artist James Bama)

What I’m Reading: “A Guest of the Reich”

GuestofTheReich

Ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, people have been talking about the “two Americas.” Namely, the working class, poorly educated, white, xenophobic America that voted for Trump and the middle- and upper-class, highly educated, “elitist,” multi-cultural America that voted for Hillary Clinton (and, later, Kamala Harris).

This perception of two Americas—and, indeed, of a “cold” Civil War that is currently being waged between them—is warranted and realistic. America is more polarized than it has been since the 1860s, and there is a very real possibility of the country tearing itself apart (not militarily, I think, but politically, in the same way the USSR erased itself in 1990).

However, I’m not sure we are in a battle between two Americas, per se, as in one between two worldviews. In one worldview, America is under threat of racial dilution, socialist revolution, and religious transgression, all of which will create an evil, perverse America, which its adherents would rather be dead than live in. In the other world view, America is under threat of nascent Fascism, corporatism, kleptocracy, and the climate apocalypse that will inevitably result from all these things.

As usual, the Germans have a much better word for this: Weltanschauung, a term that encapsulates the philosophical and cognitive underpinnings that define a social group or generation (or both). As an English major in the 1980s, I was obliged to read Eustace M. Tillyard’s classic The Elizabethan World Picture, which explores the conscious and subconscious belief system of Britons in the time of Shakespeare. More recently, I read Robert O’Niell’s memoir The Operator, which recounts his years as a Navy Seal fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this book, he describes the weltanschauung of the Afghani locals whom he encountered, some of whom—quite literally—believed in dragons.

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Synchronicity for Bookworms: Martin Caidin

Iron_Annie
German Ju-52 “Iron Annie”

Some years ago, my son Connor and I were watching the movie Dunkirk on DVD. It’s a very good movie, telling the story of that fateful week from multiple points-of-view. Of course, the most compelling thread of the narrative is that of the lone RAF pilot (played by Tom Hardy) doing his heroic best to protect the stranded British troops.

These scenes inevitably led to a geek-worthy discussion between Connor and me about the relative merits of the RAF’s Spitfire versus the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt 109. Believe it or not, such discussions are becoming more common between fathers and sons (and mothers and daughters, for all I know), mainly because of online games like War Thunder, whose popularity has breathed new life into the study of military history by the Millennial generation.

Anyway…. At some point during the discussion, I offhandedly commented that I had once flown in Adolf Hitler’s airplane.

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What I’m Reading: “Rod: The Autobiography”

Rod_ TheAutobiography2

One of the many things I learned from Rod Stewart’s memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, is that the technical process of recording a studio album is very strange.  For instance, the lead singer usually records his vocal track in a soundproofed room, by himself, wearing headphones so that he can listen to the band’s instrumental track.

It seems a very sterile and artificial process–not at all what one pictures when imagining a rock singer at work.  And so I was impressed to learn that Stewart has always rejected this technique, insisting on recording all tracks directly with his band:

When we were recording, I liked to be in the sound room with the band, walking around with a microphone  in hand, so that I could look them in the eye, interact with them, perform with them, basically.  I think it slightly startled the engineer, who was more used to having the singer isolated behind screens, or in an entirely separate vocal booth.  I remember hearing how Frank Sinatra had once been parked by an engineer behind a screen in a recording studio and he had made them take it down.  In order to sing, he needed to feel the sound of the orchestra hit him in the chest.  I guess this was my own version of that.

It’s interesting that Stewart draws a comparison between himself and Sinatra.  As I learned from James Kaplan’s fine bio of Sinatra, the great crooner himself exerted tremendous effort when preparing for one his recordings.  He was known to read the song lyrics aloud to himself, almost like prose.  He felt he had to discover the emotional truth of the lyric before he could sing it, and if that truth was not forthcoming, he would nix the song.

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