Category: Mysteries

It’s a well known fact of life that the older you get, the more you find yourself drawn to old things. This has always been true for me. I find myself particularly entertained by the classic pop culture of the twentieth century.

A few years ago, for instance, I was working my way through the works of two great pop writers: the James Bond thrillers by Ian Fleming, and the Nero Wolfe mysteries of Rex Stout. I would alternate between them, tearing through each series in no particular order.  Each of them offered a different kind of thrill, and also a window into the past.

Young people today are familiar with the Bond stories thanks to the great and continuing set of movies based on them, the latest incarnation being the fine English character actor Daniel Craig. The Nero Wolfe novels are, of course, less well-known. To sum them up briefly, they recount the adventures of a reclusive, brilliant, and enormously fat detective who seldom leaves his Manhattan brownstone, preferring to solve his cases remotely. To do the actual legwork of investigation, he sends out his much younger, hipper assistant, Archie Goodwin (who narrates the novels). It is Goodwin who does most of that sleuthing required (as well as some frequent romancing of the numerous femme fatales). He brings the information back to Wolfe, who then solves the case by virtue of his sheer intellect.

I regard both series—the Bond novels as well as the Wolfe novels—as gems of pop literature:  clever, witty, sexy, and (most importantly) sharply written. And so you can imagine my delight when, in the early chapters of Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I came upon the following exchange between Bond and his craggy, avuncular boss, M.

Bond automatically took his traditional place across the desk from his Chief.

M began to fill a pipe.  “What the devil’s the name of that fat American detective who’s always fiddling about with orchids, those obscene hybrids from Venezuela and so forth.  Then he comes sweating out of his orchid house, eats a gigantic meal of some foreign muck and solve the murder.  What’s he called?”

“Nero Wolfe, sir.  They’re written by a chap called Rex Stout.  I like them.”

“They’re readable,” condescended M.

This was the literary equivalent of having two good friends from separate areas of your life and inviting them both over for dinner, only to discover that they already know each other.  More to the point, I found my love of Rex Stout vindicated by Fleming’s obvious approval. Had I looked, I could have found lots of other sources of vindication: Kingsley Amis also loved Stout, as did Isaac Asimov. (Asimov, in fact, was a life-long member of Stout’s fan club, The Wolfe Pack.)

But the more I thought about it, the more Fleming’s Rex-Stout-shout-out made perfect sense. The character of James Bond bears more than a passing resemblance to Archie Goodwin. Both are tough guys—street-smart and wise-cracking anti-heroes—who would rather deal with a shot of a whisky than a shot from a gun. Like Bond, Archie is a brilliant operator, not to mention a rampant womanizer (although without Fleming’s darker, misogynistic overtones).

In retrospect, Bond seems like a more British, post-modern version of Goodwin—meaner, hornier, and drunker. Both characters lend a vicarious thrill to nerds like myself (and, I would bet, to Amis and Asimov). They represent versions of the tough guys we would like to be.

If there are strong echoes of Archie Goodwin in James Bond, then there are somewhat fainter echoes of Nero Wolfe in M. Like M, Wolfe is a mastermind who seldom leaves his office, preferring to send Archie to do the actual leg-work. Also like M, Wolfe is a bit of a cipher. We know he is of Eastern European descent, and that his youth was both violent and tragic, but nothing more. Beyond this, he exists only in the present-time of the stories, the genius with no intimate connection his fellow man—except perhaps in his dependence on (and grudging friendship with) Archie himself.

In suggesting that Fleming may have been influenced by Stout, I mean no slur against the great spy novelist, nor to British popular literature in general. Indeed, a sharp student of British lit would be quick to point out that Stout, in turn, seemed to borrow heavily from that earlier colossus of the mystery genre, Arthur Conan Doyle. No less a figure than Edmund Wilson first pointed out the similarity between Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes; both are hyper-intelligent misanthropes whose stories are told by lesser men. Just as Watson’s narration humanizes Holmes, Goodwin’s voice filters Wolfe’s genius and makes him accessible to the reader.

In fact, I’ve often thought of the Nero Wolfe novels as a kind of fusion of the Sherlock Holmes with the grittier, wholly American sensibilities of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. If Wolfe is the inheritor of Holmes’ deductive powers, then Archie is the reincarnation of the hard-boiled American private eye.

Archie is also genuinely funny…

What Wolfe tells me, and what he doesn’t tell me, never depends, as far as I can make out, on the relevant circumstances.  It depends on what he had to eat at the last meal, what he is going to eat at the next meal, the kind of shirt and tie I am wearing, how well my shoes are shined, and so forth.  He does not like purple.  Once Lily Rowan gave me a dozen Sulka shirts, with stripes of assorted colors and shades.  I happened to put on the purple one the day we started on the Chesterton-Best case, the guy that burgled his own house and shot a week-end guest in the belly.  Wolfe took one look at the shirt and clammed up on me.  Just for spite I wore the shirt a week, and I never did know what was going on, or who was which, until Wolfe had it all wrapped up, and even then I had to get most of the details from the newspapers and Dora Chesterton, with whom I had struck an acquaintance.  Dora had a way of—no, I’ll save that for my autobiography.

But while the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett often approached the level of  high art, Stout’s novels remain happily in the realm of great genre fiction—beautifully written and with a sharp edge.  Most of them involve snobbish, greedy rich people who need Wolfe to bail them out of some sort of trouble—a missing CEO, a murdered secretary, a looming scandal.  If the true villain of Chandler’s work is the city of Los Angeles and all its soul-destroying corruption, then Stout’s is the corporate America of the 40s and 50s (the period when he wrote his best novels).

As with any pop classic, the Wolfe novels render of a deeply imagined world, peopled with distinct and vividly drawn characters: the cigar chomping Inspector Cramer; Wolfe’s fastidious Swiss chef, Fritz Brenner; Lon Cohen, the delightfully corrupt magazine editor who supplies Wolfe and Archie with much of their information.  And, of course, there is Saul Panzer, the expert freelancer who represents a more cautious (not to mention Jewish) version of Archie himself.

But the real achievement of the novels comes from the sheer amusement of watching Wolfe demolish another fat-cat rich guy. It’s easy to detect a deep vein of progressivism running through all the Wolfe novels. Two of the main characters are Jewish, and Wolfe’s roster of clients often includes women, blacks, poor people, and (in one notable case), a victim of FBI harassment.

As the critic Terry Teachout writes…

Like all good detective stories, the Nero Wolfe novels are not primarily about their settings, or even their plots. They are conversation pieces, witty studies in human character…less mystery stories than domestic comedies, the continuing saga of two iron-willed codependents engaged in an endless game of oneupmanship. Archie may be Wolfe’s hired hand, but he is also an undefinable combination of servant, goad, court jester, and trusted confidant. His relationship with Wolfe is by definition uneasy, intimate but never affectionate—it’s plain to see that he loves Wolfe like a father, but inconceivable that he would ever admit such a thing—and so the intimacy is transformed into a daily contest for dominance. At least half the fun of the Wolfe books comes from the way in which Stout plays this struggle for laughs.

The Wolfe novels have enjoyed a resurgence in the last twenty years or so, largely thanks to an excellent A&E television series from the 90s starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton.  The books underwent a really fine reprint from Bantam books, with great cover art (a campy combination of art deco and pulp luridness).  The price of these paperbacks is inflating faster than BitCoins, but fortunately Bantam has released most of them as Kindle editions for under ten bucks.  The penny-pinching Wolfe would be proud.