Posted on 04/15/2002 10:47:10 AM PDT by jrherreid
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@lneilsmith.com
Special(*) to TLE
On March 5, the Arts & Entertainment Network presented Golden Spiders, a Nero Wolfe adventure adapted from a novel of the same name by Rex Stout. If I were to describe the 40-odd books Stout wrote about Wolfe and Archie Goodwin between the 1930s and the 1970s as "novels of manners", likely you'd yawn, make some polite excuse, get up and leave.
Ostensibly a long series of murder mysteries featuring an obese, agoraphobic deep thinker and his tall, dark, and handsome (not to mention more mobile) assistant, the books are a family favorite with us. I've read them all aloud at least four times in the 20 years my wife and I have been together (one of Stout's great strengths is that he reads aloud very easily; another is that he rereads magnificently), and now my 10-year-old daughter is beginning to enjoy the books, as well.
Stout, who's often criticized by individualists for his politics -- I've heard him called everything from a Roosevelt Democrat to a Communist; I'm not sure which is worse -- was actually unclassifiable, what my friend cartoonist Rex "Baloo" May calls a "squarepegger". A rather quaint, 1930s-style advocate of World Government, I seriously doubt that he'd endorse the jackbooted thuggery of the New World Order today.
Stout did head up the notorious Writer's War Board, a typically Rooseveltian fascist instrumentality that centralized publishing in New York during World War II. But at the same time, he found excuses to rail against the graduated income tax. He was also an early and ardent advocate of political equality for blacks -- but never wrote a single word that would lead me to believe he approved of "affirmative action" and similar programs that actually deny and undermine racial equality.
I could be wrong.
Rex Stout's fundamental definition of government -- or perhaps more generally of civilization -- as an explicit agreement among the individuals comprising it not to kill or otherwise injure one another (or perhaps more importantly to tolerate anyone who does) is almost identical, at least in spirit and the vigor of its expression, to Ayn Rand's.
Stout's books have lots of romance -- Archie, who narrates the stories, is often compared by other characters to Clark Gable or Cary Grant. A deceptively misogynistic Wolfe accuses him of having dallied with thousands of women. But they contain no sex to speak of. They're full of adventure, but by today's standards they're almost nonviolent. Maybe a shot gets fired in every fourth or fifth book. Now I like sexy, violent novels, so there must be something else going on here, beyond the fact that I'm agoraphobic myself and tend to identify with Wolfe.
Two things make Stout's work something that should interest the individualist. The first is the nature of the relationships he describes and the nuances they involve. Over 30 years, Stout lays out a clear vision of a civility our culture seems to have hoplessly lost today.
The second -- and it's of great and increasing interest to me as a novelist -- is the growth we see happening in principal characters, especially Archie, who starts as a diamond-in-the-rough toughguy and evolves, over the decades, into a sophisticated observer of his own culture.
Read the Nero Wolfe books for their humor (they're very funny, especially once you get to know the characters), for their civility, for Wolfe's passion for justice -- which sometimes, given the poor substitute the law provides, leads him, just as it did his father(**), to become judge and excutioner himself -- for the quirky interactions between him and Archie. Read them to see what we're missing today and what we might have again with a little help from "squarepegger", Rex Stout.
My personal favorites are Black Mountain The Doorbell Rang, and Death of a Dude -- but Golden Spiders was pretty terrific, too.
* This article was first commissioned by the Daily Objectivist http://www.dailyobjectivist.com
** The identity of Nero Wolfe's father -- as well as of his infamous mother -- shall be left as an exercise for the intelligent reader.
I doubt that Wolfe would have enjoyed Rand, though. In one of the mysteries, Wolfe reads a novel by Jane Austen--then vows never to read her again, because she has proved to him that a woman can write a good novel. So I don't think he'd enjoy a philosophy that hails a woman as its most influential thinker.
Any other Wolfe fans out there?
In the interest of full disclosure I’ve read about half of his 70 or so books.
Quite an achievement for a 10 yr old since the vocabulary is challenging. I read every Nero Wolfe book yrs ago and used to imagine what the brownstone looked like inside. I liked "The Doorbell Rang."
Yeah, that one is good. I hope they film that one for the A&E series. One of my favorite parts in Black Mountain is when Archie begins reciting the Declaration of Independence to the Communist soldiers. Classic.
I agree. "Death of a Doxy" was the first one of the series that I've seen, and I loved it. The actors have the characters down pat (watching Wolfe argue over anchovy fritters with Fritz was great), and the house looks just as I had imagined it.
The above website is called "Merely a Genius." and is devoted to all the Nero Wolfe books. I remember that Wolfe lost a huge amount of weight in "The Black Mountain" so they could climb the mountains in Montenegro.
My dad has that book. I remember that there is a recipe in it for scrambled eggs that takes 40 minutes... I'll have to check it out again sometime.
Civility, Prescriptive Law, Private Property and Virtues were big things with Stout.
I watched the A&E series last fall and hope to see some of this year's effort as well.
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