Let me begin, then, by laying down a marker: I started reading the works of Rex Stout when I was thirteen years old. I can still remember with perfect clarity how I happened to stumble across Wolfe and Archie. In March of 1969 I read a piece in Time called “The American Holmes.” It was a profile of Stout, and it led with the highest possible card: “If there is anybody in detective fiction remotely comparable to England’s Sherlock Holmes, it is Rex Stout’s corpulent genius, Nero Wolfe.”
By then I already knew my way around the Sherlock Holmes stories, and so, having subscribed to Time in order to widen my cultural horizons, I hopped on my bicycle, pedaled to the public library, and checked out a copy of Trio for Blunt Instruments. No sooner did I start reading it than I found myself even more intrigued by the complicated relationship between Wolfe, the orchid-growing, womanhating genius who never left his Manhattan brownstone save under compulsion, and Archie, the wisecracking man of action who did Wolfe’s legwork and served as the narrator of their published adventures in private detection.
As soon as I’d finished Trio for Blunt Instruments, I went straight back to the library to check out another Wolfe book. Within a few weeks I’d read everything by Rex Stout that they had on the shelves, so I got my mother to take me to the nearest used bookstore, where I bought a slightly tattered paperback copy of Gambit. My goal was to collect all of the Nero Wolfe books, no easy task in 1969, at least not for a thirteen-year-old boy living in a small Midwestern town. But I kept at it, and my collection was all but complete by the time I graduated from high school in 1974.
Rex Stout died the following year, a few days after the publication of A Family Affair, the last Nero Wolfe novel and the first one that I bought in its original hardcover edition. Now that Stout—and I—had completed the corpus, I naturally started from scratch and read the whole thing again. I’ve been doing so at regular intervals ever since.
What keeps me, and all of you, coming back? It is, I have no doubt, the fact that the Nero Wolfe novels, like all the best detective stories, are not primarily about their plots. They are conversation pieces, wonderfully witty studies in human character, not so much mystery stories as domestic comedies, the continuing saga of two iron-willed co-dependents engaged in a four-decade-long game of one-upmanship.
Much the same thing can be said, of course, about the Holmes stories. But the great literary critic Edmund Wilson believed that Rex Stout was second best to Conan Doyle—and he didn’t mean that as a compliment, either. “Nero Wolfe,” Wilson wrote in 1944, was a dim and distant copy of an original. The old stories of Conan Doyle had a wit and a fairy-tale poetry of hansom cabs, gloomy London lodgings and lonely country estates that Rex Stout could hardly duplicate with his backgrounds of modern New York; and the surprises were much more entertaining.
Of course I needn’t tell anyone in this room that a great many readers of note have begged to differ with Wilson, and continue to do so. In his lifetime, Rex Stout numbered among his fans such illustrious literary personages as Jacques Barzun, Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, and Kingsley Amis. In 1934 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in his old age had developed what he described as an “ignoble liking” for mysteries, read Fer-de-Lance, the first Wolfe novel, and found it to his liking. “This fellow is the best of them all,” he scrawled in the margin of his copy.
That said, there can be no possible question that the Wolfe novels were based on the Holmes stories. In preparing this talk, I had occasion to re-read the first half-dozen Wolfe novels back to back, and I was very forcibly struck by the myriad ways in which Stout used Holmes and Watson as points of departure for Wolfe and Archie. I’m not just talking about the obvious borrowings, such as the title of The League of Frightened Men or the shared misogyny of Holmes and Wolfe, or the clever but equally obvious ways in which Stout turned Holmes upside down, most famously by making Wolfe fat and sedentary. No, the resemblances go far deeper, in ways both large and small.
As early as the first sentence of Fer-de-Lance, Stout is already making teasing reference to Wolfe’s earlier, unpublished cases, one of Conan Doyle’s own best-remembered tricks. Surely Stout had the Giant Rat of Sumatra in mind when he has Archie “remind” us of “the time the taxi driver ran out on us in the Pine Street case” or “the time [Wolfe] sweated the Diplomacy Club business out of Nyura Pronn.” He liked Nyura Pronn so much that he actually mentioned her a second time, in The Red Box, although he never did get around to telling us what she was doing at the Diplomacy Club.
Sometimes Stout actually went so far as to crib key plot devices from his great predecessor. The next-to-last “reveal” in The League of Frightened Men is borrowed almost literally from “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” just as the backstory of The Rubber Band is a fairly straightforward variation on the backstory of A Study in Scarlet. And speaking of Clara Fox, who can doubt that she is Wolfe’s Irene Adler? Archie puts it well when he calls Clara “one of the few women [Wolfe] would have been able to think up a reason for.”
Edmund Wilson, then, was right, up to a point: Wolfe and Archie, at least in the Thirties, are closely related to Holmes and Watson. But were they really “dim and distant” copies? Or might Justice Holmes have been right when he called Rex Stout “the best of them all”? Was he thinking specifically of Conan Doyle? That I can’t say, but after spending nearly half a century with Wolfe and Archie, I’ve come to the settled conclusion that the Nero Wolfe novels aren’t as good as the Sherlock Holmes stories. No … they’re better. Considered in their totality, they are a vastly more substantial and successful literary achievement, one that I believe to be comparable in quality only to the work of Georges Simenon.
Now I don’t want to leave anyone uncertain of my admiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. To have created Sherlock Holmes was a considerable feat of the romantic imagination, and to have paired him with Dr. Watson was a stroke of something not unlike genius. But Conan Doyle, lest we forget, didn’t think all that much of his most memorable literary creation. His objection to the Sherlock Holmes stories, and to detective stories in general, was that (in his words) “they only call for the use of a certain portion of one’s imaginative faculty, the invention of a plot, without giving any scope for character drawing.”
In fact, this objection comes perilously close to inverting the truth about Holmes. The puzzles that he solves are certainly clever enough, but their cleverness exhausts itself on first reading. It is, instead, Holmes the character who fascinates us—and it is his failure to develop other than superficially that is to my mind the principal weakness of the Holmes stories, especially when they’re read in bulk.
Anyone who returns to the Sherlock Holmes stories in adulthood after having put them aside for half a lifetime, as I did a few months ago, will likely be startled by this weakness. The Holmes and Watson of A Study in Scarlet, it turns out, are already fully developed as personalities, and while we learn a certain number of new things about them in the tales that follow, they do not grow, nor does their relationship alter in any truly significant way. Hence there is no dynamism to the Holmes canon: reading it from beginning to end is not a journey, but a long string of discontinuous events.
Not so the Wolfe novels and stories. It’s true that Wolfe and Archie remain the same age, more or less, throughout the series. But they develop in a way that Holmes and Watson do not.
I was talking about the first point with my wife the other day, and she put her finger on something that had never before occurred to me. In the early novels, Archie is a very young man—immature, really. It isn’t just a matter of his authorial voice not yet having developed fully. He’s also immature in his attitudes. Not only is he filial toward Wolfe, but he regards him with more than a touch of youthful hero worship.
As for Wolfe, he’s showy, even stagey, forever trotting out the kinds of meant-to-be-quoted aphorisms that the Brits call “made dishes.” “I am merely a genius, not a god,” he goes out of his way to tell Archie in Fer-de-Lance, and we roll our eyes in response, just as we do when he repeatedly asserts that he is an “artist.” Real artists don’t have to tell us they’re artists—we know it already.
Moreover, Wolfe in the Thirties is habitually condescending, at times almost sneeringly so. An all-too-typical example