Jacques Barzun said, "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."

Rex Todhunter Stout (1886-1975)

Mystery novelist

Raised a Quaker, Rex Stout read the Bible cover to cover twice by age four and was Kansas State Spelling Bee champion in 1899. After kicking around a while, writing stories for the pulps, he invented an accounting system for children’s school savings accounts and gave up writing until he could establish a sufficient outside income to not have to write for money. For a decade, he devoted himself to his accounting system, and when he decided it was providing enough royalties for a return to writing, he published a novel just in time to lose his money in the Great Crash of 1929.

In 1933, he lit upon an idea for a series detective- all the rage in the Depression. Nero Wolfe,a  mysterious, immensely wealthy native of Montenegro who weighed “one-seventh of a ton,” according to his aide and legman, Archie Goodwin, was 56 when Fer-de-lance was published in 1934 (“This fellow is the best of them all,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote in his copy at 93) and never aged a day after that.

He solved crimes when he had nothing else to do, and when he did, nothing could interrupt him. He was devoted to his books and the ten thousand orchids in the greenhouse of his opulent Manhattan brownstone’s greenhouse, and to eating. He had a live-in chef- Fritz- on staff, and never, ever left home to solve a crime. He made himself his own locked-room mystery.

Wolfe’s culinary enthusiasts became legendary. “Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup,” Archie explained as he narrated one of the 33 novels and 39 short stories Stout published between 1934 and 1975.

Wolfe’s office contained 1200 books; wickedly, he dog-eared pages when interrupted (which he only allowed after reaching the end of a paragraph). Fans have even catalogued the known volumes on Wolfe’s shelves- a losing task, as Archie maintained Wolfe read two hundred books a year, rating each between A and D (he was a strict grader; no more than half a dozen got the top mark).

Stout, for his part, was a public intellectual in his heyday, practically living on radio talk shows. He took most of World War II off from writing to work on propaganda as a radio debunker of Axis war claims. He was president of the Authors’ Guild forever, a copyright reform advocate, and a founder of the Vanguard Press. Stout and the British exile P.G. Wodehouse were neighbors and friends for decades; their mutual admiration was such that Wodehouse mentioned Stout’s books in a variety of his own (both Jeeves and Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia were Nero Wolfe addicts).

The surrealist painter Rene Magritte was another Wolfe fan, borrowing story titles for his own works. Ian Fleming’s spy, James Bond, was another reader, discussing Wolfe with M in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Stout actors longed to play Nero Wolfe; Charles Laughton tried to launch a series of films, and Stout turned down Orson Welles. Stout didn’t think much of the few radio and early TV series he licensed; Sidney Greenstreet, he thought, did the best of it in the Forties. Edward Arnold made a few movies- solid B-list stuff. Kurt Kasznar made a CBS series pilot in 1959, with the young William Shatner as Archie, but the network shelved it at the last minute.

Only after Stout’s death did his estate sell the rights to Paramount. William Conrad and Maury Chaykin did credible turns in the role, as did German, Italian, and Russian actors in spinoffs. The estate has also licensed eleven Wolfe novels written by others, in spells from 1986 to 1994 and since 2012, ignoring this exchange between Stout and an interviewer:

How would you feel if someone wanted to continue the Wolfe series after you laid aside your pen?

I don't know whether vampirism or cannibalism is the better term for it. Not nice. They should roll their own.

Stout invented several lesser detectives, including Theolinda Bonner, one of the first female detectives in fiction. Singed by a HUAC denunciation and FBI surveillance, he turned rightward in his politics in the 1950s, evolved into a war hawk over Vietnam.

A Wolfe novella from 1952.

Nero Wolfe remains in print and widely read. Wodehouse praised Stout’s writing for being that rarest of things, “re-readable.” Some have even argued Archie Goodwin is the real hero of the Wolfe novels.

Others, more persuasively, make the case that with Wolfe and Goodwin, Stout successfully fused both the popular styles of detective fiction into one. Ross MacDonald said, “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.”

Stout became a gentleman farmer outside New York City, and turn out Wolfe stories until he died at 88 on October 27, 1975. He survived his friend Plum Wodehouse by eight months.