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of action must expect such vexations.” You can imagine his tone of voice when he says it, too.

      But while these over-obvious traits grate on the sensitive reader, they gradually dry up and disappear as Wolfe and Archie cease over time to be dresser’s dummies for made-up affectations and grow into their now-established characters. By the mid-Forties Wolfe has evolved, not dramatically but noticeably—and significantly. His conversation, both on and off the job, has acquired a Johnsonian force and authority that is far removed from the self-conscious posing of the early novels. And when, in The Silent Speaker, Archie has occasion to refer to him as a “genius,” he does so to Wolfe’s face, and he does it not to praise him but to tease him. Wolfe sends Bill Gore to the office of the NIA to “compile certain lists and records,” and Archie responds by asking, “Fifty dollars a day for the dregs. Where is there any genius in that?”

      Wolfe’s response, by the way, is no less revealing: “‘Genius?’ His frown became a scowl. ‘What can genius do with this confounded free-for-all?’” This tells us everything about Nero Wolfe in his maturity. He knows how impressive he is, and so feels no need to assure us of his singularity. Likewise his creator: instead of asserting that Nero Wolfe is an eccentric genius, Stout now shows us. The postwar Wolfe burns up a dictionary out of sheer pique. He quizzes his bootblack on classical Greek culture. He goes into hiding, loses a hundred pounds, and grows a beard in order to track down Arnold Zeck—and lets Lily Rowan neck with him to boot!

      If anything, the transformation that Archie Goodwin undergoes is even more striking. I have a feeling that Archie, like so many other young men of his generation, was matured by the war in which he served, though the process was already under way by the time he put on his uniform in 1942. Whatever the timing, he’s evolved into a noticeably different person when he returns from the war. Yes, he’s still a confirmed bachelor who takes love lightly and is quick with a wisecrack. But he’s also acquired a touch of gravity, a recognition that the world is a place in which bad things happen to good people, and though he never wears that understanding on his sleeve, it’s still visible.

      Once again, let’s go back to The Silent Speaker, the first postwar Wolfe novel, in which Archie meets a classy dame, Phoebe Gunther, and clearly has it in mind to romance her—until the dame in question has her skull caved in by an unknown assailant lurking in the areaway of the brownstone at West 35th Street. And how does Archie respond? He’s jolted. Really jolted. So much so that when he reflects on how the murderer covered his tracks, he says the following: “Very neat management, I told myself …. Very neat, the dirty deadly bastard.” That’s serious stuff—not quite Chandleresque, but also not at all the kind of thing Philo Vance would say. It is, in fact, the reaction of a real person, authentic and mature.

      And what of Archie’s postwar relationship with Nero Wolfe? He’s still Wolfe’s hired hand, but he’s also become an undefinable combination of servant, goad, trusted confidant, and court jester. It’s an uneasy relationship, intimate but never affectionate. You can still see that Archie loves Wolfe like a father, but it’s inconceivable that he’d admit such a thing, or even hint at it. As a result, their intimacy is transformed into a daily contest for dominance—and at least half the fun of the Wolfe books comes from the way in which Stout plays their struggle for laughs, in exactly the way that he might have portrayed a marriage of similarly long standing.

      Such relationships lend themselves to close scrutiny, and this is the first and most important way in which Stout surpasses Conan Doyle: we learn more and more about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin as the series progresses, and the more we learn about them, the better we understand them and the more interesting—and human—they become. Compared to Wolfe and Archie, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are little more than fabulously well-dressed stick figures.

      In addition, Stout was also much more sophisticated than Conan Doyle when it came to building into his novels a continuing cast of comparably memorable secondary characters. First come Fred, Orrie, Saul, Fritz, and Theodore, then Inspector Cramer, then Lily Rowan and Lon Cohen—and unlike Lestrade and Moriarty, they are not stick figures but highly distinctive personalities in their own right. Stout could have spun off whole novels about them (and did, of course, with Cramer, though unsuccessfully so). Wouldn’t you have gladly read a book about Saul Panzer? But Stout was careful never to tell us too much about any of them, not even Saul. He knew who his stars were.

      He also understood that Archie is more essential to the artistic success of the novels than Wolfe, and so took care to make him a richer character than Dr. Watson. Archie is also smarter than Watson, and in my opinion a better writer as well. For therein lies the real genius of the Wolfe novels—Archie’s literary style. It drives the books and is the main source of their enduring interest, and it wouldn’t be nearly as effective on a smaller scale.

      Which brings us to the last key difference between Rex Stout and Conan Doyle: Stout uses the novel, not the short story, as the basic building unit of his canon. It is, of course, a pleasure to read the Wolfe novellas, but my guess is that most Wolfeans would probably agree that the novels are better, and the reason for this is that they contain more room for character development. In the novellas, Stout is forever cutting to the chase. He has to. In the novels, he has time to digress, to tell us something new about Wolfe or to let Archie sound off on one of his own pet peeves.

      I could quote ad infinitum to prove my point, but let me settle for one of my all-time favorite digressions. It’s from Before Midnight:

      I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it. It may be that a bevy of beautiful maidens in pure silk yellow very sheer gowns, barefooted, singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and scattering rose petals over me would do the trick, but I’d have to try it.

      That’s Archie Goodwin to the letter, and in my opinion it beats Dr. Watson all hollow.

      And is it art? Of course—not in the same way that Proust and Tolstoy are art, but what of it? Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, nor can any writer, however gifted, hope to produce them every time he sits down at his desk. It is in the nature of things that there must also be well-made pieces of intelligent entertainment to keep our fancies tickled, and that’s where Rex Stout came in.

      When I wrote about Stout on my blog six years ago, I quoted something that Evelyn Waugh wrote about one of his own characters, a man who wrote detective stories for a living:

      “There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living …. to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste.”

      That is what Rex Stout did: he supplied his readers with tasteful, intelligent, impeccably artful literary entertainment of a kind that is not merely readable, but re-readable—infinitely re-rereadable, in my long and happy experience.

      Others have done it as well, but except for Simenon, no one has ever done it so consistently well over so long a span of time—forty-one years, all told. That’s an achievement rare enough in any kind of literature and unique in the annals of what H.L. Mencken liked to call “sanguinary literature,” one for which I have long been and will always be profoundly grateful. No other writer has given me as much pure, uncomplicated pleasure as Rex Stout. I bless his memory.

      d

      Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the author of biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H.L. Mencken. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his first play, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

      “I’M THE OLD MAN”

      H.M. and the Brothers Holmes

      by Dan Andriacco

      “I’m

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