Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 41

by The Doorbell Rang

  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  Introduction

  The Doorbell Rang was the first Nero Wolfe novel I read. It turned out to be an odd, atypical choice but one that hooked me.

  At the time, I was more than just a fan of hard-boiled tales. Chandler, Thomas Dewey, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane were my idols. The only traditional P.I. I could tolerate was Sherlock Holmes; I had read The Complete Sherlock Holmes from cover to cover and back again four or five times, making notes in the margins and cursing Conan Doyle for not writing ten times as much about Holmes and Watson.

  I had assumed, judging by the blurbs on the backs of the paperbacks and the reviews in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times, that Rex Stout’s tales were of the ilk of Philo Vance and Hercule Poirot—delicate, hinging on tricks and quirks.

  I read The Doorbell Rang because I was grieving over the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I read the book as I read dozens of others—randomly, rocking on the El from Skokie to Chicago, trying not to think of the winter, trying to find a new voice with lots of volumes and volume behind it to rescue me from the 1960’s, which I found not the least satisfying and which I still regard without the saving grace of nostalgia.

  What I discovered when I opened the book and began to read was Archie Goodwin. The first few pages read like a Holmes tale with Archie simply Watsoning, but then Archie’s voice began to emerge. It was the hard-boiled, weary, witty, cynical, yet romantic voice I wanted to hear. “This isn’t a Nero Wolfe book,” I wanted to say to the tired woman with a shopping bag nodding off next to me. “This is an Archie Goodwin book.”

  I read on. When I got to work, I locked my door and kept reading. The hell with the article on heart transplants I was supposed to be writing.

  The plot was a blur to me. But Wolfe was there, and for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

  Since the day I turned the final page of the book, my answer to the question, “What fictional or historical character would you like to have dinner with?” has been Nero Wolfe, with Archie—sitting sullenly in the corner and Fritz serving clam cakes with chili sauce, beef braised in red wine, squash with sour cream and chopped dill, avocado with watercress and black walnut kernels, and Liederkranz. Following discussions of cooked oysters, the feminine mind, structural linguistics, and books, Fritz would serve coffee and brandy and I would say to myself, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

  The Doorbell Rang inspired me. The references to historical characters, particularly J. Edgar Hoover, contributed to my desire to incorporate history into the hard-boiled detective tale. Archie’s voice inspired me. Wolfe’s eccentricity sent my imagination racing. If much of the inspiration for my Toby Peters character can be found in Archie, there is no small measure of Wolfe in my Jeremy Butler and Gunther Wherthman characters. The idea of an ensemble cast of central figures and an extended family—Saul Panzer is my favorite quasi-cousin—was a revelation to me. The inspiration and respect goes much further than this.

  I went back and read as many Goodwin-Wolfe books as I could find, in order. I watched the late-night listings for Nero Wolfe movies, and though I enjoyed the ones I saw, Lionel Stander and Edward Arnold were not really Archie and Wolfe to me. My ideal duo would be Robert Mitchum and Sidney Greenstreet.

  I gathered information about Stout, found a photo of him in a newspaper, and wondered if he and George Bernard Shaw were cousins or the same person. I learned that he wrote on an ancient typewriter, that he never rewrote, and that he did not work from outlines—he had no idea who his killer was till the answer revealed itself in the work in progress.

  This was confirmed for me when I heard a radio interview with Stout, who said that he had been writing a scene in which Wolfe was sitting at his desk working when there was a knock at his door. Wolfe told the visitor to come in.

  “And who,” asked Wolfe, “are you?”

  “Your son,” replied the man in the doorway.

  At this point in the radio interview Stout said something to the effect of, “I was amazed. I had no idea Wolfe had a son.”

  While Stout may ha
ve been exaggerating, the creative point had been made to me—write as if you are a reader. The great joy in writing is the same joy as in reading: the discovery, the desire to go on to the next page to find out what will happen, and the sound of the voices. And Stout’s voices are worth listening to.

  When Nero Wolfe came to television, I made my love of Archie and Wolfe known to NBC, and one of the great disappointments of my professional life is that the series was canceled after I had been assured that I would write the opening episode of the next season. I wanted to bring The Doorbell Rang to life even if it wasn’t the right Archie and Wolfe.

  Returning specifically to The Doorbell Rang, the last line, which is also the title of the book, became my favorite last line of a novel till Larry Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die twenty years later. It is, like much of Stout’s writing, deliciously understated. Ultimately, the Archie-Nero novels delight me most when I feel that Stout respects not only my taste but my intelligence, that I am in on Wolfe’s ironies, that I can see beyond the surface of Archie’s complaints to his insecurity and genuine love of Wolfe and the extended family.

  I had a classics professor at the University of Illinois who after giving a reading assignment said, with genuine emotion, “Oh, to be reading Boethius for the first time.”

  And so I say to you, “Oh, to be reading a Nero Wolfe mystery for the first time.”

  —Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Chapter 1

  Since it was the deciding factor, I might as well begin by describing it. It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars. Signed, Rachel Bruner. It was there on Wolfe’s desk, where Mrs. Bruner had put it. After doing so, she had returned to the red leather chair.

  She had been there half an hour, having arrived a few minutes after six o’clock. Since her secretary had phoned for an appointment only three hours earlier there hadn’t been much time to check on her, but more than enough for the widow who had inherited the residual estate of Lloyd Bruner. At least eight of the several dozen buildings Bruner had left to her were more than twelve stories high, and one of them could be seen from anywhere within eye range—north, east, south, or west. All that had been necessary, really, was to ring Lon Cohen at the Gazette to ask if there was any news not fit to print about anyone named Bruner, but I made a couple of other calls, to a vice-president of our bank and to Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer. I got nothing, except at one point the vice-president said, “Oh … a funny thing …” and stopped.

  I asked what.

  Pause. “Nothing, really. Mr. Abernathy, our president, got a book from her….”

  “What kind of a book?”

  “It—I forget. If you will excuse me, Mr. Goodwin, I’m rather busy.”

  So all I had on her, as I answered the doorbell in the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street and let her in, and ushered her to the office, was that she had sent a man a book. After she was in the red leather chair I put her coat, which was at least a match for a sable number for which a friend of mine had paid eighteen grand, on the couch, sat at my desk, and took her in. She was a little too short and too much filled out to be rated elegant, even if her tan woolen dress was a Dior, and her face was too round, but there was nothing wrong with the brown-black eyes she aimed at Wolfe as she asked him if she needed to tell him who she was.

  He was regarding her without enthusiasm. The trouble was, a new year had just started, and it seemed likely that he was going to have to go to work. In a November or December, when he was already in a tax bracket that would take three-quarters—more, formerly—of any additional income, turning down jobs was practically automatic, but January was different, and this was the fifth of January, and this woman was stacked. He didn’t like it. “Mr. Goodwin named you,” he said coldly, “and I read newspapers.”

  She nodded. “I know you do. I know a great deal about you, that’s why I’m here. I want you to do something that perhaps no other man alive could do. You read books too. Have you read one entitled The FBI Nobody Knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t need to tell you about it. Did it impress you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Favorably?”

  “Yes.”

  “My goodness, you’re curt.”

  “I answered your questions, madam.”

  “I know you did. I can be curt too. That book impressed me. It impressed me so strongly that I bought ten thousand copies of it and sent them to people all over the country.”

  “Indeed.” Wolfe’s brow was up an eighth of an inch.

  “Yes. I sent them to the members of the cabinet, the Supreme Court justices, governors of all the states, all senators and representatives, members of state legislatures, publishers of newspapers and magazines, and editors, heads of corporations and banks, network executives and broadcasters, columnists, district attorneys, educators, and others—oh yes, chiefs of police. Do I need to explain why I did that?”

  “Not to me.”

  There was a flash in the brown-black eyes. “I don’t like your tone. I want you to do something, and I’ll pay you the limit and beyond the limit, there is no limit, but there’s no point in going on unless—You said that book impressed you favorably. Do you mean you agree with the author’s opinion of the FBI?”

  “With some minor qualifications, yes.”

  “And of J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it won’t surprise you to hear that I am being followed day and night. I believe ‘tailed’ is the word. So is my son, and my daughter, and my secretary, and my brother. My telephones are tapped. Some of the employees at the Bruner Corporation have been questioned. It occupies two floors of the Bruner Building and there are more than a hundred employees. Does that surprise you?”

  “No.” Wolfe grinned. “Did you send letters with the books?”

  “Not letters. My personal card with a brief message.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Well, I am. I was. I’m not just a congressman, or someone like an editor or a broadcaster or a college professor, with a job I can’t afford to lose. Does that megalomaniac think he can hurt me?”

  “Pfui. He is hurting you.”

  “No. He’s merely annoying me. Some of my associates and personal friends are being questioned—discreetly, of course, careful excuses, of course. It started about two weeks ago. I think my phones were tapped about ten days ago. My lawyers say there is probably no way to stop it, but they are considering it. They are one of the biggest and best firms in New York, and even they are afraid of the FBI! They disapprove; they say it was ‘ill-advised’ and ‘quixotic,’ my sending the books. I don’t care what they say. When I read that book I was furious. I called the publishers and they sent a man to see me, and he said they had sold less than twenty thousand copies. In a country with nearly two hundred million people, and twenty-six million of them had voted for Goldwater! I thought of paying for some ads, but decided it would be better to send the books, and I got a forty-percent discount on them.” She curled her fingers over the chair arms. “Now he’s annoying me and I want him stopped. I want you to stop him.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “Preposterous.”

  She reached to the stand at her elbow for her brown leather bag, opened it, took out a checkfold and a pen, opened the fold on the stand, no hurry, and wrote, the stub first, with care. Methodical. She tore the check out, got up and put it on Wolfe’s desk, and returned to the chair. “That fifty thousand dollars,” she said, “is only a retainer. I said there would be no limit.”

  Wolfe didn’t even give the check a glance. “Madam,” he said, “I am neither a thaumaturge nor a dunce. If you are being followed, you were followed here, and it will be assumed that you came to hire me. Probably another has already arrived to start surveillance of this house; if not, it will be started the instant there is any indicat
ion that I have been ass enough to take the job.” His head turned. “Archie. How many agents have they in New York?”

  “Oh …” I pursed my lips. “I don’t know, maybe two hundred. They come and go.”

  He went back to her. “I have one. Mr. Goodwin. I never leave my house on business. It would—”

  “You have Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather.”

  Ordinarily that would have touched him, her rattling off their names like that, but not then. “I wouldn’t ask them to take the risk,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect Mr. Goodwin to take it. Anyway, it would be futile and fatuous. You say ‘stop him.’ You mean, I take it, compel the FBI to stop annoying you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I.” He shook his head. “No, madam. You invited it, and you have it. I don’t say that I disapprove of your sending the books, but I agree with the lawyers that it was quixotic. The don endured afflictions; so must you. They wont keep it up forever, and, as you say, you’re not a congressman or a drudge with a job to lose. But don’t send any more books.”

  She was biting her lip. “I thought you were afraid of nobody and nothing.”

  “Afraid?” I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”

  “I said no other man alive could do it.”

  “Then you’re in a box.”

  She got her bag and opened it, took out the checkfold and pen, wrote again, the stub first as before, stepped to his desk and picked up the first check and replaced it with the new one, and returned to the chair.

  “That hundred thousand dollars,” she said, “is merely a retainer. I will pay all expenses. If you succeed, your fee, determined by you, will be in addition to the retainer. If you fail, you will have the hundred thousand.”

  He leaned forward to reach for the check, gave it a good look, put it down, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Knowing him, I knew what he was considering. Not the job; as he had said, it was preposterous; he was looking at the beautiful fact that with a hundred grand in the till on January fifth he would need, and would accept, no jobs at all for the rest of the winter, and the spring, and even into the summer. He could read a hundred books and propagate a thousand orchids. Paradise. A corner of his mouth twisted up; for him that was a broad grin. He was wallowing. That was okay for half a minute, a man has a right to dream, but when it got to a full minute I coughed, loud.