by Josh Pachter
THE MISADVENTURES OF NERO WOLFE
PARODIES AND PASTICHES FEATURING THE GREAT DETECTIVE OF WEST 35TH STREET
EDITED BY JOSH PACHTER
CONTENTS
Tribute in Triplicate: Introductions
At Wolfe’s Door
A Family Affair
Plot It Yourselves
Part I: Pastiches
The Red Orchid
Chapter 8 from Murder in Pastiche
The Archie Hunters
The Frightened Man
Chapter 1 from Murder in E Minor
The Purloined Platypus
Part II: Parodies
The House on 35th Street
The Sidekick Case
The Case of the Disposable Jalopy
As Dark as Christmas Gets
Who’s Afraid of Nero Wolfe?
Julius Katz and the Case of Exploding Wine
The Possibly Last Case of Tiberius Dingo
Part III: Potpourri
The Woman Who Read Rex Stout
Sam Buried Caesar
Chapter 24 from Rasputin’s Revenge
A scene from Might as Well Be Dead
The Damned Doorbell Rang
Acknowledgments
Copyright Information
About the Contributors
TRIBUTE IN TRIPLICATE
INTRODUCTIONS
At Wolfe’s Door
by Otto Penzler
Sherlock Holmes was not the first detective, but he was the first fictional character to become more real than the flesh-and-blood personages of his time. The only other detective in literature about whom that is true is Nero Wolfe. A few other detectives may be greater in that they have solved more complex cases, a few may be more famous in distant regions of the world, and a few may even sell more books—but none has achieved an emotional rapport with readers to equal that of Rex Stout’s fat man.
In book after book, from 1934 to 1975, Stout wove a pattern of intricate detail that brought the eccentric detective and his tough, wisecracking assistant Archie Goodwin to life. The old brownstone on West Thirty-Fifth Street exists, almost as clearly as 221B Baker Street.
Wolfe and Holmes follow paths that cross at more than one point. Much like the greatest detective of them all, Wolfe has inspired a devout fandom that speculates on unrevealed details of his past, combing the books for evidence, filling in gaps with inferences, suffering frustration at the hands of an author who changed facts, dates, names, and other elements of his detective’s history to suit the exigencies of the newest book.
Still, more is known about Wolfe’s life than about most other detectives, thanks to the narrative efforts of his assistant and chronicler, Goodwin, who represents (particularly in the early books) the dominant form of the American detective story, the “hard-boiled” school, just as Wolfe represents the classic English form, the puzzle story solved by an eccentric armchair detective.
Archie is no mere stupid, worshipful acolyte, employed solely to feed the ego of the detective and ask foolish questions for the benefit of dull readers. Archie is an excellent detective in his own right, a tough, cynical man of action, able to do many things beyond Wolfe’s power, just as Wolfe’s intellect towers over Archie’s. In an unusual and healthy relationship, the talents of the two men complement each other to produce the best detective agency in New York—and the best dialogue in mystery fiction.
Wolfe, of course, is still the mastermind, and Archie has no choice but to stumble blindly along, as much out of his depth as Holmes’s Dr. Watson or Poirot’s Captain Hastings. The difference is that Archie doesn’t care for it very much and takes no pains to disguise the fact. He is not above calling Wolfe a “hippo” or a “rhinoceros,” nor is he reluctant to quit when he has had too much. He once told Wolfe, “You are simply too conceited, too eccentric, and too fat to work for!” Not the reaction of the typical Boswell of crime literature.
Neither Wolfe nor Archie age during the forty-one-year history of their affairs, nor do the other recurring characters who populate their world.
Stout was a fast writer, completing a novel in four to six weeks, and he did not revise. Although his prose suffered not at all, his hard facts sometimes strayed, which may account for the ambiguity of Wolfe’s and Archie’s birthplaces, some fuzziness about Wolfe’s early years, and some characters undergoing a name change from one book to another.
Other facts are deliberately—not inadvertently—obscured. These are not the lapses of Stout; they are the flummery of Wolfe himself, who prefers to remain reticent about his biography. Sometimes the confusion is Archie’s, although it is impossible to deny that his memory is superb, and he is less susceptible to errors of omission or commission than Watson, Hastings, Polton, or Dupin’s anonymous chronicler.
Little is revealed about Wolfe’s ancestry, for example, but that is not Archie’s oversight so much as it is Wolfe’s sense of privacy. There is some evidence, and a widely held belief, that Wolfe is the illegitimate son of a liaison between Holmes and the woman in his life, Irene Adler. And knowledgeable students of detective fiction will have no difficulty in noting the striking physical similarities between Wolfe and Holmes’s older brother, Mycroft.
Like most other creators of memorable detectives, Stout did not intend for his books to undergo intense scrutiny, or to serve as subjects for profound scholarship. His purpose in writing the books was more noble: they were conceived to give pleasure. “If I’m not having fun writing a book,” he said, “no one’s going to have any fun reading it.”
There can be no doubt that Rex Stout had enormous fun writing his books about Nero Wolfe. And there can be no doubt that the authors represented in this collection had every bit as much fun paying homage to and/or poking respectful fun at Stout’s most famous creations.
Excerpted and adapted from The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crimefighters and Other Good Guys (Grosset & Dunlap, 1977)
A Family Affair
by Rebecca Stout Bradbury
My father died in 1975. I am indeed proud and appreciate that Rex Stout remains an active part of the literary world. His books have given many people many hours of pleasure.
Rex and Pola Stout were married for forty-three years. They had two daughters. We lived in a house my father built in 1930 on a hill in Connecticut with the help of seventeen farm boys. Harold Salmon, one of the farm boys, lived in a house at the bottom of our road and would bring us raw milk in a metal can every morning with delicious cream on the top. He spent all his days at High Meadow, actively helping, participating in our family life.
My father bought boxes of Fanny Farmer candy, would offer us a piece of candy when it arrived, then take the box to his bedroom. He would “hide” it in one of his bureau drawers. (He built his bureau so that it had cubbyholes for his socks and a separate little closet for his shirts—drawers that pulled out, each with a folded shirt on it.) My sister, Barbara, and I would find the candy and punch a hole in the bottom of a piece to see if we wanted to eat it. If not, we would put it back in the box. Dad never said anything to us about the punched candy.
My mother was a textile designer and had a mill in Philadelphia for fifteen years. Dad, Barbara, and I wore her fabrics often. We had a “Christmas” skirt—red and green—every year. My dad wore a red wool jacket to my wedding in June on the croquet court at High Meadow.
I didn’t read my first Rex Stout book until I was thirty years old, but Nero and Archie were always part of our lives. Dad would come down to dinner and say “Nero just
said to Archie” or vice versa … and we believed they were upstairs!
We had “misadventures” at High Meadow. Once Barbara drove the family car down the hill—which is what we called our long hilly dirt/gravel driveway—with her eyes closed. Going around the second curve, she landed in a field and had to walk back up the hill and tell Dad. He laughed his wonderful laugh and got into the Jeep and went to pull the car out. I also had a driving mishap. Dad was teaching me to drive. We drove down the hill, and he told me to turn right onto Milltown Road. I did—but I didn’t let go of the steering wheel and ran into a telephone pole. Again, he laughed and said, “Next time, let go of the wheel, and the car will straighten out.” And we walked up the hill to get Harold to help us.
Rex Stout wrote fiction. There were lessons in his books, as well as a slice of history. During World War II, from 1941 to 1945, we lived in New York City, so my father could devote his days to the Writers War Board, which he created to promote the sale of war bonds and to inform the citizens of the United States about what was taking place in Germany. The Second Confession spoke about totalitarianism and the role of government; Too Many Cooks and A Right to Die spoke about race relations; The Doorbell Rang was a strong statement about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The issues he was concerned about during his lifetime remain important and relevant today.
When I was nine years old, I began to wonder what my father did for a living. My friends’ fathers went off with briefcases on the commuter train or worked on farms, at stores, in offices. What I did know was that, several times a year, a scenario was repeated that started with my father moving through the house and doing his gardening, building furniture—I have three pieces that he built for me—or working on one of his activities, such as being president of the Authors’ League and chairman of Freedom House, without really hearing what anyone was saying to him, though he was usually an alert listener. I realized that he was “working”—getting to know his characters, setting out the story in his mind. Then, when he began to write the book on his manual typewriter, each day he would disappear into his study precisely at noon and reappear for dinner promptly at six thirty until the new book was finished.
My father always took Nero and Archie quite seriously, but he found it amusing when other authors imitated or poked fun at them. I think he would be amused—and honored, and perhaps even touched—by the tributes included in the pages that follow.
I know that I certainly am!
San Diego, California
March 2019
Plot It Yourselves
by Josh Pachter
Many years ago, I suggested to Frederic Dannay—who with his cousin Manfred B. Lee created the character of Ellery Queen—that there ought to be a collection of EQ parodies and pastiches titled The Misadventures of Ellery Queen. He liked the idea but thought it would be inappropriate for him to edit such a volume himself, so he graciously suggested that I do it. I was a teenager at the time, though, and had no idea how to edit a book, so the idea lay dormant for decades. Then, one night in 2016, over dinner with my old friend Mike Nevins and new friend Dale Andrews—both of whom had written excellent Queen pastiches—the subject came up, and Dale and I decided it was time to put a Misadventures of Ellery Queen together at long last. We did, and it was published by Wildside Press early in 2018.
While Dale and I were gathering the material for that collection, I got an unrelated, out-of-the-blue e-mail from Rex Stout’s daughter, Rebecca Stout Bradbury. Rebecca lives in California, but she was going to be visiting her daughter, who was living at the time in a Washington, DC, suburb—not far from where I live—and she invited me to have lunch with them. Why? Because she’d heard that, long ago, I’d written a loving homage to Nero Wolfe, her father’s best-known creation. What she was referring to was a short story of mine called “Sam Buried Caesar,” about a ten-year-old boy named Nero Wolfe Griffen. I was eighteen years old when I wrote it, nineteen when it was published in the May 1971 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Rebecca and her daughter and I had a very pleasant lunch, and out of that came an invitation to address the annual Assembly of the Wolfe Pack, which is to Nero Wolfe what the Baker Street Irregulars are to Sherlock Holmes: a gathering of fans, as dedicated to fellowship as they are to scholarship. The group, under the direction of its leader, Ira B. Matetsky—who is officially known as the Wolfe Pack’s werowance (an Algonquian word meaning a leader of the Powhatan Confederacy of Native Americans)—meets at regular intervals to eat meals that would have made Fritz Brenner proud, invent and sing song parodies with Wolfean content, and discuss in detail what Sherlockians call the Canon and Wolfe Packians call the Corpus, which is to say the thirty-three novels and forty-one novellas and short stories narrated by Archie Goodwin and devoted to the genius of that seventh-of-a-ton orchid fancier, Nero Wolfe.
In December of 2016, I took the train up to New York and addressed the Assembly, which was enormous fun—and during the course of the evening Rebecca pulled me aside and asked if I might consider editing a Misadventures of Nero Wolfe.
As you can see from the volume you now hold in your hands, my answer was yes.
Although I’ve edited this one on my own and it’s being released by a different publisher, I’ve followed the same basic format Dale and I used for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, dividing the book into three sections: pastiches (which are respectful imitations of the original, making use of the Nero and Archie characters), parodies (which are exaggerated imitations, often punning on the names of the original characters and intended to poke fun at the source material), and potpourri (which are stories inspired in some way by Rex Stout and/or his characters but written neither to re-create them nor mock them).
In addition to the formatting similarity, some of the same authors appear in both collections: Thomas Narcejac is back with another pastiche from his 1947 Usurpation d’identité collection, William Brittain with another story from his “Man Who Read” series (although, as you’ll see, in this case the man is a woman), and Lawrence Block with the other of his two Chip Harrison stories. Joseph Goodrich is represented this time, not by a story, but by a scene from his stage adaptation of Might as Well Be Dead, Jon L. Breen dug up a fifty-year-old pastiche that has never before been published, there’s another of Norma Schier’s delightful anagram stories, and I’ve included my own “Sam Buried Caesar.”
On the other hand, many of the authors represented here were not part of The Misadventures of Ellery Queen: in these pages, you’ll find the first chapter of Robert Goldsborough’s first novel-length continuation of the Corpus, one of Marvin Kaye’s estate-sanctioned short stories, a Claudius Lyon story by Loren D. Estleman and a Julius Katz story by Dave Zeltserman, a science-fictional Nero from the pen of the late Mack Reynolds, two vignettes from the pages of the Saturday Review of Literature, a chapter from John Lescroart’s Rasputin’s Revenge, and brand-new stories written especially for this collection by Michael Bracken and Robert Lopresti.
Before I turn you over to the stories themselves, I’d like to mention some of the material I chose not to include in this collection, to give you a sense of what else is out there:
• Viola Brothers Shore’s “A Case of Facsimile” (EQMM, October 1948) is a whirlwind of a story, in which the daughters of famous fictional detectives (Shirley Holmes, Samantha Spade, Elsie Queen, Charlotte Chan, and so on) are students at the Edgar Allan Poe School, but the sole reference relevant to us is a parenthetical mention of “Nerissa Wolfe, who will be a perfect elephant some day.”
• W. Heidenfeld’s “The Unpleasantness at the Stooges’ Club” (EQMM, February 1953) has a lovely premise—a locked-room murder is committed not far from the English country estate where the second bananas of great fictional detectives can get away from their stooging responsibilities for a bit of R and R—but the solution to the crime is hackneyed, Nero Wolfe is mentioned only once, in passing, and Archie Goodwin is conspi
cuously absent.
• At one point in Maurice Richardson’s “The Last Detective Story in the World” (EQMM, February 1947), “Nero Wolfe’s man-eating orchid snapped at Ellery Queen,” but there was otherwise no reference to Wolfe.
• The February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a story titled “The Volcano,” published by Paul Chapin. An “Editorial Preface” to the story includes these sentences: “Though no biography of Paul Chapin has yet been published, millions know of the man and his works. The most complete account of him is given in The League of Frightened Men, the second volume in the biography of the great detective, Nero Wolfe. … [H]e became a murder suspect but was proved innocent by Wolfe. Chapin repaid Wolfe by putting him in his next novel under the name of Nestor Whale and killing him off in a particularly gruesome fashion.” Both this preface and the story that follows were in fact written by noted science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer, the fourth entry in what has become known as his “Fictional Author Series,” which began two years earlier when Farmer, afflicted with a bad case of writer’s block, decided to write a novel as by Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout. “The Volcano” features a private investigator named Curtius Parry, who lives in an apartment on East Forty-Fifth Street in New York, but neither the character nor the case have any real connection to the world of Nero Wolfe.
• The first half of my old friend Marvin Lachman’s “The Real Fourth Side of the Triangle” (The Mystery Nook, August 1976) is a nonfiction article about the relationship between Perry Mason and his secretary, Della Street, but the piece then morphs into a fictional account of Mason’s and Ellery Queen’s rivalry for Della’s attentions before winding up at “the old four-story brownstone on West 35th Street,” where the reader learns that Della has ultimately opted to run off with … not Archie Goodwin, but Nero Wolfe!
• David Langford’s “If Looks Could Kill,” which appeared in the 1992 anthology EuroTemps (edited by Alex Stewart and Neil Gaiman), features a British detective named Caligula Foxe in a fantasy world in which paranormal powers exist. Interesting, especially due to the Stout-inspired character names (narrator Charlie Goodman, Franz the chef, and others), but not enough to my liking to include.
