“Holmes and Watson in Manhattan”: Musings on the Creation of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin

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Rex Stout began writing before Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner did. Between 1912 and 1917, he published more than thirty stories and four novels, most in pulp magazines. At age twenty-seven, Stout gave up writing to run a company that arranged for schoolchildren to set up savings accounts. The earnings from this business enabled him to move to Europe and launch a second writing career.

The first fruits of that effort put him among authors who were adapting modernist techniques for a wider readership. How Like a God (1929) was called “an extraordinarily brilliant and fascinating piece of work,” and Seed on the Wind (1930) made “the Lawrence excursion into sexual psychology seem pale and artificial.” Stout was compared favorably with Dostoevsky and Aldous Huxley. In a contemporary survey of the novel, a distinguished academic had no hesitation including Stout in the company of Woolf, Dos Passos, and Faulkner.

Stout mingled with the literati. He met G. K. Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Conrad. He got fan letters from Havelock Ellis and Mrs. Bertrand Russell. Manhattan tastemakers Mark Van Doren, Christopher Morley, and Alexander Woollcott became close friends.

Yet soon Stout turned his back on experimentation. After the 1929 stock market crash, he needed to make money. How Like a God and Seed on the Wind, published by a firm he helped found, sold poorly. His next efforts were less formally adventurous but continued in a vein of erotic provocation. Golden Remedy (1931) traces the sexual frustrations of a philandering concert impresario. In Forest Fire (1933), a park ranger confronts his homosexual impulses. Both books garnered mixed reviews and few sales.

Stout took to heart the Collins test, the distinction between art and entertainment. Realizing that he was “a good storyteller but not a great novelist,” he vowed, “To hell with sweating our another twenty novels when I’d have a lot of fun telling stories which I could do well and make some money on it.” His confession echoes a comment of several reviewers who had found that his first two novels, although technically a bit gimmicky, still managed to tell gripping stories. More than one compared their effect to the suspense generated by detective fiction.

In quick succession, Stout tried his hand at a political thriller (The President Vanishes, 1934), two comic romances, and detective novels. “There was no thought of ‘compromise.’ I was satisfied that I was a good storyteller; I enjoyed the special plotting problems of detective stories; and I felt that whatever comments I might want to make about people and their handling of life could be made in detective stories as well as in any other kind.”45 Fer-de-Lance (1934) launched a series centered on Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and after 1940, Stout would concentrate wholly on them. Their cases, chronicled more or less sequentially in thirty-three novels and forty short stories and novellas, ended in A Family Affair (1975), published shortly before Stout’s death.

When the author of How Like a God turned to mysteries, we might have expected him to produce a geometrically intricate block construction similar to The Poisoned Chocolates Case. After the reverse time scheme of Seed on the Wind, Stout might have launched something like Obelists Fly High, which begins with an epilogue and concludes with a prologue. Instead, Stout did something else. He carried a central convention of the detective story to a new, almost obsessive limit; he made that convention newly ingratiating; and in the process he revealed unexpected ways to experiment with style in a mass-market genre.

Nero Wolfe, weighing in at one-seventh of a ton, lives in a well-appointed brownstone on Thirty-Fifth Street. Here he breeds orchids, reads, drinks vast quantities of beer, and dines on meals of rare delicacy. To support his lifestyle, he works as a private investigator. But he is the ultimate armchair detective. His central rule of behavior, and the formal premise that founds the series, is that he leaves his home only under extreme necessity.

Wolfe’s self-imposed isolation obliges him to employ an assistant, Archie Goodwin, who works as his secretary—typing correspondence, keeping plant records, dusting the office—and as an investigator. Archie fetches clients, witnesses, and suspects to meetings. Slender and strong, reasonably handsome, Archie is attractive to and attracted by women of many ages.

Above all, Wolfe is committed to rationality—or at least as much as a detective in the intuitionist tradition can be. As a boy, Stout steeped himself in Doyle, Freeman, Collins, and other classics, and he admired Christie, Sayers, even Van Dine. He defended the orthodox detective story as a fairy tale “about man’s best loved fairy”: the belief in the power of reason to serve justice. Wolfe, who grunts and purses his lips and closes his eyes, avoids displays of emotion, especially from women. He is the detached, arrogant, grumpy genius.

Archie Goodwin, as Wolfe describes him in an appreciative mood, is “inquisitive, impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful.” He is good with weapons and his fists. He can bluff as well as Wolfe, but in an ingratiating, rapid-fire style. Although no less sensitive to money than Wolfe—he often has to goad his boss into taking a lucrative case—he has a streak of idealism and fair play, perhaps because he hasn’t withdrawn from the world. He has pals, including the heiress Lily Rowan and other lady friends, and he enjoys parties.

The contrast between Wolfe and Archie has inclined some commentators to see Stout’s accomplishment as a teaming of two prototypical protagonists: the puzzle-solving genius and the hard-boiled man of action. It’s true in part, but in the blend both components are changed.

Traditionally the armchair detective commands center stage. The prototype, Baron Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, is both protagonist and narrator. Prompted by a young woman, he recounts his cases in embedded flashbacks. Stout took the armchair detective premise as a formal problem. “Like the restrictions a sonnet writer is held to, Wolfe’s chosen way of life offers a challenge that is fun to meet.” Stout’s solution is to make the assistant participate fully in the action. Archie tells the story, and he is given plenty to do. In some books, Wolfe is offstage for many chapters.

Stout defended the use of a Watson as the best solution to the “purely technical problem” of fair play. The writer must present all the information needed to solve the mystery, but the significance of crucial clues must be played down. A narrating sidekick not only justifies suppressing the detective’s thinking, but it provides creative options. “A Watson keeps the reader at the viewpoint where he belongs—close to the hero—supplies a foil for the hero’s transcendence and infallibility, and makes the postponement of the revelation vastly less difficult. Also, if your imagination is up to the task of making the stooge a man instead of a dummy, he will be handy to have around in many other ways.” Stout seized on the opportunities afforded by a restless, outgoing Watson who could contrast sharply with the great detective while complicating the plot and throwing his own mystifications into the mix. In effect, he turned the Poe-Doyle helper into a coequal protagonist.

Stout believed that what made Holmes attractive was not his reasoning power but his idiosyncrasies. He admired “the thousand shrewd touches in the portrait of the great detective… It is stroked in quite casually, without effort

or emphasis.” Archie is by turns frustrated and amused by Wolfe, and his reactions go beyond John Watson’s gentlemanly tolerance. Recorded in Archie’s respectful mockery, Wolfe’s eccentricities and tantrums become diverting. “What makes Wolfe palatable,” Donald Westlake notes, “is that Archie finds him palatable.”

Stout’s major formal innovation is to make his Watson at least as interesting as his Holmes. The hard-boiled detective tends to be wary, weary, and withdrawn, but Archie the extravert is socially adroit. He’s closer to the fast-talking newshound or salesman of 1930s movie comedies. And he has a conception of masculinity far more flexible than that of most hard-boiled heroes. He doesn’t insult women or bully weak men. He can punch, but he also loves to dance in nightclubs and usually prefers milk to whisky. He almost never gets whacked unconscious. On the one occasion he is given knockout drugs, he wakes up weeping and takes a plausible stretch of time to recover. Then there’s his name: Who calls a tough guy Archie?

Stout admired Hammett enormously, ranking him above Hemingway, and it seems likely that Archie’s patter owes something to the Continental Op’s ironizing vernacular. But Stout detached himself from the “sex-and-gin marathon” on display in most hard-boiled novels. In 1950, Stout parodies the Spillane style by having Archie impersonate a tough dick. He squeezes a target with phrases like “first-hand dope,” “a nice juicy price,” and references to “bitching up” a plan before he declares, in the noble Marlowe manner: “I have my weak spots, and one of them is my professional pride…That’s a fine goddamn mess for a good detective, and I was thinking I was one.” Archie never normally talks this way. He walks away from the encounter grinning. “The game was on.”

Because Archie sees Wolfe through grudgingly admiring eyes, Stout can make their ongoing relations part of the plot. Stout turns the Watson/Holmes interplay into a battle of wits—not just a race to the crime’s solution but a daily game of two men pushing against each other. Archie prods the lazy Wolfe to take cases, quarrels with him about tactics, teases him about his habits, and threatens to quit. (Archie claims to have resigned or been fired dozens of times.)

The petty friction of different temperaments working and living together makes every moment fraught with comedy. Both men bicker ingeniously. “You know me, I’m a man of action.” “And I, of course, am super-sedentary.” When Archie pushes too far, Wolfe will interrupt: “Shut up.” They go through periods of sullen silence, usually broken by the need to cooperate on a case. Yet the interpersonal stratagems allow for a fundamental respect and affection. After Archie’s boast about being a man of action, Wolfe reveals that he fetched the unconscious Archie home in a cab, with Wolfe cradling Archie’s head in his lap.

A stream of contrasts fills out the books. We have Archie’s impudence versus Wolfe’s stolidity, Archie’s flood of words versus Wolfe’s grunts and lapidary pronouncements, Archie crossing his legs and lifting his eyebrow and Wolfe closing his eyes and wiggling a finger. Literary analogies spring to mind: Quixote and Sancho Panza, the phlegmatic and sanguine characters of the Comedy of Humours. Whatever we settle on, it seems evident we are on archetypal terrain. “It is impossible,” wrote cultural historian Jacques Barzun, “to say which is the more interesting and admirable of the two.”

Stout strengthens Wolfe and Archie’s tie to the Great Detective tradition through Doyle’s strategy of world building. Within an atmospheric London, the cozy bachelor redoubt at 221 B Baker Street was rendered with loving exactitude, from the V.R. bullet-holes on the wall to the shag tobacco kept in the Persian slipper. Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, Lestrade, and the Irregulars formed a repertory cast. Since Doyle almost no major writer of detective fiction had won readers through the sheer charm of the heroes’ milieu.

Stout launched his series as critics were celebrating the richness of Holmes’s world. By Doyle’s death in 1930, an ardent fandom had sprung up among the Manhattan literary elite. Entire books treated Holmes and Watson as actual figures, culminating in Vincent Starrett’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933). In his influential introduction to the first collection of all the stories in 1930, Christopher Morley waxed eloquent about the “minor details of Holmesiana” and the “endless delicious minutiae to consider!”61 There’s the sitting room where clients call; Holmes stretched languidly on the sofa while he scrapes the violin; breakfasts on winter mornings; “The game is afoot!”—each scrap of information asks to be caressed and cherished. Morley founded the Baker Street Irregulars as an informal dining group. In 1934, the year Fer-de-Lance was published, Morley invited Stout to join the now habitually meeting Irregulars.

Stout’s sardonic streak made him resist the cult’s ponderous coyness. “The pretense that Holmes and Watson existed and Doyle was merely a literary agent can be fun and often is, but it is often abused and becomes silly.” He shocked an Irregulars dinner in 1941 with a remorseless paper asserting that Watson was a woman, probably the wife of Holmes and the mother of Lord Peter. He was bemused by the efforts of the Wolfe Pack, a coterie of admirers who wanted to immortalize his creation through similar pseudoscholarship.

Who can blame them? All the trappings were there. This cantankerous genius had a Watson. Said Watson eventually confessed that the cases (“reports”) were being published thanks to the ministrations of a literary agent named Rex Stout. Some characters had read the Wolfe books. As the series went on, sporadic revelations of Archie’s Ohio childhood and Wolfe’s youthful espionage work coaxed the faithful to ever-more patient rereading and ever wilder speculation. What fans today call head-canon proliferated. Is Wolfe Mycroft Holmes’s son? Or even Sherlock’s, with Irene Adler? Is Archie Wolfe’s son? Or just his cousin? It was perhaps inevitable that the foremost Holmesian expert, W. S. Baring-Gould, would write a treatise on the Wolfe ménage.

More than any other writer of the time, Stout gave detectival eccentricity an obsessive-compulsive granularity. The brownstone on West 35th Street, however recognizably part of Manhattan, became an alternative world, ruled by routines capable of endless fine-tuning. Fritz Brenner cooks; Theodore Horstmann tends to the orchids. Wolfe’s schedule is strict, from breakfast in his bedroom to the evening, when, if there are no meetings with clients, Wolfe reads and Archie is likely to go out on a date or to a poker game.

The geography of the brownstone is as sharply etched as its routines, and as the years go by, we learn more and more. Seven front steps lead to the door, which has a one-way glass and a chain bolt. Pressing the button activates a doorbell, which replaced the buzzer of the first book. The best chair in the office is red, with a small table positioned at a client’s elbow for easy check-signing. At one end of the office is a big globe (first two feet, then three feet in diameter) that Wolfe likes to gently spin. On his desk is a thin gold strip that he uses as a bookmark. One drawer is reserved for the beer-bottle caps Wolfe occasionally counts. There’s a safe, a cabinet for files, and built-in bookshelves holding hundreds of volumes. A painting conceals a peephole.

In the last book of the series, after his most traumatic case, Wolfe contemplates ten days of peace. What will he do? “Loaf, drift… Read books, drink

beer, discuss food with Fritz, logomachize with Archie.” This is a world that tries to keep anything new from happening.

Stout’s casually stroked-in details pay homage to the master. Morley called the Holmes stories “this great encyclopedia of romance,” but another detective novelist, Edmund Crispin, pointed out that the account of Wolfe’s lair are “so encyclopedic and thoroughgoing that the Holmes-Watson ménage on Baker Street, in comparison, is reduced to the sketchiest of shadow-shows.”

Apart from characterizing his Holmes and Watson in full array, Stout uses world making to fill out the novel’s length. In the process, he enlivened central conventions of the classic puzzle mystery.

For instance, the armchair premise motivates not only Archie’s excursions but the need to hire other investigators who become fixtures of Wolfe’s world. These operatives become helpers, occasional obstacles, and Archie’s comrades in arms. They also push offstage all the cycles of tailing and questioning that can make the action flag. Similarly, Wolfe’s willful immobility recasts the convention of the bumbling police. Archie can be summoned to headquarters and even jailed as a material witness, but Wolfe can usually avoid that fate. The cops must come calling. Wolfe can subject Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins to his schedule, and when he finally grants them an audience, he can intimidate, bargain, and dodge accusations in comfort.

The personal proclivities of the Great Detective have always helped flesh out the standard plot and build fan loyalty. Food is central to Stout’s strategy. He delineates every exotic dish served in the household, every sandwich Archie gobbles in custody, even Cramer’s stomach-turning snack of salami and buttermilk. Groceries, brought home by Fritz or picked up in flight from the police, are lovingly itemized. The Continental Op briefly notes his abalone soup and minute steak, and Marlowe typically just eats an unspecified lunch or dinner. Archie dwells on his dining options. “I had had it in mind to drop in at Rusterman’s Restaurant for dinner and say hello to Marko that evening, but now I didn’t feel like sitting through all the motions, so I kept going to Eleventh Avenue, to Mart’s Diner, and perched on a stool while I cleaned up a plate of beef strew, three ripe tomatoes sliced by me, and two pieces of blueberry pie.” Archie invokes another Wolfe domain, Rusterman’s, only to head to the diner counter and indulge the Ohio boy’s fondness for comfort food. The “sliced by me” defines Archie’s insistence on taking charge, along with his appreciation of freshness. It’s a touch nobody but Stout would include.

Building this unique world obliges Stout to alter the role of detecting as a profession. Philip Marlowe accepts what business he can scrape up, and Perry Mason can afford to take indigent clients, even a caretaker’s cat. Wolfe and Archie rely on high-end customers. The clientele comes mostly from the plutocracy and the professions: lawyers, professors, media producers, company executives, and a surprising number of writers and publishers. Typically a financial or personal problem leads to a murder, and Wolfe and Archie are obliged to solve the crime in order to collect payment for the original assignment. In one book, Wolfe calls this “effecting a merger.”

More than most detectives, Wolfe takes on some clients in teams. He may be retained by a committee delegated to manage a crisis or representatives of a firm or professional association or a family of heirs or a band of old college classmates. The question-and-answer scenes of the classic mystery get recast as business meetings, or what Archie sometimes calls conferences. Wolfe summons a group of people with stakes in the matter. Refreshments are served—more detailing of beverages and preferences—and participants are free to examine Wolfe’s library and furnishings. When Wolfe gets to work, the quizzing that is the mainstay of the classic puzzle is turned into an open-ended discussion. Jacques Barzun calls it Wolfe’s seminar method. “I doubt I’ll have a single question to put to any of you, though of course an occasion for one may rise. I merely want to describe the situation as it now stands and invite your comment. You may have none.” Chandler, who had been an oil company executive, confessed he had trouble writing scenes with more than two people, but Stout, who founded a successful company, excelled in roundtable discussions.

The mercantile tenor of the books reshapes the conventional denouement, the gathering of all the suspects. Archie, reflecting as usual on the artifice of detective conventions, calls these Wolfe’s parties or charades. Theatrical they often are, but they don’t have the inexorability of Ellery Queen’s “exercises in deduction” or Perry Mason’s annihilation of testimony. Wolfe’s evidence is often flimsy, and he must provoke the guilty party to self-betrayal. Assembled in Wolfe’s office, usually under the eyes of Cramer and Stebbins, the principals are lectured, hectored, bluffed, and misled. After the book’s procession of meetings presided over by Wolfe, the climax seems less a blinding revelation than a boardroom power play.

Wolfe’s conclusions are often risky intuitions, light on evidence that would convince a jury. Hence the frequent recourse to extralegal pressures that would give even Perry Mason pause. Wolfe will coolly order burglary, send out anonymous messages, and press the guilty party to commit suicide. Worse, later phases of the plot are likely to hide crucial information from Archie, and us. Stout may have taken comfort in the fact the best mystery mongers violated fair-play rules.74 He claimed that Doyle ended his career by concocting “preposterous” mysteries, but that didn’t lessen the magnetism of the Holmes/ Watson relationship.75 Stout never wanted to sacrifice character byplay to the Detection Club rulebook.

Wolfe’s dodgy shortcuts, implausible as they sometimes are, create fine scenes. They generate suspense, offer Archie new challenges, allow Wolfe to earn his fee, prove his cunning, and provoke Cramer’s wrath. Likewise, keeping Archie in the dark at the climax adds value, tightening household friction and giving him occasion for eloquent complaint.

Nearly all of the typical Stout dynamics are already on display in the first book, Fer-de-Lance (1934). The esoteric title distinguishes it from the run-of-the-mill detective novel of the moment.76 Stout’s trust in the reader’s patience is apparent in the fact that the viper isn’t mentioned for more than two hundred pages.

I tried it again. “Fair-du-lahnss?”

Wolfe nodded. “Somewhat better. Still too much n and not enough nose.”

Stout takes the opportunity to contrast heartland Archie and cosmopolitan Wolfe while letting smart readers enjoy linguistic play and instructing the rest of us in pronunciation. Of his next book, a reviewer would write: “Mr. Stout adorns his tale with lots of good writing adapted to highbrow and lowbrow alike.”7

Fer-de-Lance, rather long for a mystery of its day, presents a cascade of coincidences and delays. The murder isn’t revealed as such until the fourth chapter. Not until a hundred and fifty pages in do we learn that the victim was not the intended target. These plot zigzags are buried in the minutiae of Wolfe’s world. The opening plunges us right in.

There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day, for the last ends of the Fairmont National Bank case had been gathered in the week before and there was nothing for me to do but errands, and Wolfe never hesitated about running me down to Murray Street for a can of shoe-polish if he happened to need one. But it was Fritz who was sent for the beer. Right after lunch the bell called him up from the kitchen.

Beer, Wolfe, Fritz, a successful case, an order issued by the employer, and household customs are all breezily taken for granted from the start. In an ordinary book, this would be a more typical middle chapter. The mystery isn’t Whodunit? but What’s the big deal about the beer? The scene centers on Wolfe (the “Nero” isn’t supplied for three chapters). Archie hints at his bulk but concentrates on chronicling his eccentric thoroughness in sampling the entire array of legal 3.2 beer. “None shall lack opportunity.” He could have waited; prohibition is only a few months from ending.

We approach the main action at several removes. The operative Fred Durkin brings in Maria Maffei, whose brother Carlo is missing. Maria leads Archie to the key witness Anna Fiore, whom he brings back to the office. As Wolfe’s involvement deepens, the first chapters provide demonstrations of personal styles. Archie’s dogged but fruitless questioning of Anna in the boarding house is contrasted with Wolfe’s patient conversations with her in the office. Archie takes two hours, a period Stout renders in a paragraph of summary, but Wolfe pursues her for five, with the crucial exchanges dramatized across several pages. “It was beautiful,” Archie reports.80 The questioning reveals that the missing brother is indirectly involved in the golfing death.

Next Stout gives Archie his own big scene. He delivers to the White Plains investigators Wolfe’s $10,000 bet that the death was a murder and that poison will be found if the body is exhumed. This is the first display of Archie’s gifts for politely annoying the hell out of authorities with a string of arguments, threats, and forced choices. Wolfe’s confidence that he can turn the case to profit is amplified by Archie’s grinning effrontery. Later we’ll discover that they’re also settling an old score with this district attorney, who among other transgressions has married money.

The first six chapters are occupied with these business maneuvers. A hardboiled novel would begin with the victim’s daughter visiting the office, but here that comes eighty pages in. She’s been lured by Wolfe’s newspaper advertisement, itself the result of his accidental discovery of the murder. Once Wolfe is hired, Archie can rush toward the action he enjoys, and we get the characteristic cycle of his excursions, his reports to the boss, his tapping his newspaper sources, and the conferences with police and suspects. The hero-worshipping tone in the early chapters gives way to exasperation, as we’re introduced to the rhythm of Wolfe’s stubbornness and Archie’s badgering that will pervade the series to come.

The opening stretches also display how Wolfe uses his supersedentary role to play puppeteer. He bends everyone to his agenda, with Archie summoning people to meals and interrogations while horning in on their private lives. The armchair premise, driven by Wolfe’s self-centeredness, ultimately determines how he’ll settle the case. By triggering the killer’s murder/suicide, he will never have to bestir himself to testify in court.

Besides familiarizing us with the routines and introducing us to the protagonists’ personal styles, this first book’s opening portions set in place distinctive features of Stout’s prose. Of course Archie’s vulgar zest and Wolfe’s pompous pronouncements dominate these sections, but Fer-de-Lance establishes a finer-grained pattern of echoes and refrains that show something just as distinctive in Stout’s achievement. No less than Chandler, Stout brought novelistic finish to the detective story. He bent Archie’s vernacular to verbal patterning that had become part of mainstream literary technique.

Early in Fer-de-Lance Wolfe says that Archie collects facts but has no “feeling for phenomena.” Wolfe tells Maria that Carlo’s disappearance is only a fact. Apparently it doesn’t become a bona fide phenomenon until physical clues let him grasp Carlo’s role in the murder.

The phrase sounds good, but Archie, having looked up “phenomenon,” suspects Wolfe is just parading. But Archie won’t let it go. He will defend his hunches about one suspect as proving he too can pick up on “phenomena.” When no suspect seems a prime candidate, Archie reflects that Wolfe may need to “develop a feeling for a new kind of phenomenon: murder by eeny-meanyminey-mo.” Later, Archie confronts Wolfe and starts talking “just for practice”: “The problem is to discover what the devil good it does you to use up a million dollars’ worth of genius feeling the phenomenon of a poison needle in a man’s belly if it turns out that nobody put it there?” In the closing lines, Wolfe says he’s willing to take responsibility for the two deaths that conclude the action and keep him out of court. Archie replies:

“Now, natural processes being what they are, and you having such a good feeling for phenomena, you can just sit and hold your responsibilities on your lap.”

“Indeed,” Wolfe murmured.

More than Hammett and Chandler, Stout creates refrains that crisscross dialogue and the protagonist’s commentary. He has precedents. Jane Austen, whom Stout considered “probably, technically,” the greatest novelist, sends the word “likeness” chiming significantly through Emma.83 After Wagner, artists in many media made more self-conscious use of motivic play, and it was a prominent strategy of modern literature and drama, as in Conrad and Bernard Shaw.84 The most proximate source for Stout was perhaps Ulysses, with its refrains of “Met-em-pike-hoses,” “agenbite of inwit,” “Your head it simply swirls,” and many more. Stout’s first “art novel,” How Like a God, introduces the rare word “vengeless” early and brings it back twice across the book to emphasize the protagonist’s passivity.

Too Many Cooks (1938) is a rich tissue of refrains, most set out in the first chapter and revived as needed. They’re often traces of Archie’s sarcasm, as when he always refers to the district attorney as his friend. After Wolfe declares that a guest is “a jewel on the cushion of hospitality,” Archie fobs the phrase off on a dinner guest, who doesn’t get it, and later, after seeing a Wolfe scheme foiled, grins and reflects on “how it probably felt at that moment to be a jewel on the cushion of hospitality.”

Stout relies on refrains across books as well as within them. For example, “satisfactory” is Wolfe’s highest term of praise (and, interestingly, the framing motif of The Thin Man). In one book, Archie applies it to their guest: “That girl would have been a very satisfactory traveling companion.” The word recurs at intervals and returns on the last page, where Archie works off his anger by punching an obstreperous guest whose “hundred and ninety pounds . . . made it really satisfactory.” Erle Stanley Gardner’s repetitions from book to book are bland filler, whereas Stout’s serve more literary ends of characterization and patterning, while quietly assisting world building.

Fer-de-Lance doesn’t yet deploy “satisfactory” in the Wolfean sense, but it sprinkles in refrains such as “lethal toy,” “genius,” “artist,” and “lovin’ babe!” and pauses for a debate about the slang use of “ad” for “advertisement.” Sometimes the iterations are closely packed, knitting together dialogue exchanges, but they can also recur at a distance. Archie reflects that somehow Wolfe could be called elegant, and when the obstinate witness Anna behaves with poise four pages later, he grants: “She was being elegant. She had caught it from Wolfe.” Two hundred pages later, when Archie induces Anna to sign the decisive statement, he notices that their first client Maria has changed dramatically. “She looked elegant.” Evidently she has caught it from Anna. Compared with the “Good-byes” that Chandler scatters through the last chapters of The Long Goodbye (1953), Stout’s refrain is subtle and piquant.

Or take foreshadowing. The classic whodunit scatters clues deceptively, creating a sort of disguised foreshadowing. The gun hanging on the wall in act one might not be the murder weapon; something else is, but it will be barely mentioned or obliquely described. A more self-consciously literary novel can foreshadow action through imagery rather than clues and hints. For instance, the beer bottles brought in to Wolfe on the first page of Fer-de-Lance remain as props in later office scenes, as does the desk drawer in which Wolfe stores his opener and bottle caps. At the climax, that drawer is opened.

“Look out!”

Wolfe had a beer bottle in each hand, by the neck, and he brought one of them crashing on to the desk but missed the thing that had come out of the drawer I was ready to jump back and was grabbing Wolfe to pull him back

with me when he came down with the second bottle right square on the ugly head and smashed it flat as a piece of tripe.

The beer and the drawer have been carefully planted, but most novelists, mystery mongers or not, wouldn’t plant Archie’s remark, two hundred pages earlier, long before we have heard anything about vipers and have met any suspects.

I looked at Wolfe and back again at the pile on the floor. It was nothing but golf clubs. There must have been a hundred of them, enough I thought to kill a million snakes. For it had never seemed to me that they were much good for anything else.

I said to Wolfe, “The exercise will do you good.”

Knowing that a snake will indeed pop up in the office and that Wolfe will dispatch it furiously, we can see Archie’s imaginary serpent massacre and his teasing comment as classic instances of through-composed novelistic texture.

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Excerpted from Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell. Copyright (c) 2023 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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