If Death Ever Slept

Rex Stout

If Death Ever Slept

Introduction

IT IS NOW A commonplace to point out that Rex Stout fused the two great streams of English language detective fiction. In Nero Wolfe he creates a Holmesian genius, European born, who solves crimes through the application of superior intellect, in the ratiocinative tradition. In Archie Goodwin we have an American wiseacre who solves, or helps Wolfe solve, crimes through the application of superior toughness, in the hard-boiled tradition. One should not be too schematic here. Archie is smart and Wolfe is tough, but the generalization, I think, holds.

This would have been a clever contrivance in any case, but it would have been only that if Stout were not also quite a splendid writer. He wrote short and he wrote often, which tended to obscure the fact that he wrote well. Unless it leads to obscurity, brevity is rarely praised (or employed) in the journals of, ah, serious literary criticism, and frequency is often equated with frivolity. Thus it has been insufficiently observed in such circles that Stout created people you care about and want to see again. I have read all of the thirty-something Nero Wolfe novels several times. It is not the plots. The plots are ingenious enough, but Wolfe’s solutions are made to seem more remarkable than they might otherwise, because of Archie. Stout, having established Archie’s intelligence, persuades us by letting Wolfe solve crimes that Archie can’t. And while Wolfe knows many things, his genius is human behavior. He solves crimes not because he knows the symptoms of curare poisoning or the sound made by a Borneo blowgun, but because he understands what a person might do in extremis.

There are criticisms to be made. Stout was often formulaic, repeating exactly from book to book descriptions of Wolfe’s weight, for instance. The nonrecurring characters are less memorable than the regulars and seem somewhat interchangeable among the stories. And the regular characters never change. Wolfe, Archie, and the rest remain as they were in 1934, when we met them in Fer-de-Lance.