Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 11. Jack Grochot
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last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that’s why they’re still the best ones.” Later in the same program, he said, “It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.” (Obviously, he wasn’t including pastiches.)
A few years later, in 1949, Stout wrote an article called “Grim Fairy Tales” for Saturday Review, in which he tried to explain why “Sherlock Holmes is the most widely known fictional character in all the literature of the world.” And this was his conclusion:
“Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of man’s greatest pride and his greatest weakness: his reason…He is human aspiration. He is what our ancestors had in mind when in wistful bragging they tacked the sapiens onto the homo.”
Stout added to this a more general statement which McAleer suggested could apply to Nero Wolfe and to Rex Stout himself. He wrote:
We enjoy reading about people who love and hate and covet—about gluttons and martyrs, misers and sadists, whores and saints, brave men and cowards. But also, demonstrably, we enjoy reading about a man who gloriously acts and decides, with no exception and no compunction, not as his emotions brutally command, but as his reason instructs.
In an introduction to The Later Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1952, Stout argued that the success of the Canon depended on what he called “the grand and glorious portrait” of Holmes, which transcended the author’s plot errors. “We are not supposed to reach real intimacy with him,” he wrote. “We are not supposed to touch him.” I have not yet had the pleasure of reading this introduction, but I gather from McAleer’s description that it discusses Conan Doyle’s literary offenses in some detail. And yet Stout concluded that all of these transgressions seemed to enhance the portrait of the Great Detective. How did that work? “No one will ever penetrate it to the essence and disclose it naked to the eye,” Stout concluded. “For the essence is magic, and magic is arcane.”
Stout wrote eloquently about Holmes again in 1963 for the cover of a record album of Basil Rathbone reading Holmes stories.
“Holmes,” Stout wrote, “is a man, not a puppet. As a man he has many vulnerable spots, like us; he is vain, prejudiced, intolerant; he is a drug addict; he even plays the violin for diversion—one of the most deplorable outrages of self-indulgence.”
But, Stout went on, there is much more to him than that: “He loves truth and justice more than he loves money or comfort or safety or pleasure, or any man or woman. Such a man has never lived, so Sherlock Holmes will never die.”
Neither—I submit—will Rex Stout’s most famous creation, Nero Wolfe. And since the fat sleuth’s 1934 debut, readers and critics have drawn parallels between the two detectives. More than that, they have put them on the same family tree by speculating that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock or, less frequently, Mycroft Holmes. Certainly Wolfe looks like Mycroft. And in the novel Baker Street Irregular, Stout says that the character was based on Mycroft.
In October 1954, as they appeared together at a book signing at Kann’s Department Store in Washington, D.C., Frederic Dannay asked Stout how he came up with the name of Nero Wolfe. According to Dannay, Stout thought for a while and then said that he based the name on Sherlock Holmes. In McAleer’s version, Stout was just quoting Alexander Woollcott’s theory. Here’s how Dannay lays it out in the book In the Queen’s Parlor:
Now…how in the world does Nero Wolfe resemble Sherlock Holmes? Well, one likeness is quickly apparent: both names have the same number and the same distribution of syllables: Sherlock has two, Holmes one; Nero likewise has two, Wolfe one. But this is a superficial kinship: the relationship is far more subtle. Consider the vowels, and their placement, in the name Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock has two—e and o, in that order; Holmes also has two—the same two, but in reverse order—o-e. Now consider the vowels in Nero Wolfe: Nero has two—the same two as in Sherlock, and in exactly the same order! Wolfe also has two—the same two as in Holmes, and again in the same reverse order!
Dannay called this “the great O-E theory,” and mused that it probably all went back to P-O-E. Clearly, Rex Stout was not the only one having fun with Sherlock Holmes.
William S. Baring-Gould, in his biography Nero Wolfe of Baker Street, mentions the great O-E theory in passing in a chapter called “Alias Nero Wolfe,” in which he argues that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Frankly, in my opinion, Baring-Gould’s attempt to prove a genetic connection between the two detectives rather limps. For example, in listing similarities between the two men, Baring-Gould writes: “In his youth, Nero Wolfe, like Sherlock Holmes, was an athlete.” This is proof?
Undeterred by what seems to me very flimsy evidence, mystery writer John T. Lescroart adopted this paternity theory whole-heartedly in his books Son of Holmes (1986) and Rasputin’s Revenge (1987). They recount the World War I adventures of John Hamish Adler Holmes under the primary alias of Auguste Lupa. Lescroart’s hero also calls himself Julius Adler and Cesar Mycroft. We are to assume that he later adopted the first name of another Roman emperor and anglicized the lupine last name. I personally found these books entertaining, but the series had short legs; it stopped at two.
As the Holmes-Wolfe connection kept being proposed over the years, Stout came up with a number of amusing ways of saying, in effect, “leave me out of this.” As early as 1935, in a letter to the editor of The Baker Street Journal, he pleaded client confidentiality in his role as Archie Goodwin’s literary agent. In 1968, he wrote to Bruce Kennedy, “Since the suggestion that Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes was merely someone’s loose conjecture, I think it is proper and permissible for me to ignore it.” A couple of years later he wrote to another admirer, “As for the notion that he [Wolfe] was sired by Sherlock Holmes, I don’t believe Archie Goodwin has ever mentioned it.”
And yet Archie Goodwin notes in Fer-de-Lance that he, Archie, has a picture of Sherlock Holmes over his desk. On August 12, 1969, McAleer asked Stout: “Did Archie hang up the picture of Sherlock Holmes that is found over his desk, or did Wolfe put it there?” Stout’s response was typically unequivocal: “I was a damn fool to do it. Obviously it’s always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done.”
We shall charitably assume that the reference to fictional characters reflects Stout’s advanced age at the time.
Another interesting picture in the Wolfe establishment on West 35th Street is the painting of a waterfall, behind which Archie and others often hide in a secret alcove to observe and hear the goings-on in Wolfe’s office. According to John McAleer, Stout surmised that the painting represented the Reichenbach Falls.
If Stout guessed correctly, this is quite appropriate—for Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes both battled a criminal genius to the death. Professor Moriarty, a figure as archetypical in popular mythology as Holmes himself, is a significant presence in “The Final Problem,” “The Adventure of the Empty House,” and The Valley of Fear. He is also mentioned in three other stories. Arnold Zeck, Moriarty’s counterpart in the world of Nero Wolfe, has speaking parts in the novels And Be a Villain and The Second Confession and appears in the third book of the trilogy, In the Best Families.
“I’ll tell you this,” Wolfe says to Archie in the first of these books. “If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work—and sleep and eat if there is time for it—and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I will never have to.”
Like Holmes, he is ready to give his all. In the Best Families finds him doing exactly that. It’s a kind of “Final Problem” and “Empty House” in one epic novel—epic not in size, but in terms of its significance to the Wolfe corpus. Wolfe isn’t believed dead in the book, but he might as well be. He leaves the brownstone on West 35th Street with the door wide open and a strong indication that he will never be back. When he does return, months later, Archie doesn’t recognize him. Physically he’s a mere shadow of his former one-seventh of a ton, his face full of seams from the weight loss. His resolve and mental resources are undiminished, however. And