Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 11. Jack Grochot
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unlikely subterfuges are used…All this is very improbable. It is the art of Mr. Stout to make it seem plausible…Holmes was a fully realized character. There is only a handful of his successors to whom that compliment can be paid. One of them, certainly, is Nero Wolfe.
Surprisingly, Stout told McAleer more than once that this story arc wasn’t planned—that he didn’t know for sure when he wrote And Be a Villain that Zeck would reappear in another book. That would mean, then, that he wasn’t intentionally paying homage to Reichenbach and The Return. But who can doubt that Stout was influenced by the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, however subconsciously?
Nor is this by any means the only impact the Canon had on Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe.
In Rex’s appreciation of Doyle’s art [wrote John McAleer], we find valuable guidelines for understanding Rex’s own art. He saw the necessity of making Wolfe a man rich in human contradictions. Wolfe’s eccentricities surpass those of Holmes. At times he is childish in his moods. He shuts his eyes more often than Holmes does to “moral issues.” More than once he “arranges” for the suicide of a culprit, to save himself a court appearance. Yet, withal, even as Holmes is, he is “grand and glorious.”
He also has a sidekick without whom he would be just another genius sleuth. The parallels between John H. Watson, M.D., and Archie Goodwin may not be immediately obvious, but they are strong. Like Watson, Archie is:
• his boss’s Boswell (although better known in crime writing as a “Watson”);
• a man of action;
• a ladies’ man;
• the one who always carries the gun (although Holmes occasionally does, too);
• a colorful and interesting character, unlike S.S. Van Dine or the unnamed “I” of Poe’s Dupin stories;
• a conductor of light, if not himself luminous.
In this matter, Stout’s debt to Conan Doyle was conscious and acknowledged. In The Mystery Writer’s Handbook, a 1956 volume from The Mystery Writers of America, Stout wrote an article called “What to do About a Watson.” He argued that a Watson helps solve what he called “your main technical difficulty” of having the detective hero learn information that the author isn’t ready to share with the reader. “A Watson can be a devil of a nuisance at times,” he wrote, “but he is worth it for his wonderful cooperation in clearing the toughest hurdle on the course.”
At the end of his three-page essay, Stout cited an example of a Watson at work for the author in this exchange from “The Red-Headed League”:
“Evidently,” said I, “Mr. Wilson’s assistant counts for a good deal in this mystery of the Red-headed League. I am sure that you inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.”
“Not him.”
“What then?”
“The knees of his trousers.”
“And what did you see?”
“What I expected to see.”
“Why did you beat the pavement?”
“My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk.”
And then Stout added—gleefully, in my imagination—“That’s the way to do it!”
Nobody who has ever read Rex Stout’s mysteries could deny that he did it his own unique way. But he was also operating under the spell of Arthur Conan Doyle’s arcane magic.
The great private eye novelist Ross Macdonald expressed the opinion of many critics when he wrote:
Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American detective novel. With great wit and cunning, he devised a form which combined the traditional virtues of Sherlock Holmes and the English school with the fast-moving vernacular narrative of Dashiell Hammett.
Stout deserves full credit for doing this so well, and over a 41-year period. But Conan Doyle was there before him. While the first part of The Valley of Fear is an exemplar of “Sherlock Holmes and the English school,” the flashback half—the story of tough guy Birdy Edwards in Vermissa Valley, U.S.A.—is arguably (as Steve Doyle writes in Sherlock Holmes for Dummies) “the world’s first hard-boiled detective story.”
So even in his best known and most enduring contribution to the American detective story, Rex Stout walked in the footprints of a giant. And they were not the footprints of a gigantic hound!
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