Rex Stout and Me

It seems to me, that growing up, the two constants in my life were John D. MacDonald and Rex Stout. Those two were always there, Travis McGee and Meyer, the man of action and the man of those, and Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, again the man of action and the man of thought. The two series share much in common, both comment on society,on why people behave the way they do, and on people behaving very badly. MacDonald is the harder edged of the two-people die in grotesque ways in his books, and the murderer, him or herself, always comes to a very bad end, sometimes at McGee's hands and sometimes at the hands of fate, while in the Wolfe series, there is usually just the one murder, occasionally one more. Wolfe is much more civilized, relatively speaking. He never leaves his house (which is why I'm enjoying In the Best Families so much, where he leaves home, loses a lot of weight and goes after his Moriarty-Arnold Zeck), he focuses on food, orchids and a case when Archie pesters him into it.

Ah, Archie Goodwin. As a child, I believed New York was full of people like him-smart, smartly-dressed and always with a smart-ass response. If Bugs Bunny formed my sense of humor as a child, it was Archie Goodwin who was my idol as I got older. Of course, having a crush on him helped.

When I moved to DC, I could not bring all my Wolfe books with me, so I picked my two favorites (Some Buried Caesar and Death of a Dude) and let the rest go. Until last week, when I paid a visit to my local used bookstore and ran into The Red Box. Nero Wolfe, I thought. How can I go wrong? And it would be interesting to see my reaction to a series that I had not read in a very long time.

I am pleased to report that time has not reduced any of the pleasure in reading these books (yes, I'm buying them all, again. At least it's only for the second time, not the third like with MacDonald). It's like visiting old friends, the house on 34th St, with Fritz and Theodore, Inspector Cramer and Purely Stebbins, Saul, Orrie and Fred. I'll quote a critic I read recently on this series on re-reading them-"you know who did it and you still re-read it, for the pure pleasure of it" and it's true. How great is it that time has made me appreciate them more?

Thank you, Rex, Archie and Nero and John, Travis and Meyer for always being there. Thank you for all the years of reading pleasure that continues to this day. Thank you for some of the greatest characters in fiction-my life wouldn't have been the same without you and has been all the better for you in it.

I was thinking about this last night and realized a couple more things-when I think about MacDonald and Travis McGee, I think about the plot, the murders, the extravagant items he's trying to get back for his clients. It runs the gamut from ancient Inca gold statues to an invention that blows plastic material with bubbles in it into sunken yachts-and raises them so they can rehabbed and sold-and a treasure book to go with it. And as for death-well, the bad usually comes to a VERY bad end, ranging from fire ants to getting caught in an anchor. These are the things that stick with me from these books-"oh, is that the one where...".

It's a different case with Rex Stout. Yes, the plots are interesting and each case is different, but the deaths are not showy, not like in MacDonald. The people are poisoned or shot or knifed but I read these books for sheer pleasure of reading a sentence like "I am the employer and as such I do not invite familiarities from the help, I said stiffly. However, there are four of us and Fritz will make five for poker and when it's over I will lend you carfare home". But my all time favorite line form Stout is this "I never met a man who let a woman take him to hell who didn't already have a ticket in his pocket or was at least checking the time tables". That's the difference between the two.