The Red Box

R
EX
S
TOUT
, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel,
Fer-de-Lance
, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them
Too Many Cooks
,
The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang
and
Please Pass the Guilt
, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” a member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death, he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery,
A Family Affair
. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in
Death Times Three
.

Nero Wolfe Mysteries

Fer-De-Lance

The League of Frightened Men

The Rubber Band

The Red Box

Too Many Cooks

Some Buried Caesar

Over My Dead Body

Where There’s a Will

Black Orchids

Not Quite Dead Enough

The Silent Speaker

Too Many Women

And Be A Villain

The Second Confession

Trouble in Triplicate

In the Best Families

Three Doors to Death

Murder by the Book

Curtains For Three

Prisoner’s Base

Triple Jeopardy

The Golden Spiders

The Black Mountain

Three Men Out

Before Midnight

Might As Well Be Dead

Three Witnesses

If Death Ever Slept

Three For the Chair

Champagne For One

And Four to Go

Plot It Yourself

Too Many Clients

Three at Wolfe’s Door

The Final Deduction

Gambit

Homicide Trinity

The Mother Hunt

A Right to Die

Trio for Blunt Instruments

The Doorbell Rang

Death of a Doxy

The Father Hunt

Death of a Dude

Please Pass the Guilt

A Family Affair

Death Times Three

H
ow many novels will you read this year that were published in 1937?

The odds are, not many.

But Rex Stout’s
The Red Box
is a marvelous exception and with good reason. The fourth book in the immortal Nero Wolfe series,
The Red Box
is quintessential Stout. Every element so long adored by faithful fans is there, the brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street; Wolfe’s monumental girth, which is exceeded only by his towering intellect; the ten thousand orchids (Archie keeps the records updated) in the glassed-over rooms on the roof (the orchids’ caretaker, Theo Horstmann, sleeps up there in a small den); the quick wit and ready cynicism of good-looking, blunt-talking Archie Goodwin; the unmatched epicurean delights (on the heavy side, only good eaters invited) of chef Fritz Brenner; the great man’s collection of beer bottle caps.

And therein lies much of the magic of this series, the creation of a world that readers come to know as well as the insides of their own households, from the yellow couch and double-width cherry desk in Wolfe’s office-cum-living room to the climate-and-temperature-controlled plant rooms where Wolfe spends from nine to eleven and four to six every day.

Readers often are curious as to how much of the author can be found in a book’s hero. In the case of Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe, the lack of correlation is perhaps more striking. Stout was tall, slender, scraggly bearded; Wolfe packed a seventh of a ton into a stocky five foot eleven inches. Stout radiated energy; Wolfe avoided physical exertion as if it were deleterious to his health. Stout enjoyed good food, but was quite willing to enjoy common fare; Wolfe was a gourmand who would rather skip a meal than eat junk food. Stout had a wide-ranging interest in the political life of his country; Wolfe was almost apolitical.

But what they had in common and the quality that accounts for the greatest charm of the Nero Wolfe series is a love of language. Stout used language with great precision and with great pleasure. Wolfe was surely his alter ego in this glorious pursuit.

As all Wolfe and Goodwin aficionados know, Wolfe’s idea of heaven was life uninterrupted in his brownstone with the orderly progression of his day from plant room to meal to plant room. It was Archie who alternately bullied and cajoled the great man into taking cases, which Wolfe did only because he knew he had to earn enough money to maintain their life-style.

The Red Box
is a shining example of Wolfe and Archie at their most entertaining and intriguing, and the banter between the great detective and his unquenchable sidekick will delight Stout fans.

The Red Box
provides one of the few instances in the long history recorded by Archie (more than forty books) when Wolfe does indeed depart from the cozy confines of his brownstone, much to Wolfe’s disgruntlement. Archie achieves this rare state of affairs through a clever ploy that takes advantage of Wolfe’s orchidmania.

The sortie to the clothing enterprise on Fifty-second Street provides perspicacious Wolfe with the only ambiguity among the recorded statements on the murder of a model.

Wolfe is faced first with a seemingly insoluble crime—who was really the intended victim? When he correctly identifies the murderer’s true objective and has within his grasp the opportunity to divine the perpetrator, murder once again intervenes—this time in Wolfe’s own office, both an infuriating and ultimately tactless mistake by the murderer.

The cast of suspects includes:

—A gorgeous, rich model who knows too much about the candy.

—The caretaker of an estate who talks so much and so fast no one can get a word in edgewise.

—A self-possessed widow who certainly earned the ire of her husband.

—Wolfe’s first client, who can’t seem to make up his mind what he wants.

—An expatriate without visible means of support who seems to live quite comfortably.

Wolfe is frustrated because he decides early on who did the killing, but sees no way of bringing the suspect to justice. Wolfe solves this problem—with some artful legerdemain—when he unmasks a clever and calculating killer in the comfort and convenience of his lair.

Archie Goodwin is in top form, sassing police, suspects, and clients (as Archie remarks, this case “is just one damned client after another”).

Readers will delight in the intricacy of the plot, the repartee between Wolfe and his man-about-town, Archie, and they may be quite particular in their choice of candies should a box without provenance be offered.

—Carolyn G. Hart

W
olfe looked at our visitor with his eyes wide open—a sign, with him, either of indifference or of irritation. In this case it was obvious that he was irritated.

“I repeat, Mr. Frost, it is useless,” he declared. “I never leave my home on business. No man’s pertinacity can coerce me. I told you that five days ago. Good day, sir.”

Llewellyn Frost blinked, but made no move to acknowledge the dismissal. On the contrary, he settled back in his chair.

He nodded patiently. “I know, I humored you last Wednesday, Mr. Wolfe, because there was another possibility that seemed worth trying. But it was no good. Now there’s no other way. You’ll have to go up there. You can forget your build-up as an eccentric genius for once—anyhow, an exception will do it good. The flaw that heightens the perfection. The stutter that accents the eloquence. Good Lord, it’s only twenty blocks, Fifty-second between Fifth and Madison. A taxi will take us there in eight minutes.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe stirred in his chair; he was boiling. “How old are you, Mr. Frost?”

“Me? Twenty-nine.”

“Hardly young enough to justify your childish effrontery. So. You humored me! You speak of my build-up! And you undertake to stampede me into a frantic dash through the maelstrom of the city’s traffic—in a taxicab! Sir, I would not enter a taxicab for a chance to solve the Sphinx’s deepest riddle with all the Nile’s cargo as my reward!” He sank his voice to an outraged murmur. “Good God. A taxicab.”

I grinned a bravo at him, twirling my pencil as I sat at my desk, eight feet from his. Having worked for Nero Wolfe for nine years, there were a few points I wasn’t skeptical about any more. For instance: That he was the best private detective north of the South Pole. That he was convinced that outdoor air was apt to clog the lungs. That it short-circuited his nervous system to be jiggled and jostled. That he would have starved to death if anything had happened to Fritz Brenner, on account of his firm belief that no one’s cooking but Fritz’s was fit to eat. There were other points too, of a different sort, but I’ll pass them up since Nero Wolfe will probably read this.