Rex Stout - And Be A Villain (A Nero Wolfe Mystery)

This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended
between any character herein and any person,
living or dead; any such resemblance is
purely coincidental.

AND BE A VILLAIN
A Bantam Crime Line Book / published by arrangement with
The Viking Press, Inc.

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Viking edition published September 1948
Bantam edition / October 1950
Bantam reissue edition / March 1994

CRIME LINE and the portrayal of a boxed cl are trademarks of Bantam Books,
a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1948 by Rex Stout.
Introduction copyright 1994 by Martin Meyers and
Annette Brafman Meyers.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78390-5

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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T he time, the place, the detective, the puzzle. These are the basic ingredients of a classic mystery.

The time is 1934, the place is New York City. Rex Stouts first Nero Wolfe mystery, Fer-de-Lance, is published. Annette is born in the Fifth Avenue Hospital; Martin is born in Beth Israel Hospital. The country is in the grip of the Great Depression.

As Maan Meyers, we write detective fiction about historical New York in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, requiring many hours of research. We write it on a word processor.

But we know the thirties and forties of Rex Stouts early Nero Wolfe novels. We lived it; it was our time.

We remember Pearl Harbor and Bataan; we heard Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London during the Blitz as the bombs were falling. We believed that everyone across the Channel in France was a member of the underground and doing his or her best to defeat the Nazis while the Marseillaise played in the background.

We remember war bond drives and D day and the first shocking pictures of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters sing forever in our memories, and Glenn Millers orchestra plays on. Listening to the radio eased the delicious (for children) terror of the blackouts. In a small New Jersey town Annettes father was an air raid warden, her mother an airplane spotter.

Once a week, at school, we all proudly bought savings stamps, which eventually grew into war bonds. Before and after school we collected tin cans and tinfoil, from cigarette and gum wrappers, for scrap metal drives.

The bleak early years of World War II were enlivened by radio, with Edgar Bergen and the wooden brat, Charlie McCarthy, and Jack Benny and all the others. Social life with family or friends meant sitting around a table putting together jigsaw puzzles, playing checkers or dominoes or mah-jongg, or fathoming the mysteries of a Ouija board. On nights out, there were movie musicals in glorious Technicolor, starring Betty Grable and Dan Dailey or Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. Some nights at the movies offered bingo, others free dishes.

Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out, Joe Louis was heavyweight champ, Joe DiMaggio hit home runs, and Fred and Ginger danced. In supper clubs, so the movies and printed page told us, beautiful women and handsome men drank highballs and manhattans.

We ate Jell-O and were meatless on Tuesdays. Many of us still had iceboxes instead of refrigerators. Hot dogs cost a nickel. We read about shamuses and dames, gats and capers, dicks and broads. Then came VE Day. And VJ Day. Victory in Europe and Japan, and the long war was over.

It was a time of new things. The United Nations. Instant coffee. Nylon stockings, with seams. Ballpoint pens.

In 1948, the year we were fourteen, And Be a Villain was published. We had made it to postwar America. President Harry (Give em hell, Harry) Truman surprisingly defeated Tom Dewey to win a second term in the White House. The new state of Israel was born, Gandhi was assassinated, and the transistor was invented. Typing was done on mechanical typewriters, with carbon paper copies.

When Annette met Marty, in 1961, the area below Fourteenth Street and east of Fifth Avenue was awash with used-book stores. We climbed on shaky ladders and pawed through dusty shelves and wooed each other with first editions of the thirties and forties Nero Wolfe.

In rereading the early Nero Wolfe canon we are struck by two particular things. One, they still work. But, two, they create a time machine. When Archie gives the housekeeper, Maria Maffei, a dollar tip in Fer-de-Lance, it boggles the mind to realize how much that dollar bought during the Depression.

The time, the politics, the war, the clubs where Archie took Lily Rowan dancing, the rationing Archie talks about and Nero Wolfe complains about are rooted in our personal memories.

And Be a Villain, simply because of the passage of time, has become an historical mystery.

Rex Stout was by no means a feminist; he was a man of his timean exceptional man, but of his time. Still, he created strong women; he allowed that they could exist. Lily Rowan, Archies continuing lady friend, seems to personify the carefree and caring bright young women of the day. All right, so she was rich. Poor people did not make the reader forget about the Depression or the war.

An important element in the books is the truly singular support group around Nero Wolfe with which Stout improves on Doyles band of loyalists for Holmes. Wolfes band includes Fritz Brenner, the cook; Theodore Horstmann, the orchid man; Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, Wolfes three main operatives; Inspector Cramer and Purley Stebbens, the two primary cops; and Lon Cohen, the newspaperman, whos always there when Archie needs information.

And then theres the innocence. Archie may be cynical, but the Nero Wolfe books are not. And because they are not, they stand out in a time when Stouts contemporaries were writing such world-weary protagonists.

The Wolfe books of the thirties and forties are not at all dark. Archies violence is neat and efficient rather than bloodthirsty. Wolfe, the armchair detective, solves the murder by brain, not brawn, and most of the time without leaving the sanctum sanctorum on Thirty-fifth Street.

Archie, the perennial wise guy, waits for Wolfes solution by going out on the town with Lily, the clever society girl, to dance away the hours. Back at the brownstone, Fritz cooks elegant meals. Crassness and vulgarity are hard put to raise their heads in Wolfes home. Except sometimes when the annoyed murderer bridles at being caught out during the final, comfortably anticipated confrontation scene in front of Wolfes cherry desk.

Meals in the brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, not far from the Hudson River, were sacrosanct, the menus always fascinating. There was something unique in Rex Stouts careful detailing of food and its preparation.

The fact that Wolfe was a connoisseur of fine food who would accept nothing but the best, even on ration coupons, and employed a full-time chef of incredible talent further distances Wolfe from any of his literary contemporaries. Even Lord Peter never had it so good. Somewhere between the hard-boiled detective story and the cozy mystery, Nero Wolfe sits alone, the master, in his huge, specially constructed brown leather Brazilian Mauro chair.