Rex Stout - The Silent Speaker (A Nero Wolfe Mystery)

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 he left to enlist in the navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelts yacht. When he left the navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sight-seeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that 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 from 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 Gardners 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, and 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.

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 Theres 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

Prisoners 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 Wolfes 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

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

THE SILENT SPEAKER
A Bantam Crime Line Book / published by arrangement with Viking Penguin

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Viking edition published October 1946
Detective Book Club edition published December 1946
Bantam reissue //February 1994

CRIME LINE and the portrayal of a boxed cl are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

All right reserved.
Copyright 1946 by Rex Stout.
Copyright renewed 1974 by Rex Stout.
Introduction copyright 1994 by Walter Mosley.
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: 978-0-307-78389-9

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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I love Nero Wolfe. I love his house, his orchids, his sour disposition, and his shrouded past. I love his reading habits, his unabashed fear of women, and his incredible appetite; that is to say, I love his love of food.

When Nero Wolfe spoke, I learned. He taught me, when I was just a teenager, to look closely at the world because what might be apparent to us everyday kind of guys was probably just fluff. Im not talking so much about the crimes he solved as the way he exercised his mind on whatever came before him. The way he read books or the petty arguments he had with his clients, his employees, and the police. Nero Wolfe was always thinking, always distrustful, and almost always right.

Wolfe was lazy, agoraphobic, prejudiced against many different kinds of people (most notably women), and a glutton. He was arrogant, vengeful, spiteful, and sometimes cruel. Any manners he had came from a personal sense of decorum and never from common civility. But I always knew that he had high moral values and that people sitting before him could trust him if they themselves could be trusted.

Wolfe was never a hero in the American sense. No gunslinger or karate master he. He never subdued the bad guy or ran a merry chase. As a matter of fact, Nero Wolfe was a coward when it came to things physical.

He was afraid of traffic.

Again, instead of condemning Mr. Wolfe for his cowardice, I learned from him. I learned that the American ideal of heroism is no more than a bad movie; that real heroes rarely existif, indeed, they ever do. I learned that life is not so much the struggle of good against evil as it is the struggle to survive.

Wolfe struggled for comfort. A great meal and a solid brownstone, that was the prize; a brief respite in this all too short, all too painful life.

Wolfe didnt care about crime and its eradication. He was a philosopher. As long as there is man there will be murder, adultery, and theft, he might have said. And he knew that his efforts would make little difference in that equation. His job was to pay the rent and buy the groceries. All the liars and murderers and saints that passed through his house over the decades meant little or nothing to Wolfes heart. He was a man doing his job.

And now that I think of itwhat could be more heroic than that?

All of that said, I still havent touched on why Ive read all of the Nero Wolfe mysteries. As a matter of fact, you would be justified in asking why anyone would read about such a rude and unredeemed character.

The answer is, of course, Archie Goodwin.

Archies voice is at once so humorous and so revealing that I often felt I was being addressed by a spirit rather than just some normal human being. Archie, it seemed, was sprung fully grown from the mind of that twentieth-century god, New York City. Hes a footloose New Yorker who sees the whole world from Thirty-fifth Street. He can tell you about a cops gait, a pretty womans choice of a particular hue of lipstick, an unusual texture in Fritzs corn fritters, or the angle of a dead mans armall with wit and humor that keep you reading for more.