John J. McAleer - Rex Stout: A Biography

(between pages 172 and 181 and 358 and 367) Unless otherwise noted, the photographs appear through the courtesy of Pola Stout..

The Todhunter family (Virginia Pretzfelder) The Todhunter homestead (Virginia Pretzfelder) Nathan Stout Sophia Stout .

Stout's Mill (Natalie Stout Carr) .

Rex at six months .

Rex's birthplace (Bud Ayres) .

Clara Todhunter (From the Archives, Lilly Library, Earlham College) .

Oscar Benjamin Todhunter (From the Archives, Lilly Library, Earlham College) .

Hackberry Hall (Esther Doan Starbuck) .

John Stout, circa 1899 (John W. Ripley, Shawnee County Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas) .

The Stouts, circa 1893 .

Lucetta, circa 1920 .

John, circa 1918 (Natalie Stout Carr) .

Police Chief A. G. Goodwin (John W. Ripley, Shawnee County Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas) .

Lincoln School (John W. Ripley, Shawnee County Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas) .

Rex on Mayflower .

The Stouts in New York .

Rex in 1916 .

Fay (Fay Koudrey) .

The Stouts, 1920 .

Rex in Montana, 1926 (Fay Koudrey) .

Rex with Joe MacGregor and Harland Knowlton (Fay Koudrey) Rex, 1929 .

Rex and Barbara, 1937 Rex and Pola, 1944 .

The signing of the Universal Copyright Convention, 1954 Rex with John McAleer, 1973 (Jill Krementz) .

Nobody who claims to be a competent critic can say that Rex Stout does not write well. His narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Nero Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing. .

Does the ordinary reader realize how exactly right those Nero Wolfe stories are? There are no loose ends. One could wonder why Sherlock Holmes, fawned on by kings and prime ministers, was not able to afford rooms in Baker Street price at the turn of the century thirty bob a week including breakfast unless he got Doctor Watson to put up half the money, but in Nero Wolfe, a professional detective charging huge fees, you can believe. Those orchids, perfectly understandable. He liked orchids and was in a financial position to collect them. He liked food, too. Again perfectly understandable. He refused to leave his house on business, and very sensible of him if his wealth and reputation were such that he could get away with it. In other words, there was nothing contrived about his eccentricities, purely because Stout knew his job..

But Stout's supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin..

Telling a mystery story in the third person is seldom satisfactory. To play fair you have to let the reader see into the detective's thoughts, and that gives the game away. The alternative is to have him pick up small objects from the floor and put them carefully in an envelope without revealing their significance, which is the lowest form of literary skulduggery. A Watson of some sort to tell the story is unavoidable, and the hundreds of Watsons who have appeared in print since Holmes's simply won't do. I decline to believe that when the prime minister sends for the detective to cry on his shoulder about some bounder having swiped the naval treaty and finds that he has brought a friend along, he just accepts the detective's statement that "This is Augustus So-and-So, who has been associated with me in many of my cases." What he would really do would be to ring the bell for the secretary of state and tell him to throw Mr. So-and-So out on his ear. "And I want to hear him bounce," he would add. Stout has avoided this trap. Archie is a Watson in the sense that he tells the story, but in no other way is there anything Watsonian about him. And he brings excellent comedy into the type of narrative where comedy seldom bats better than .100..

Summing up, I would say that there is only one Rex Stout, and if you think I am going to say "That's plenty," you are wrong, witty though it would be. I could do with a dozen..

P. G. Wodehouse .

REX STOUT

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Isaac Todhunter =?= Eleanor Jury Robert Power Lanum =j= Bathsheba Ambler (1754-1821) | (1755-1839) (1765-1821) I_(1777-1^45) .

Abner Todhunter =j= Elizabeth Job Daniel McNeal =j= Mary Lanum (1789-1871) (1794-1866) (1802-c. 18590) (1806-1890) .

Amos Todhunter j= Emily Elizabeth McNeal (1818-1901) (1828-1906) .

John Mary .

Atkinson =j= Woody (1766-?)! (1722-?) .

Solomon Stout =j= Ruth Atkinson John Nicholas j= Regina (1787-1865) (?-i823) Swingle Hartman .

1-1 (1788-1875) .

Charles Stout j= Mary Noblit (1742-1822) (1746-1811) .

Nathan Stout =j= Sophia Swingle (1821-1908) (1826-1912) .

John Wallace Stout = f Lucetta Elizabeth Todhunter .

(1848-1933) (1853-1940) .

Winona May John Robert Walter Wallace Juanita Lucetta Ruth Imogen Rex Todhunter Mary Emily Alice Elizabeth Donald Philip (1876-1908) (1878-1965) (1880-1943) (1882-1965) (1884-) (1886-1975) (1888-) (1890-1956) (1896-1922) .

In the closing days of October 1975, when word came from rural Connecticut that Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, had died at eighty-nine, readers around the world experienced an enveloping sense of loss, as though Wolfe and Archie had passed from the scene, too, in the company of their creator..

For more than forty years Wolfe and Archie had stepped with the times. When Wolfe first came on the scene, in 1933, he was kitchen-testing Prohibition beer. When last beheld, in the autumn of 1974, he was deploring the outrage of Watergate. But now the mirror which had given back Wolfe's image was broken. Readers would not again enter the brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street to learn how Wolfe dealt with mankind's latest excursions and alarums. The bulwark that had been Wolfe's amazing perspicacity was gone and so was Archie's reassuring banter. Or so it seemed..

Yet no one contends that Mr. Pickwick passed to extinction when Dickens died or that Huck Finn perished with Twain. The chronicle that celebrated Wolfe and Archie has been broken off, but the record of forty-two years, set down in seventy-two tales, survives. And, surviving, it will extend the existence of Rex Stout..

Those who knew Rex Stout best believe that he lives in his creations as well as through them. Rex's voice often is heard in Archie's utterances. At times, Rex was Nero Wolfe's identical twin. Certainly there existed within Rex the variegated potential he would have needed to have created Wolfe and Archie out of his own substance..

Geneticists tell us that we are the procession of our ancestors. If that is so then Rex Stout had a substantial legacy to draw on. Through his father, John Wallace Stout, Rex was descended from Penelope Van Princin, a colonial heroine who was scalped and disemboweled by Indians at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1642, but lived to bear ten children and celebrate her one hundredth birthday; from Regina Hartman, who, late in the eighteenth century, survived nineteen years of captivity among the Indians, and from Solomon Stout, founder of Columbus, Indiana. Through his mother, Lucetta Todhunter Stout, Rex was descended from Mary Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's sister; from Elizabeth Maxwell, a kinswoman of Daniel Defoe's; and from an illustrious member of Pennsylvania's Colonial Assembly, Joshua Hoopes, from whom Hubert Humphrey also is descended. Additionally, both Stouts and Todhunters offered Rex a heritage of five generations of birthright Quakerism..