and the pen of an Edgar Smith, the experience and the skill of a Vincent Starrett, as well as the genius and the beard of a Christopher Morley, to equalize the contest.
Wolff proved equal to the task, however. His response included an acrostic of his own that spelled out NUTS TO REX STOUT.
Long an admirer of Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin mysteries, I wrote Stout a letter when I was but 14 years old, asking him which story he considered his best and positing the bold theory that Archie was the true author of “Watson Was a Woman.”
Stout fired back an ingenious response dated December 8, 1966. The postage on the note was five cents, but to me the contents have always been priceless. “Dear Master Dan,” Stout wrote, “If your surmise, that Archie Goodwin wrote that gem, ‘Watson Was a Woman,’ is correct, I would be silly to admit it, and I try not to be silly. So the answer to your question, what do I consider my best story, is ‘Watson Was a Woman.’ Sincerely, Rex Stout.”
Clearly, Stout liked to have fun with Sherlock Holmes. But he did so as a true believer who was one of the original Baker Street Irregulars and the Guest of Honor at that infamous 1941 meeting.
Born in 1886 in Noblesville, Indiana, Stout began reading Holmes as a boy and devoured the later stories as they were published. In 1903, having moved to Kansas at a young age, he saw William Gillette portray Sherlock Holmes in Kansas City. He returned again the next night.
More than a generation later, in 1931, Stout found himself among a select group of men drinking bootleg bourbon with Winston Churchill at a hotel in New York until the wee hours of the morning. One of the subjects of their conversation was Sherlock Holmes. Stout was forty-five years old, and Arthur Conan Doyle had died only the year before—just three years after the publication of his final Sherlock Holmes story.
When Christopher Morley founded the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934, he asked Stout to be one of the first members. That same year also saw the publication of Fer-de-Lance, the first of Stout’s more than 60 Nero Wolfe stories. More about that rotund gentleman later!
Stout’s relationship with the BSI was a long and happy one. In 1949, despite the “Watson Was a Woman” blasphemy, he was presented with his Irregular Shilling and the investiture name of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” For the first five years of the BSI’s Silver Blaze Stakes at Belmont Race Track, Stout and his wife Pola attended, and presented the trophy in two of those years. In 1961, he was awarded the BSI’s first Two-Shilling Award “for extraordinary devotion to the cause beyond the call of duty.” Five years later, the annual BSI dinner again honored Stout and also toasted Pola as “The Woman.”
Although best known as a mystery writer, the tart-tongued Stout was also a perceptive critic who was never shy about sharing his thoughts on his craft—or any other subject, for that matter. In January 1942, appearing with Jacques Barzun and Elmer Davis on Mark Van Doran’s CBS radio show “Invitation to Learning,” he made this observation: “The modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that’s why they’re still the best ones.” Later in the same program, he said, “It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.” (Obviously, he wasn’t including pastiches.)
A few years later, in 1949, Stout wrote an article called “Grim Fairy Tales” for Saturday Review, in which he tried to explain why “Sherlock Holmes is the most widely known fictional character in all the literature of the world.” And this was his conclusion:
“Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of man’s greatest pride and his greatest weakness: his reason…He is human aspiration. He is what our ancestors had in mind when in wistful bragging they tacked the sapiens onto the homo.”
Stout added to this a more general statement which McAleer suggested could apply to Nero Wolfe and to Rex Stout himself. He wrote:
We enjoy reading about people who love and hate and covet—about gluttons and martyrs, misers and sadists, whores and saints, brave men and cowards. But also, demonstrably, we enjoy reading about a man who gloriously acts and decides, with no exception and no compunction, not as his emotions brutally command, but as his reason instructs.
In an introduction to The Later Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1952, Stout argued that the success of the Canon depended on what he called “the grand and glorious portrait” of Holmes, which transcended the author’s plot errors. “We are not supposed to reach real intimacy with him,” he wrote. “We are not supposed to touch him.” I have not yet had the pleasure of reading this introduction, but I gather from McAleer’s description that it discusses Conan Doyle’s literary offenses in some detail. And yet Stout concluded that all of these transgressions seemed to enhance the portrait of the Great Detective. How did that work? “No one will ever penetrate it to the essence and disclose it naked to the eye,” Stout concluded. “For the essence is magic, and magic is arcane.”
Stout wrote eloquently about Holmes again in 1963 for the cover of a record album of Basil Rathbone reading Holmes stories.
“Holmes,” Stout wrote, “is a man, not a puppet. As a man he has many vulnerable spots, like us; he is vain, prejudiced, intolerant; he is a drug addict; he even plays the violin for diversion—one of the most deplorable outrages of self-indulgence.”
But, Stout went on, there is much more to him than that: “He loves truth and justice more than he loves money or comfort or safety or pleasure, or any man or woman. Such a man has never lived, so Sherlock Holmes will never die.”
Neither—I submit—will Rex Stout’s most famous creation, Nero Wolfe. And since the fat sleuth’s 1934 debut, readers and critics have drawn parallels between the two detectives. More than that, they have put them on the same family tree by speculating that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock or, less frequently, Mycroft Holmes. Certainly Wolfe looks like Mycroft. And in the novel Baker Street Irregular, Stout says that the character was based on Mycroft.
In October 1954, as they appeared together at a book signing at Kann’s Department Store in Washington, D.C., Frederic Dannay asked Stout how he came up with the name of Nero Wolfe. According to Dannay, Stout thought for a while and then said that he based the name on Sherlock Holmes. In McAleer’s version, Stout was just quoting Alexander Woollcott’s theory. Here’s how Dannay lays it out in the book In the Queen’s Parlor:
Now…how in the world does Nero Wolfe resemble Sherlock Holmes? Well, one likeness is quickly apparent: both names have the same number and the same distribution of syllables: Sherlock has two, Holmes one; Nero likewise has two, Wolfe one. But this is a superficial kinship: the relationship is far more subtle. Consider the vowels, and their placement, in the name Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock has two—e and o, in that order; Holmes also has two—the same two, but in reverse order—o-e. Now consider the vowels in Nero Wolfe: Nero has two—the same two as in Sherlock, and in exactly the same order! Wolfe also has two—the same two as in Holmes, and again in the same reverse order!
Dannay called this “the great O-E theory,” and mused that it probably all went back to P-O-E. Clearly, Rex Stout was not the only one having fun with Sherlock Holmes.
William S. Baring-Gould, in his biography Nero Wolfe of Baker Street, mentions the great O-E theory in passing in a chapter called “Alias Nero Wolfe,” in which he argues that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Frankly, in my opinion, Baring-Gould’s attempt to prove a genetic connection between the two detectives rather limps. For example, in listing similarities between the two men, Baring-Gould writes: “In his youth, Nero Wolfe, like Sherlock Holmes, was an athlete.” This is proof?
Undeterred by what seems to me very
