Holmes under the primary alias of Auguste Lupa. Lescroart’s hero also calls himself Julius Adler and Cesar Mycroft. We are to assume that he later adopted the first name of another Roman emperor and anglicized the lupine last name. I personally found these books entertaining, but the series had short legs; it stopped at two.
As the Holmes-Wolfe connection kept being proposed over the years, Stout came up with a number of amusing ways of saying, in effect, “leave me out of this.” As early as 1935, in a letter to the editor of The Baker Street Journal, he pleaded client confidentiality in his role as Archie Goodwin’s literary agent. In 1968, he wrote to Bruce Kennedy, “Since the suggestion that Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes was merely someone’s loose conjecture, I think it is proper and permissible for me to ignore it.” A couple of years later he wrote to another admirer, “As for the notion that he [Wolfe] was sired by Sherlock Holmes, I don’t believe Archie Goodwin has ever mentioned it.”
And yet Archie Goodwin notes in Fer-de-Lance that he, Archie, has a picture of Sherlock Holmes over his desk. On August 12, 1969, McAleer asked Stout: “Did Archie hang up the picture of Sherlock Holmes that is found over his desk, or did Wolfe put it there?” Stout’s response was typically unequivocal: “I was a damn fool to do it. Obviously it’s always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done.”
We shall charitably assume that the reference to fictional characters reflects Stout’s advanced age at the time.
Another interesting picture in the Wolfe establishment on West 35th Street is the painting of a waterfall, behind which Archie and others often hide in a secret alcove to observe and hear the goings-on in Wolfe’s office. According to John McAleer, Stout surmised that the painting represented the Reichenbach Falls.
If Stout guessed correctly, this is quite appropriate—for Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes both battled a criminal genius to the death. Professor Moriarty, a figure as archetypical in popular mythology as Holmes himself, is a significant presence in “The Final Problem,” “The Adventure of the Empty House,” and The Valley of Fear. He is also mentioned in three other stories. Arnold Zeck, Moriarty’s counterpart in the world of Nero Wolfe, has speaking parts in the novels And Be a Villain and The Second Confession and appears in the third book of the trilogy, In the Best Families.
“I’ll tell you this,” Wolfe says to Archie in the first of these books. “If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work—and sleep and eat if there is time for it—and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I will never have to.”
Like Holmes, he is ready to give his all. In the Best Families finds him doing exactly that. It’s a kind of “Final Problem” and “Empty House” in one epic novel—epic not in size, but in terms of its significance to the Wolfe corpus. Wolfe isn’t believed dead in the book, but he might as well be. He leaves the brownstone on West 35th Street with the door wide open and a strong indication that he will never be back. When he does return, months later, Archie doesn’t recognize him. Physically he’s a mere shadow of his former one-seventh of a ton, his face full of seams from the weight loss. His resolve and mental resources are undiminished, however. And by the last page, Zeck is as dead as Moriarty.
Julian Symons, an English crime writer and often-difficult critic, was effusive in his praise of what Stout achieved in the Zeck Trilogy, which was later collected in an omnibus volume called Triple Zeck. He wrote:
In the fight to death between master-detective and master-criminal the most ingenious and unlikely subterfuges are used…All this is very improbable. It is the art of Mr. Stout to make it seem plausible…Holmes was a fully realized character. There is only a handful of his successors to whom that compliment can be paid. One of them, certainly, is Nero Wolfe.
Surprisingly, Stout told McAleer more than once that this story arc wasn’t planned—that he didn’t know for sure when he wrote And Be a Villain that Zeck would reappear in another book. That would mean, then, that he wasn’t intentionally paying homage to Reichenbach and The Return. But who can doubt that Stout was influenced by the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, however subconsciously?
Nor is this by any means the only impact the Canon had on Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe.
In Rex’s appreciation of Doyle’s art [wrote John McAleer], we find valuable guidelines for understanding Rex’s own art. He saw the necessity of making Wolfe a man rich in human contradictions. Wolfe’s eccentricities surpass those of Holmes. At times he is childish in his moods. He shuts his eyes more often than Holmes does to “moral issues.” More than once he “arranges” for the suicide of a culprit, to save himself a court appearance. Yet, withal, even as Holmes is, he is “grand and glorious.”
He also has a sidekick without whom he would be just another genius sleuth. The parallels between John H. Watson, M.D., and Archie Goodwin may not be immediately obvious, but they are strong. Like Watson, Archie is:
• his boss’s Boswell (although better known in crime writing as a “Watson”);
• a man of action;
• a ladies’ man;
• the one who always carries the gun (although Holmes occasionally does, too);
• a colorful and interesting character, unlike S.S. Van Dine or the unnamed “I” of Poe’s Dupin stories;
• a conductor of light, if not himself luminous.
In this matter, Stout’s debt to Conan Doyle was conscious and acknowledged. In The Mystery Writer’s Handbook, a 1956 volume from The Mystery Writers of America, Stout wrote an article called “What to do About a Watson.” He argued that a Watson helps solve what he called “your main technical difficulty” of having the detective hero learn information that the author isn’t ready to share with the reader. “A Watson can be a devil of a nuisance at times,” he wrote, “but he is worth it for his wonderful cooperation in clearing the toughest hurdle on the course.”
At the end of his three-page essay, Stout cited an example of a Watson at work for the author in this exchange from “The Red-Headed League”:
“Evidently,” said I, “Mr. Wilson’s assistant counts for a good deal in this mystery of the Red-headed League. I am sure that you inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.”
“Not him.”
“What then?”
“The knees of his trousers.”
“And what did you see?”
“What I expected to see.”
“Why did you beat the pavement?”
“My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk.”
And then Stout added—gleefully, in my imagination—“That’s the way to do it!”
Nobody who has ever read Rex Stout’s mysteries could deny that he did it his own unique way. But he was also operating under the spell of Arthur Conan Doyle’s arcane magic.
The great private eye novelist Ross Macdonald expressed the opinion of many critics when he wrote:
Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American
