Rex Stout and Archie Goodwin (oh, and Nero Wolfe, too)

I’ve joined a group promotion called Hunted By Monsters. It would really help a lot of people if you click on the link and take a look. Maybe you’ll find your next favorite fantasy writer!

And speaking (or writing) of writing, here’s a ridiculously good writer giving a hell of a compliment:

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 this 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. —P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse (who deserves his own one of these meditations on style and writing—I’ll get there one day) is quite right about Stout. Sadly, I keep running into people who like mysteries and have generally good taste, but have never read a Nero Wolfe book. They don’t know what they’re missing.

The basic setup looks, on paper, nothing special. We have Wolfe himself, an eccentric genius detective whose brilliant detections are narrated in the first person by a less-brilliant assistant, Archie Goodwin. Very Holmes and Watson, or Poirot and Hastings, or whoever. Because Wolfe is a private detective, we don’t delve too deeply into police procedural stuff, and indeed we have the classic irritation-overlaying-admiration relationship with the police, in the form of the redoubtable, cigar-chewing Inspector Cramer. And because this is America and not England, our narrator isn’t a dull, modest medical or military man, but a detective street-operator in his own right, doing the classic gun-and-girls-and-wisecracks routine without the bitterness of Chandler or the viciousness of Hammett. All very derivative, ho hum. Right?

Wrong.

Because it turns out that everything lies in that narrative voice. Archie makes the whole thing go—in more ways than one.

In terms of plot and process, Archie is quite literally the guy who makes it all go, because Wolfe is not only an eccentric genius but also extremely fat and lazy, and he constantly tries to get out of doing any work at all. Archie’s job is, in part, to goad Wolfe, which he does with great pizzazz.

More importantly, however, it’s Archie’s voice that carries the books. He’s funny, sharp, and remarkably intelligent. He also finds Wolfe considerably more annoying than we do—and that’s saying something, because Wolfe can be a real pain.

Many critics have remarked that a great part of Stout’s genius in creating the Wolfe stories lies in his old brownstone on West 35th Street. Four residents: Wolfe, Archie, the cook and housekeeper Fritz Brenner, and the rarely-seen orchid tender Theodore Horstmann. Wolfe is up with the orchids from 9 to 11 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. He eats lunch at 12:30 (or thereabouts, there is some variation among the books, but it’s always on a tight schedule) and dinner at about 7:30. This schedule is sacrosanct, and when (as happens more often than you might realize) it gets violated, Wolfe is always enraged. He never leaves the house on business (with one or two exceptions across the 40-book canon), meaning Archie is constantly sent to “get” people and bring them so that Wolfe can interrogate them during his free hours, when, if he is not actually interrogating someone or making a grandiose presentation of his cleverness (a stock set-piece that occurs at the end of almost every novel), he is sitting in his custom-built chair (necessary to handle his enormous bulk), reading a book and drinking beer.

All of this is eccentric and yet somehow desirable. Who wouldn’t want to live this way? Men, I mean—Wolfe is generally opposed to women, with very few exceptions, and while he likes to look at pretty legs, he remains utterly convinced that any woman will be irrational and will probably burst into tears or something equally idiotic. Archie has an active romantic (and almost certainly sexual) life, but he goes out for it. Setting misogyny or chauvinism aside, who wouldn’t want to live in that brownstone?

Interestingly—and wonderfully—the only person who ever considers packing it in and leaving that place is Archie. Sure, it’s a great life for Wolfe, but the bills and salaries have to get paid, and that means taking cases in order to get paid, and that means Archie doing a lot of work, and what’s more Wolfe has to work (sitting in his chair thinking), and that’s very often the sticking-point. Again and again we have a story that begins with Archie threatening Wolfe about the state of the bank account, or trying to lever Wolfe into a case he doesn’t feel like taking, or just going out and trying to dig up a client. It generally works in the end, but it’s a lot of effort and annoyance, and Wolfe never, ever thanks him for it. As Archie says on at least one occasion, the fat bum.

And that’s the magic of it. Archie manages to be witty, charming, debonair, and yet a down-to-earth, streetwise New York working-man. He likes to work, and he likes his job, and he likes his living arrangements. Unfortunately, his boss is one of the world’s most irritating people, and if it weren’t for the fact that his boss is also the top private detective in America (and possibly the world), Archie would surely have just given up on him.

It’s the Holmes-Watson formula turned inside-out, in fact. We’re supposed to admire and indeed be awed by Holmes, but Conan Doyle’s own dislike for the man does show through. But Stout doesn’t really care if we admire Wolfe. Archie mostly does, it’s true, but in the end it’s Archie we like and, yes, admire. Wolfe’s brilliant solutions are rarely all that brilliant, when push comes to shove: Inspector Cramer is not wrong to rant about “your goddamn luck.” But that doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that the plots aren’t really all that clever, or that there’s a lot of repetition from book to book. Because what carries it is style—and it’s Archie’s style.

I think next time I’m going to muse a little more concretely on first-person narrative style, which has become almost de rigeur in Young Adult fiction, and yet is rarely executed terribly well. If you’re looking for examples of great first-person narration, though, you could do very much worse than to pick up any Nero Wolfe novel and let yourself sink into the voice of Archie Goodwin.