Prisoner's Base

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, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which 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 of 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 Erie Stanley Gardner’s 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 as a 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-nine. 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.

F
irst I want to talk a little about Rex Stout. When I, as a Bantam Doubleday Dell author, volunteered (begged, actually) to do an introduction for one of the books in this edition of Stout’s works, I did so for one main reason—I owe a lot to Rex Stout (and Wolfe, and Archie); and since it’s impossible to repay the debt, I’d like at least to acknowledge it.

I’d read some Sherlock Holmes as a kid, and I watched a lot of tough private eyes on TV. But I didn’t really get hooked on mysteries until I was twelve years old. And no, it wasn’t Stout who first got me, it was Ellery Queen. But I ran into the problem that plagues all true mystery fans—I read faster than my favorite author could write. When Queens grew hard to come by, I turned to my mother, the other mystery junkie in the family, and said, through pangs of withdrawal, “Who else is good?” She told me her own favorite was Rex Stout. I didn’t have anything to lose, so I plunged in. I started slowly, with novelettes reprinted in Howard Haycraft anthologies: “Die Like a Dog” and “Instead of Evidence.”

Wow.

King Rex had joined the Queen. I mean, even as a
kid I could see Stout’s genius, and I could see that the genius resided in the creation of Archie Goodwin. Nero Wolfe was great, but great as he was, he was a master detective, and I’d seen a lot of those before. Wolfe might have been an updated Mycroft Holmes.

But, my youthful self judged (and I’ve never found a reason to change my mind), this Goodwin character was something new. He was a Watson in that he told the story and was frequently left panting behind in the great man’s tracks, but there was nothing worshipful about him. He was a tough guy, but unlike too many tough guys, he had no chip on his shoulder. He could work for a man he acknowledged to be his mental superior without having to shelve his own sense of self-worth. He knew what he brought to this particular partnership. In fact, Archie’s deflations of Wolfe are what make Wolfe a human and (dare I say it?) lovable figure, rather than the off-putting freak he might have been if a lesser author had given him a lesser sidekick.

I may have grown to resemble Wolfe, but I always identify with Archie.

Stout also used Archie’s up-to-date vernacular to put across some very old-fashioned values. “It is most important for you to feel you have
earned
your fee,” Wolfe says. Or, “I rarely make promises, because I would redeem one, tritely, with my life.” Or Archie will make a remark about racism: “When I feel superior to someone, as I frequently do, I need a better reason than the color of my skin.”

I spent many happy hours, through adolescence and adulthood, immersed in this stuff and still gladly plunge back in today. Because along with all his other virtues, Rex Stout is the most rereadable author in the history of the genre.

All of this Stout-Wolfe-Archie exposure at an impressionable
age has made indelible marks on my outlook, my patterns of thought, even my style as a writer. Several readers have told me that my first-person style reminds them of Stout’s and that a certain character of mine, to quote one of them, “could be Archie Goodwin’s younger brother.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s the best praise I can hear.

Now I want to talk a little about this particular book.

There’s something ridiculous about having a favorite Rex Stout book. The man sustained an amazing level of excellence for such a long time, it seems foolish to single one out. It’s like having a favorite Elvis record.
*

Nevertheless, when I was offered the choice of which book to do,
Prisoner’s Base
was the one I chose instantly. Why? Because it shows Wolfe and Archie at their romantic (in the swashbuckling sense) best. Because, as in just a few other books (
The Silent Speaker
, for instance), we have a case that really gets under Archie’s skin. We’ve got the regular gang in top form (although Lily Rowan is, alas, absent), and we have plenty of the Stoutian spear carriers (Dewdrop Irby, Andy Fomos) to bring Wolfe’s New York to life. If you were going to pick one book to introduce a friend to Wolfe, you couldn’t pick a better one than
Prisoner’s Base
.

But this book has something else going for it, too: a dazzlingly simple—and simply dazzling—plot gimmick. Great as he was, plotting classic mystery puzzles wasn’t Stout’s strongest suit. But every once in a while
he’d come up with a clue for the ages.
The League of Frightened Men
has a solution like that. So does
Prisoner’s Base.
I envy those of you who are about to read it for the first time.

—William L. DeAndrea
Watertown, Connecticut

I
n Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street that Monday afternoon in June, the atmosphere was sparky. I mention it not to make an issue of Wolfe’s bad habits, but because it is to the point. It was the atmosphere that got us a roomer.

What had stirred it up was a comment made by Wolfe three days earlier. Each Friday morning at eleven, when he comes down to the office on the first floor from the plant rooms on the roof, Wolfe signs the salary checks for Fritz and Theodore and me, hands me mine, and keeps the other two because he likes to deliver them personally. That morning, as he passed mine across his desk, he made a remark.

“Thank you for waiting for it.”

My brows went up. “What’s the matter? Bugs on the orchids?”

“No. But I saw your bag in the hall, and I note your finery. Straining as you are to be gone, it is gracious of you to wait for this pittance, this meager return for your excessive labors in the week nearly ended. Especially since the bank balance is at its lowest point in two years.”

I controlled myself. “That deserves an answer, and
here it is. As for finery, I am headed for a weekend in the country and am dressed accordingly. As for straining, I am not.” I glanced at my wrist. “I have ample time to get the car and drive to Sixty-third Street to get Miss Rowan. As for pittance, right. As for excessive labors, I have had to spend most of my time recently sitting on my prat only because you have seen fit to turn down four offers of jobs in a row. As for the week nearly ended, meaning that I am dashing off to carouse before the week is out for which I am being paid, you’ve known about it for a month, and what’s here to keep me? As for the bank balance, there I admit you have a point. I’m the bookkeeper and I know, and I’m willing to help. It’s only a pittance anyway, what the hell.”

I took my check, with thumbs and forefingers at the middle of its top edge, tore it across, put the halves together and tore again, dropped the shreds into my wastebasket, and turned and started for the door. His bellow came at me.

“Archie!”

I wheeled and glared at him. He glared back. “Pfui,” he said.

“Nuts,” I said, and turned and went.

That was what created the atmosphere. When I returned from the country late Sunday night he had gone up to bed. By Monday morning the air might possibly have cleared if it hadn’t been for the torn-up check. We both knew the stub would have to be voided and a new check drawn, but he wasn’t going to tell me to do it without being asked, and I wasn’t going to do it without being told. A man has his pride. With that between us, the stiffness Monday morning lasted through lunch and beyond, into the afternoon.

Around 4:30 I was at my desk, working on the germination records, when the doorbell rang. Ordinarily,
unless instructions have been given, Fritz answers it, but that day my legs needed stretching and I went. Swinging the door open, I took in a sight that led me to an agreeable conclusion. The suitcase and hatbox could have held a salesman’s samples, but the young woman in the light peach-colored dress and tailored jacket was surely no peddler. Calling on Nero Wolfe with luggage, ten to one she was a prospective client from out of town, and, coming straight from the station or airport, in a hurry. Such a one was welcome.

With the hatbox dangling from her hand, she crossed the threshold, brushed past me, and said, “You’re Archie Goodwin. Will you bring my suitcase in? Please?”

I did so, closed the door, and deposited the suitcase against the wall. She put the hatbox down beside it and straightened to speak.

“I want to see Nero Wolfe, but of course he’s always up in the plant rooms from four to six. That’s why I picked this time to come, I want to see you first.” Her eyes moved. “That’s the door to the front room.” Her eyes moved again, aimed the length of the hall. “That’s the stairs, and the door to the dining room on the right and to the office on the left. The hall’s wider than I expected. Shall we go to the office?”

I had never seen eyes like hers. Either they were brownish gray flecked with brownish yellow, or brownish yellow flecked with brownish gray. They were deep in, wide apart, and moved fast.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

That was phony. She must have been used to people, at first sight of those eyes, staring at them; she probably expected it. I told her nothing was the matter, took her to the office and gave her a chair, sat at my desk, and observed, “So you’ve been here before.”