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ROBERT
CRAIS: ON REX STOUT
Archie and Me
an introduction to Rex Stout’s
‘Before Midnight’
I find
comfort in friendship. I am a social
animal and, even though I mouth off
about being a rugged individualist,
iron-willed and resolute, standing
alone against all odds like some
sort of hyperheroic Clint Eastwood,
when push comes to reverse head
kicks, I am as much a creature of
the herd as, say, dingoes or chacma
baboons or lions in the veldt. I
seek family and friends and the
patterns of human interaction and
that is why, when I sat down to
write Elvis Cole, I gave him Joe
Pike.
My publisher labels these books of mine An Elvis
Cole Novel. That is but a half
truth, no more complete than
suggesting Holmes without Watson,
Nick without Nora, Batman without
Robin. Elvis and Joe are yin and
yang, two halves to the whole, the
light and dark of but one character.
Theirs is a gestalt of friendship
that hopefully yields a sum to the
reader far greater than either might
yield on his own. Sort of like
Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.
Let me be honest with you. I never
gave a damn about Nero Wolfe. Here
was this fat guy who sat around his
house, futzing with orchids and
gorging himself on a high fat, high
cholesterol diet and acting like a
spoiled and peevish child when
things didn’t go his way. Think
about it. If Nero Wolfe were real,
instead of fictional, and you or I
actually had to deal with him
instead of simply reading about him
from the comfortable distance of our
arm chairs, neither of us would like
him very much. Nero Wolfe was a
dick.
I think Rex Stout knew that.
And so he gave us Archie Goodwin, the filter through
which we see Wolfe and an appealing
anchor for our emotions. It is
Archie in whom we invest ourselves,
not Wolfe. It is Archie whom we like
and care for, not Wolfe. Wolfe is
interesting and intriguing, to be
sure, but could you take that
holier-than-thou pout of his, that
superior air? Not me, friends.
Wolfe, without Archie, would have
surely died an unlamented death,
like so many other pulp-era category
fiction creations, long gone and
never loved.
But there was Archie, and Archie saved him.
Here was Archie Goodwin, who we liked, telling us by
his friendship toward Wolfe that
Wolfe, in fact, was not a hideous
bloated slug of a twerp, after all.
If Archie could find value in the
man, then maybe we had judged too
quickly. Maybe there was more to
Wolfe than an incisive intellect and
an offensively eccentric life style.
I loved Archie Goodwin, so let me tell you how we came
to meet. Years ago, when I was
growing up in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, and struggling with the
first temptations of becoming a
professional writer in an
environment that valued only the oil
industry and Southeast Conference
football, I used to haunt a bookshop
that sold second-hand paperbacks,
underground comic books, and,
discreetly displayed on a shelf
above two cardboard boxes of
coverless men’s magazines against
the wall in the rear of the place,
devices best described as ‘marital
aides.’ It was a grungy, dirty,
seedy kind of place, but I
discovered Chandler there, as well
as Ted Mark and Don Westlake and Don
Westlake writing as Richard Stark. A
paperback cost nineteen cents. If it
had no cover, it cost a dime. I had
gone through the Chandler and was
working on the Hammett and I walked
into the little store that day very
much wanting a copy of Red
Harvest. The stacks were divided
by category (western, mystery,
science fiction, etc), but were
rarely alphabetized, so if you
wanted a particular author, you had
to look through all the
mysteries, oft-times a tedious
process. There was only a single
copy of Red Harvest, and some
yo-yo had written BITE ME across the
cover in green ink, so that ended
that. I won’t buy a book with BITE
ME on the cover. Not even for half
price. But I was in the store, and I
continued through the stacks, and
that’s when I stumbled upon five or
six titles written by this guy Rex
Stout. I picked one and skimmed the
first pages and found the narrator
coming home late one night while his
boss, this other guy named Wolfe,
was pissing and moaning about it
because he’d been put out, really
coming down hard on the first guy,
demanding to know where he’d been
and sort of whining about it and
acting snappish and spoiled. You
see? A dick. But already I’m liking
the narrator, so who cares about
this guy Wolfe? Rex Stout has given
the narrator a clean appealing
voice, just enough attitude to show
that he’s nobody’s chump, and a wit
like Marlowe on a day when all the
bio-rhythms are up. So I’m reading,
and liking this guy -- the narrator
-- and then the client walks in and
the narrator says, “He didn’t
look tough, he looked flabby, but of
course that’s no sign. The toughest
guy I ever ran into had cheeks that
needed a brassiere.” Right then
and there, sitting on the floor in
front of the mystery section in that
crummy bookstore with that ragged
paperback and its sticky cover,
Archie Goodwin owned me. The
book was If Death Ever Slept,
and I still own that very edition,
bought then over twenty years ago
for nineteen cents, and now tucked
away in a box somewhere here in the
house in Sherman Oaks.
Stout gave us Archie because Archie is us, or who we
would like to be if we could get
away with it. Smart, sharp,
physically confident, and tough. We
can identify with Archie, but not
with Wolfe. Wolfe is just the freak
in the house -- a turd in a cage who
grows flowers and draws Sherlockian
conclusions from insufficient data;
fun to watch, but would you really
want to share your time with the
guy?
Yet Archie does, and it isn’t just for pay. Oh, Archie
is Wolfe’s employee, to be sure, but
read the books and you will see that
these two are more than
employer/employee; they exist in a
sort of symbiosis that transcends
mere environmental or biological
need or employment security. If
that’s all there was to it, no one
would give a damn. As fine and
wonderful and entertaining as is
Archie, there has to be more here
for the reader. There has to be
something that speaks to that
innermost part of us, and keeps
these books vital and alive in the
marketplace through the passing
decades. There is.
Archie and Nero are family. They are friends. As we
read the books, as we immerse
ourselves in that world of theirs on
West Thirty-fifth Street, so we
share the warmth of that friendship,
and seek to return to it, again and
again, as if by returning we receive
an affirmation for that which we
seek not in fiction, but in our
lives. For these books, these novels
by Rex Stout, tell us things that we
want very badly to hear.
Stout says to us, “Here are two friends. Here are two
people sharing their lives. As you
wish for friendship, share in
theirs. As you seek companionship,
share in theirs. As you search for
love, share in theirs.” Rex Stout
invites us into the family and
offers warmth and security and
certainty. He affirms what we all
seek on some primal level. If such
disparate individuals as Wolfe and
Goodwin can share friendship and
love and caring and life, can not
we? That’s the strength here. That’s
the message and the feel-good
inherent in the voice and character
that Rex Stout has given to Archie
Goodwin. In this cold world, it is a
fire on which we may warm our hands.
Holmes and Watson. Nick and Nora.
Spenser and Hawk. Isaac Asimov’s R.
Daneel Olivaw and Lije Baley. Tom
and Huck and Jim. It runs deep in
us, from literature to movies to
comic books to television. Cagney
and Lacey. Hope and Crosby. Batman
and Robin. Cisco and Pancho. Is
there any wonder that ‘buddy
pictures’ are so often successful?
Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. The appeal
of friendship is old, and the
pleasures inherent in such fictional
pairings are no less valid today
than they were in the days of Holmes
and Watson, or in the thirties,
forties, fifties, sixties, and
seventies -- the incredible fifty
decades through which Stout
published Nero Wolfe. Check out
Thelma and Louise.
When I write about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, I am
defining their friendship, and
exploring it, and expressing a
profound belief in its value. Not
just in the friendship that Elvis
and Joe enjoy, but in the friendship
that we all might share, or hope to.
I think Stout believed in this. He certainly
illustrated it through his work.
Read this book and enjoy it, then read the others. They
are testament to our humanness. They
are also rollicking good yarns.
Robert Crais
Sherman Oaks, California
Easter, 1993
© 1993 by Robert Crais
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