Death on Deadline - Robert Goldsborough

Death On Deadline

A Nero Wolfe Mystery

Robert Goldsborough

To Janet, without whom I am incomplete

Contents

Introduction

Foreword

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

DEATH ON DEADLINE

INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

End of Death on Deadline

Introduction

IN REX STOUT’S THE FATHER HUNT (1968) Archie Goodwin reflected, “Before long the day will come, maybe in a year or two, possibly as many as five, when I won’t be able to write any more of these reports for publication.” That valedictory note did not occur in the saga again till the final volume in the series, A Family Affair (1975), when Inspector Cramer, surveying Nero Wolfe’s office, observed, “This is the best working room I know. The best-looking. I mention it now because I may never see it again.” Perhaps Cramer merely was referring to his threat to have Wolfe’s license revoked, but Rex Stout was then eighty-eight, so there was ample cause to assign to Cramer’s words an ominous meaning.

Though certainly neither of the foregoing passages suggests that Rex Stout expected the Nero Wolfe series to be extended into the future by another hand once he himself had ceased to write, he did not see the series as concluded when he completed A Family Affair. In August 1975 he told me that, if he felt equal to it, he would begin a new Wolfe novel “along about November.” That was not to be. Death came suddenly on October 27, 1975. Had Rex lived another five weeks, he would have entered his ninetieth year. Even so, as he saw it, he had not rung down the curtain on the household at West Thirty-fifth Street. More adventures awaited Wolfe and Archie. That did not surprise me. In 1974, when Triple Zeck was published, I asked Rex if he had ever considered letting Wolfe perish in his final struggle with Arnold Zeck, even as Sherlock Holmes was portrayed as perishing in his final struggle with Professor Moriarty. “What then, for next year?” he snorted. “Open the tomb and drag him out?” Could he, I persisted, end the series as the Baroness Orczy had her Old Man in the Corner series, by letting Wolfe himself commit murder? “I would think it was silly,” he said.

Early in our acquaintance, plagued by ill health, Rex put aside unfinished the manuscript of Death of a Dude. I tried to jolly him into better spirits by telling him I was writing a Nero Wolfe novel myself. “Let me see a chapter,” he said. So I sat down and sweated out a dozen pages which found Archie at Harvard investigating the death of the president of Swaziland, fatally stricken when, at a midday luncheon for honorary decree recipients, someone nudged a poisoned melon ball into his fruit cup. Rex commended my effort, as politeness demanded, but, much to my relief, did not commission me to complete the novel he had left undone. “How would you feel,” I asked him later, when, restored to health, he was writing again, “if someone wanted to continue the Wolfe series after you ... eh, laid aside your pen?” “I don’t know whether vampirism or cannibalism is the better term for it,” he answered. “Not nice. They should roll their own.” “Do you have any plans for rounding out the series yourself?” I asked. “For . . . killing off Wolfe, as Christie does with Poirot?” “Certainly not,” he said, with palpable indignation. “I hope he lives forever.”

Only on a single other occasion did the question of a series continuator come up between us and that was in another connection. I told him of a letter I had received from a suspect reader who insisted that Rex Stout had a resourceful secretary who now wrote all his books for him. “The name is Jane Austen,” he replied, “but I haven’t the address.” Rex was paying himself the ultimate compliment. Of Austen he had told me earlier, “Jane Austen had an incredible, instinctive awareness of how to use words, which words to use, how to organize them, how to organize her material, how many pages, how much weight to give to this incident and to that one. She was astonishing. No finer novelist than she has ever lived.” He said he once dreamed that Jane Austen had come back to life and started writing detective stories. He awoke, he said, in a state of panic. Jane Austen his continuator, indeed. Some bill to fill!

As a matter of record, Rex never accepted story ideas from anyone, though readers often submitted them. New York City’s celebrated Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, once sent him, for his