Death on Deadline - Robert Goldsborough Page 0,1

consideration, an entire chapter of a Nero Wolfe novel he had projected. “It was awful,” Rex said. In fact, he found none of the material sent him usable. He even refused to listen to the Nero Wolfe radio dramas, based on his characters but scripted by others. “Unbearable,” he told me. On one occasion, when he outlined a plot to his friend Alan Green, Green said to him, “Why, Rex, that’s the plot of Christopher Bush’s The Perfect Murder.” “Indeed?” Rex said, and never spoke of it again. He was unwilling to accept story ideas even from his editors, who, encountering just once Neronian wrath, never dared to offer them again.

From the early days of the genre, readers have been reluctant to accept an author’s decision to terminate a detective series or nature’s decision to terminate it for him by terminating him. Reader demand forced Arthur Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes. In 1928, while Doyle still lived, August Derleth, dismayed at Doyle’s diminishing output, inaugurated his own series, Solar Pons being, as Robert Briney noted, “an ectoplasmic emanation of his great prototype,” and the seventy stories in which he eventually appeared, “a pastiche ... of the Holmesian canon as a whole.” Later, in collaboration, Adrian Conan Doyle, Doyle’s youngest son, and John Dickson Carr sought to add to the canon. Even the collaborators themselves were displeased with the results and abandoned further efforts to keep Holmes on the active list. As for the avalanche of Holmesian pastiches that has followed, with the exception of Rick Boyer’s Giant Rat of Sumatra, the results have been so flawed that many readers can sympathize with Nicolas Freeling, who effectively closed out his Inspector Van der Valk series by shooting Van der Valk through the heart. In the 1940s Gerald Fairlie continued H. C. McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond series, but, since the original stories themselves were never more than thrillers, this was a feat of no great consequence. Following the death of Margery Allingham, her husband, Youngman Carter, completed her last novel, Cargo of Eagles. H.R.F. Keating calls it her most forgettable story.

“There should be,” says Jacques Barzun, “a collection of watchdogs—watchwolves—to keep guard over the fair fame and right significance of Nero and Archie.” Surely he spoke for legions when he protested a TV series which portrayed Wolfe “looking and talking like a stingy landlord, Archie like an ivy-league junior executive,” and Cramer making “willowy movements with his torso.” Yet, there are those fierce guardians of the sacred scroll who would look with contempt on a Nero Wolfe continuation even if an affidavit from the Archangel Gabriel vouched for its authenticity. Does Lily Rowan really have “deep blue eyes”? Is it his left eyebrow that Archie raises? Count the steps of the brownstone again. Did Rex say seven? And, what’s this? Lionel T. Cramer! Fergus, once. A slip. Never Lionel! How dare he! There’s nothing to be done with liturgical nuts, of course. They are beyond pleasing. Even when a bona fide Stout manuscript turns up (as indeed one did), they are torn apart, wondering whether to admit it to the corpus.

Rex Stout hoped that Nero Wolfe would “live forever.” Did he provide for that possibility? Yes, he did. First, he created, in the brownstone, routines which are immune to time. Second, unlike Doyle, who confined Holmes’s activities to the gaslight era and wrote about the era with increasing vagueness as the gap separating him from that era widened, Rex’s tales always were contemporaneous with his actual life while writing them. Finally, unlike Christie, whose aging Poirot solved his last case from a wheelchair (by then he was a centenarian!), he decreed, with canny foresight, that Wolfe should ever be fifty-six and Archie thirty-four. Such arable soil invites another planting.

Now we must ask, since it can be done, should it be done? The decade of mourning that followed Stout’s death is concluded. The demands of decency have been met. No continuator need feel reproach for curtailing the period of bereavement. To add to the corpus cannot diminish respect for the seventy-three tales Rex Stout wrote. Indeed, since a misbegotten television series actually rallied thousands of new readers to the corpus, why should we suppose the work of an able continuator would not bring about the same desideratum? Let us bear in mind, too, that several commentators, Julian Symons among them, now either speak of Wolfe in the past tense or suggest that the brownstone has been bulldozed and that Wolfe, in retirement, is living