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THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOOSIER, by Dan Andriacco

How Rex Stout Had Fun

with Sherlock Holmes

The announcement last year that the actress Lucy Liu would be playing the part of Dr. Watson in the new CBS program “Elementary” attracted a great deal of interest—and also shock, skepticism, cynicism, derision, and scorn. In other words, the gimmick worked.

But a well known Sherlockian of the last century would not even have lifted one eyebrow at the news that “Watson was a woman.” For Rex Stout knew that decades ago. On the evening of January 31, 1941, at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York, Stout declined to toast “the Second Mrs. Watson.” In the talk that followed, he set forth for the assembled Baker Street Irregulars a scandalous theory that “the Watson person” who wrote the Canon was actually Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. Frederic Dannay, writing as Ellery Queen in the book In the Queen’s Parlor, called Stout’s speech an H-Bomb—H for Holmes, of course.

Stout cited many passages from the Sacred Writings that sounded to him as if they were written by a woman, and especially a wife, such as “I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals” and “I must have fainted” and “the relations between us in those days were peculiar.” The coup de grace, however, was an acrostic spelling out IRENE WATSON from the first letters of canonical tales. Stout insisted at the end of his speech that the wedding related in “A Scandal in Bohemia” was actually Holmes’s own, and speculated that the fruit of the union might have been Lord Peter Wimsey.

“As Rex reached his last sentence,” John McAleer reported in Rex Stout: A Biography, “pandemonium ensued.” He added: “In certain quarters 1941 would be remembered as the year that began with the Stout hypothesis and ended with Pearl Harbor—two nightmarish happenings.”

Although Stout spoke from notes, a written version quickly found its way into print. So did an official BSI rebuttal from Dr. Julian Wolff called “That Was No Lady.”

Upon entering into a literary controversy with Mr. Stout [Wolff wrote], one is immediately conscious of being at a great disadvantage. It would require the knowledge and the pen of an Edgar Smith, the experience and the skill of a Vincent Starrett, as well as the genius and the beard of a Christopher Morley, to equalize the contest.

Wolff proved equal to the task, however. His response included an acrostic of his own that spelled out NUTS TO REX STOUT.

Long an admirer of Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin mysteries, I wrote Stout a letter when I was but 14 years old, asking him which story he considered his best and positing the bold theory that Archie was the true author of “Watson Was a Woman.”

Stout fired back an ingenious response dated December 8, 1966. The postage on the note was five cents, but to me the contents have always been priceless. “Dear Master Dan,” Stout wrote, “If your surmise, that Archie Goodwin wrote that gem, ‘Watson Was a Woman,’ is correct, I would be silly to admit it, and I try not to be silly. So the answer to your question, what do I consider my best story, is ‘Watson Was a Woman.’ Sincerely, Rex Stout.”

Clearly, Stout liked to have fun with Sherlock Holmes. But he did so as a true believer who was one of the original Baker Street Irregulars and the Guest of Honor at that infamous 1941 meeting.

Born in 1886 in Noblesville, Indiana, Stout began reading Holmes as a boy and devoured the later stories as they were published. In 1903, having moved to Kansas at a young age, he saw William Gillette portray Sherlock Holmes in Kansas City. He returned again the next night.

More than a generation later, in 1931, Stout found himself among a select group of men drinking bootleg bourbon with Winston Churchill at a hotel in New York until the wee hours of the morning. One of the subjects of their conversation was Sherlock Holmes. Stout was forty-five years old, and Arthur Conan Doyle had died only the year before—just three years after the publication of his final Sherlock Holmes story.

When Christopher Morley founded the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934, he asked Stout to be one of the first members. That same year also saw the publication of Fer-de-Lance, the first of Stout’s more than 60 Nero Wolfe stories. More about that rotund gentleman later!

Stout’s relationship with the BSI was a long and happy one. In 1949, despite the “Watson Was a Woman” blasphemy, he was presented with his Irregular Shilling and the investiture name of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” For the first five years of the BSI’s Silver Blaze Stakes at Belmont Race Track, Stout and his wife Pola attended, and presented the trophy in two of those years. In 1961, he was awarded the BSI’s first Two-Shilling Award “for extraordinary devotion to the cause beyond the call of duty.” Five years later, the annual BSI dinner again honored Stout and also toasted Pola as “The Woman.”

Although best known as a mystery writer, the tart-tongued Stout was also a perceptive critic who was never shy about sharing his thoughts on his craft—or any other subject, for that matter. In January 1942, appearing with Jacques Barzun and Elmer Davis on Mark Van Doran’s CBS radio show “Invitation to Learning,” he made this observation: “The modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that’s why they’re still the best ones.” Later in the same program, he said, “It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.” (Obviously, he wasn’t including pastiches.)

A few years later, in 1949, Stout wrote an article called “Grim Fairy Tales” for Saturday Review, in which he tried to explain why “Sherlock Holmes is the most widely known fictional character in all the literature of the world.” And this was his conclusion:

“Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of man’s greatest pride and his greatest weakness: his reason…He is human aspiration. He is what our ancestors had in mind when in wistful bragging they tacked the sapiens onto the homo.”

Stout added to this a more general statement which McAleer suggested could apply to Nero Wolfe and to Rex Stout himself. He wrote:

We enjoy reading about people who love and hate and covet—about gluttons and martyrs, misers and sadists, whores and saints, brave men and cowards. But also, demonstrably, we enjoy reading about a man who gloriously acts and decides, with no exception and no compunction, not as his emotions brutally command, but as his reason instructs.

In an introduction to The Later Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1952, Stout argued that the success of the Canon depended on what he called “the grand and glorious portrait” of Holmes, which transcended the author’s plot errors. “We are not supposed to reach real intimacy with him,” he wrote. “We are not supposed to touch him.” I have not yet had the pleasure of reading this introduction, but I gather from McAleer’s description that it discusses Conan Doyle’s literary offenses in some detail. And yet Stout concluded that all of these transgressions seemed to enhance the portrait of the Great Detective. How did that work? “No one will ever penetrate it to the essence and disclose it naked to the eye,” Stout concluded. “For the essence is magic, and magic is arcane.”

Stout wrote eloquently about Holmes again in 1963 for the cover of a record album of Basil Rathbone reading Holmes stories.

“Holmes,” Stout wrote, “is a man, not a puppet. As a man he has many vulnerable spots, like us; he is vain, prejudiced, intolerant; he is a drug addict; he even plays the violin for diversion—one of the most deplorable outrages of self-indulgence.”

But, Stout went on, there is much more to him than that: “He loves truth and justice more than he loves money or comfort or safety or pleasure, or any man or woman. Such a man has never lived, so Sherlock Holmes will never die.”

Neither—I submit—will Rex Stout’s most famous creation, Nero Wolfe. And since the fat sleuth’s 1934 debut, readers and critics have drawn parallels between the two detectives. More than that, they have put them on the same family tree by speculating that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock or, less frequently, Mycroft Holmes. Certainly Wolfe looks like Mycroft. And in the novel Baker Street Irregular, Stout says that the character was based on Mycroft.

In October 1954, as they appeared together at a book signing at Kann’s Department Store in Washington, D.C., Frederic Dannay asked Stout how he came up with the name of Nero Wolfe. According to Dannay, Stout thought for a while and then said that he based the name on Sherlock Holmes. In McAleer’s version, Stout was just quoting Alexander Woollcott’s theory. Here’s how Dannay lays it out in the book In the Queen’s Parlor:

Now…how in the world does Nero Wolfe resemble Sherlock Holmes? Well, one likeness is quickly apparent: both names have the same number and the same distribution of syllables: Sherlock has two, Holmes one; Nero likewise has two, Wolfe one. But this is a superficial kinship: the relationship is far more subtle. Consider the vowels, and their placement, in the name Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock has two—e and o, in that order; Holmes also has two—the same two, but in reverse order—o-e. Now consider the vowels in Nero Wolfe: Nero has two—the same two as in Sherlock, and in exactly the same order! Wolfe also has two—the same two as in Holmes, and again in the same reverse order!

Dannay called this “the great O-E theory,” and mused that it probably all went back to P-O-E. Clearly, Rex Stout was not the only one having fun with Sherlock Holmes.

William S. Baring-Gould, in his biography Nero Wolfe of Baker Street, mentions the great O-E theory in passing in a chapter called “Alias Nero Wolfe,” in which he argues that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Frankly, in my opinion, Baring-Gould’s attempt to prove a genetic connection between the two detectives rather limps. For example, in listing similarities between the two men, Baring-Gould writes: “In his youth, Nero Wolfe, like Sherlock Holmes, was an athlete.” This is proof?

Undeterred by what seems to me very flimsy evidence, mystery writer John T. Lescroart adopted this paternity theory whole-heartedly in his books Son of Holmes (1986) and Rasputin’s Revenge (1987). They recount the World War I adventures of John Hamish Adler Holmes under the primary alias of Auguste Lupa. Lescroart’s hero also calls himself Julius Adler and Cesar Mycroft. We are to assume that he later adopted the first name of another Roman emperor and anglicized the lupine last name. I personally found these books entertaining, but the series had short legs; it stopped at two.

As the Holmes-Wolfe connection kept being proposed over the years, Stout came up with a number of amusing ways of saying, in effect, “leave me out of this.” As early as 1935, in a letter to the editor of The Baker Street Journal, he pleaded client confidentiality in his role as Archie Goodwin’s literary agent. In 1968, he wrote to Bruce Kennedy, “Since the suggestion that Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes was merely someone’s loose conjecture, I think it is proper and permissible for me to ignore it.” A couple of years later he wrote to another admirer, “As for the notion that he [Wolfe] was sired by Sherlock Holmes, I don’t believe Archie Goodwin has ever mentioned it.”

And yet Archie Goodwin notes in Fer-de-Lance that he, Archie, has a picture of Sherlock Holmes over his desk. On August 12, 1969, McAleer asked Stout: “Did Archie hang up the picture of Sherlock Holmes that is found over his desk, or did Wolfe put it there?” Stout’s response was typically unequivocal: “I was a damn fool to do it. Obviously it’s always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done.”

We shall charitably assume that the reference to fictional characters reflects Stout’s advanced age at the time.

Another interesting picture in the Wolfe establishment on West 35th Street is the painting of a waterfall, behind which Archie and others often hide in a secret alcove to observe and hear the goings-on in Wolfe’s office. According to John McAleer, Stout surmised that the painting represented the Reichenbach Falls.

If Stout guessed correctly, this is quite appropriate—for Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes both battled a criminal genius to the death. Professor Moriarty, a figure as archetypical in popular mythology as Holmes himself, is a significant presence in “The Final Problem,” “The Adventure of the Empty House,” and The Valley of Fear. He is also mentioned in three other stories. Arnold Zeck, Moriarty’s counterpart in the world of Nero Wolfe, has speaking parts in the novels And Be a Villain and The Second Confession and appears in the third book of the trilogy, In the Best Families.

“I’ll tell you this,” Wolfe says to Archie in the first of these books. “If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work—and sleep and eat if there is time for it—and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I will never have to.”

Like Holmes, he is ready to give his all. In the Best Families finds him doing exactly that. It’s a kind of “Final Problem” and “Empty House” in one epic novel—epic not in size, but in terms of its significance to the Wolfe corpus. Wolfe isn’t believed dead in the book, but he might as well be. He leaves the brownstone on West 35th Street with the door wide open and a strong indication that he will never be back. When he does return, months later, Archie doesn’t recognize him. Physically he’s a mere shadow of his former one-seventh of a ton, his face full of seams from the weight loss. His resolve and mental resources are undiminished, however. And by the last page, Zeck is as dead as Moriarty.

Julian Symons, an English crime writer and often-difficult critic, was effusive in his praise of what Stout achieved in the Zeck Trilogy, which was later collected in an omnibus volume called Triple Zeck. He wrote:

In the fight to death between master-detective and master-criminal the most ingenious and unlikely subterfuges are used…All this is very improbable. It is the art of Mr. Stout to make it seem plausible…Holmes was a fully realized character. There is only a handful of his successors to whom that compliment can be paid. One of them, certainly, is Nero Wolfe.

Surprisingly, Stout told McAleer more than once that this story arc wasn’t planned—that he didn’t know for sure when he wrote And Be a Villain that Zeck would reappear in another book. That would mean, then, that he wasn’t intentionally paying homage to Reichenbach and The Return. But who can doubt that Stout was influenced by the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, however subconsciously?

Nor is this by any means the only impact the Canon had on Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe.

In Rex’s appreciation of Doyle’s art [wrote John McAleer], we find valuable guidelines for understanding Rex’s own art. He saw the necessity of making Wolfe a man rich in human contradictions. Wolfe’s eccentricities surpass those of Holmes. At times he is childish in his moods. He shuts his eyes more often than Holmes does to “moral issues.” More than once he “arranges” for the suicide of a culprit, to save himself a court appearance. Yet, withal, even as Holmes is, he is “grand and glorious.”

He also has a sidekick without whom he would be just another genius sleuth. The parallels between John H. Watson, M.D., and Archie Goodwin may not be immediately obvious, but they are strong. Like Watson, Archie is:

• his boss’s Boswell (although better known in crime writing as a “Watson”);

• a man of action;

• a ladies’ man;

• the one who always carries the gun (although Holmes occasionally does, too);

• a colorful and interesting character, unlike S.S. Van Dine or the unnamed “I” of Poe’s Dupin stories;

• a conductor of light, if not himself luminous.

In this matter, Stout’s debt to Conan Doyle was conscious and acknowledged. In The Mystery Writer’s Handbook, a 1956 volume from The Mystery Writers of America, Stout wrote an article called “What to do About a Watson.” He argued that a Watson helps solve what he called “your main technical difficulty” of having the detective hero learn information that the author isn’t ready to share with the reader. “A Watson can be a devil of a nuisance at times,” he wrote, “but he is worth it for his wonderful cooperation in clearing the toughest hurdle on the course.”

At the end of his three-page essay, Stout cited an example of a Watson at work for the author in this exchange from “The Red-Headed League”:

“Evidently,” said I, “Mr. Wilson’s assistant counts for a good deal in this mystery of the Red-headed League. I am sure that you inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.”

“Not him.”

“What then?”

“The knees of his trousers.”

“And what did you see?”

“What I expected to see.”

“Why did you beat the pavement?”

“My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk.”

And then Stout added—gleefully, in my imagination—“That’s the way to do it!”

Nobody who has ever read Rex Stout’s mysteries could deny that he did it his own unique way. But he was also operating under the spell of Arthur Conan Doyle’s arcane magic.

The great private eye novelist Ross Macdonald expressed the opinion of many critics when he wrote:

Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American detective novel. With great wit and cunning, he devised a form which combined the traditional virtues of Sherlock Holmes and the English school with the fast-moving vernacular narrative of Dashiell Hammett.

Stout deserves full credit for doing this so well, and over a 41-year period. But Conan Doyle was there before him. While the first part of The Valley of Fear is an exemplar of “Sherlock Holmes and the English school,” the flashback half—the story of tough guy Birdy Edwards in Vermissa Valley, U.S.A.—is arguably (as Steve Doyle writes in Sherlock Holmes for Dummies) “the world’s first hard-boiled detective story.”

So even in his best known and most enduring contribution to the American detective story, Rex Stout walked in the footprints of a giant. And they were not the footprints of a gigantic hound!