The detective novel as failed Western

Rex Stout, Montana, and the emotionally suppressed origins of Nero Wolfe

I’ve long believed that the Western and the hard-boiled detective novel are the same story in different settings. As I’ve previously discussed here, Dashiell Hammett showed it best in his 1929 novel Red Harvest, which took a cowboy-style hero to the mean streets of Butte, Montana. But another famous novelist practiced in both genres with very different results.

That novelist was Rex Stout. In my last two pieces, I’ve been looking at his novel Forest Fire, which failed as the first gay Western and also as a chronicle of the new professionalized West. Stout’s biggest problem was emotional distance. Where stoic but emotionally deep cowboys jumped off the page, Stout’s characters sagged as distant embodiments of psychological principles.

When Forest Fire sold poorly, the 46-year-old Stout faced a problem. He needed money. The Depression had wiped out his savings, along with a family company from which he’d taken early retirement. His wife was expecting their first child. Rex decided that the solution to this crisis was to write a bestselling crime novel. He titled his first mystery Fer-de-Lance, after a poisonous snake that nearly kills his detective, Nero Wolfe.

Today, reading Fer-de-Lance immediately after Forest Fire is like moving to bright sunlight from a dark room. Stout’s voice is confident and relaxed, his settings rich and familiar, his plotting clever without feeling too manipulative. The vivid characters are all skilled professionals, compartmentalized by job function, but they sometimes surprise you in delightful and authentic ways. They feel real rather than constructed. It’s as if Stout has known the fat, orchid-loving detective Wolfe — and the narrator of the stories, Wolfe’s smart-alecky assistant Archie Goodwin — all of his life.

In a sense, he had. Wolfe resembled Rex’s own father, who had recently passed away: dark-complexioned, fastidious, moralistic, set in his ways, wearing a yellow nightshirt. Archie resembled Rex’s mother: gray-eyed, imaginative, fun-loving, unflappable, born in Chillicothe, Ohio. The two characters became the opposing sides of Rex’s own personality, the clash of the hyper-rational intellect and the charming socialite.

It was a smart time to publish detective fiction. Hammett had recently popularized the hard-boiled style, while Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers led a venerable British tradition. Stout made Archie a Hammett-style tough guy, while crafting Wolfe as a Sherlock Holmes–style genius, to explicitly play with the conflict between the American and British forms. And as a man who loved thinking through complicated problems, Stout devised devilish puzzles for Wolfe and Archie to solve.

It’s all about as un-Western as you can imagine. It’s set in Manhattan. Wolfe spends four hours every day tending to orchids. He refuses to leave his brownstone on business. When a client presents a mystery, Wolfe typically just sits around and overthinks everything.

Wolfe is notoriously coldhearted. Sure, he’s sometimes swayed by ego or pride, but he generally lacks the basic empathy that ennobled the cowboy hero. Archie’s frustration at this (and Wolfe’s near-misogyny, which doesn’t play as well today) is part of the fun.

Stout wrote 32 more Wolfe novels plus 41 shorter works. He rightly became a legend in the world of detective fiction. He rebuilt his fortune, provided for his family, and luxuriated in his garden. Then in 1969, when he was 82, his novel Death of a Dude improbably took Wolfe and Archie to Montana. Stout had not been back West in decades. Instead he relied on his memories of the 1930s experiences that had informed Forest Fire.

As a kid, I read dozens of Nero Wolfe novels. After I moved to Montana 36 years ago, I sought out Death of a Dude. It made me angry in ways I couldn’t articulate at the time. But writing these essays has helped me recognize: Death of a Dude, like Forest Fire, is a failed Western set in a defeatedly professionalized Montana.

Death of a Dude lacks the depth of emotion that Westerners like to perceive in our glorious landscapes: Wolfe is the same type of distant overthinker that Stan Durham was in Forest Fire. He’s engaged in the same sort of professionalized work. Meanwhile, Archie can’t enact any cowboy heroics because he’s an outsider who has not yet earned the locals’ trust. Archie’s heiress-girlfriend Lily is a fun character, but totally miscast as a part-time Montanan.

Seeing Death of a Dude as Stout’s long-overdue rewrite of Forest Fire helped me like both books better. Applying the Nero Wolfe formula allows Stout to sidestep the previous book’s quagmires: Wolfe is an overthinker because that’s his job. Archie is an outsider because Stout was too. We don’t need to explore ideas of sexuality or misogyny because we’re just here for a genre mystery.

The reason I’d always wanted to read Forest Fire was that I wanted to understand Rex Stout’s relationship to Montana—and thus at least one corner of the relationship of the detective novel and the Western.

With little evidence, I like to imagine Stout purposefully writing Death of a Dude as an anti-Western, a sort of culmination of his lifelong journey as a novelist. Yet simultaneously, I like to imagine Stout trying and failing yet again to write his Western, to put the characters that represented his personality into the glorious natural settings he wanted them to deserve.

I imagine a terrific conflict here. If Wolfe and Archie are the warring sides of Stout’s own personality, so too are the cowboy and the professional, Montana and Manhattan, the novel of ideas and the novel of action, the Western and the detective story. By working through those conflicts, Stout turned his failed Forest Fire into a lasting genre triumph.

End notes:

• This is part 3 of a trilogy on the book Forest Fire. Part 1: “Why the first gay Western came from a straight Easterner more interested in ideas than romance.” Part 2: “The Forest Fire at the end of Western individualism.” Thanks for following my odyssey!

• For Stout’s life, I relied on John J. McAleer’s comprehensive Rex Stout: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.

• One of my all-time favorite books, Mark Spragg’s Where Rivers Change Direction, is now available as an e-book with a new foreword from the author.

• This essay contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, I earn a small commission, at no cost to you, when you click through and make a purchase there. But I’m just as happy if you support your local independent bookseller!