Three Doors to Death (The Rex Stout Library)

Rex Stout

Three Doors To Death

Introduction

Let's face it.

We can stare at each other over designer coffee and natter on about the spiritual and intellectual benefits of immersing oneself in haute litterature, but most of us read fiction to get away from the drudgery of our lives.

And what a wonderful sanctuary Rex Stout has provided millions of readers for over half a century by introducing the world to Nero Wolfe.

As the century fades, Wolfe lives on, fresh and current as ever. One reason is the way he lives – a self-contained, blatantly self-indulgent existence in a Manhattan brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street surrounded by gleaming paneling, fine furniture, gourmet food, servants, exotic orchids, the power to control life's nasty little intrusions. What a glorious end-of-day tonic for clock watchers, straphangers, and freeway slaves. How many of us wouldn't commit minor mayhem in exchange for an Archie Goodwin to cheerfully run our errands and tidy up our scutwork, or a Fritz Brenner to prepare and serve our sweetbreads en croute on bone china? With a suitable wine. (Interestingly, Wolfe's cozy world also burlesques the isolated, self-indulgent life of the writer and, in that sense, can be regarded as Stout's wicked slant on the artiste.)

Stout had wicked slants on lots of things and a gift for phrasing and rhythm and irony that remains remarkably contemporary. Consider lines such as these: 'Her chin hinges began to give'; 'the sort of greasy voice that makes me want to take up strangling'; 'he was slender, elegant, and groomed to a queen's taste, if you let him pick the queen.' And let us not forget the hilariously truistic: 'Escorting a murderer on a subway without handcuffs is a damn nuisance, so I chose a taxi.'

Stout's sense of humor is at its best when it conveys a lusty misanthropy. Wolfe's truculent view of his fellow men – and women – is delicious in an age when sectarian selfishness and emotional lobotomy masquerade as political correctness and the carny freak parade is beamed into our homes daily in the form of pretentiously mislabeled talk shows so self-righteously smarmy they gag the consciousness. Take a blissful moment to imagine Wolfe on Geraldo or Oprah or any of the other high-octane patholothons. I, for one, would commit major mayhem for the privilege of witnessing it. Hell, one good 'Pfui!' directed at a celibopsychic schizoid diaper devotee would be worth it.

Then there's Wolfe's glorious gluttony, a perfect foil for the skeletal images and anorexic fiction promulgated with teeth-gnashing joy by the style-over-substance crowd. Stout doesn't spare Wolfe the consequences of his hyperphagia – the Great Man is so monstrously endomorphic that when he removes his pajama top, he reveals 'enough hide to make shoes for four platoons;' but he does not assault us with cholesterol counts and dire warnings of vascular sludge. During the time we spend gourmandizing along with Wolfe, the nagging and finger-wagging of gram-counting aerobicops fade mercifully into the background. Wolfe may huff and puff during his infrequent outings into the 'real' world – the description of his unplanned hike in the final story in this volume is as memorable as anything that has ever been put to paper – but he is happy with himself. And when we are with him, so are we, by God.

Of course there's more to Wolfe than constructive agoraphobia or cream sauce. Stout's stories are always great mysteries – whodunits, howdunits, whydunits – and they zip along at a pace that would leave the Great Man anoxic.

Some say Stout's talents were put to best use in the novella, and no contradiction of that judgment can be found in the three stories in this book.

Turn the page, then, and prepare yourself for a well-deserved getaway: the funny, phony, bloody world of high fashion as portrayed in 'Man Alive.' The knife-in-the-back shenanigans of the nascent fast-food industry in 'Omit Flowers' (how sadly civilized that bit of vulgarity seems compared to today's technoburger madness). And finally, the spooky and downright nasty family psychopathology of 'Door to Death,' a real chiller.

Three gems.

Three great escapes.

–Jonathan Kellerman

Foreword

Looking over the scripts of these accounts of three of Nero Wolfe's cases, it struck me that they might