Three for the Chair

Rex Stout

Three For The Chair

Introduction

I WONDER HOW an old mountain boy like Nero Wolfe ended up living in New York City.

He’s originally from a central European country called Montenegro, you know. The word means “black mountain.” It was once a republic and then part of greater Yugoslavia. Lord knows what it is now. It’s about fifty miles south of Sarajevo, though. Wolfe was probably wise to leave early. Anyhow, encyclopedias describe Montenegro as wholly mountainous, with a population of less than half a million supporting themselves with sheep, goats, and forestry. Aside from wars and politics, it was probably a marvelous place to spend a childhood.

I have always felt some affinity for the reclusive Mr. Wolfe because I suspect that we have things in common: maybe some folk tales and fiddle tunes, but certainly a way of looking at the world. His mountains are part of the Carpathian chain, while mine are the southern Appalachians of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia, but there is a universal kinship among mountain people. They have the same ways of doing things: a love of nature and a dislike for authority; a fierce pride and a stubborn streak. And although they are loyal and hospitable, they tend to be wary of strangers. I’m pretty sure there’s a word in Serbo-Croatian for hillbilly.

For years people have called Nero Wolfe eccentric and strange because he refuses to leave his Manhattan brownstone, because he grows orchids on the roof of his building, and because he’s not a sociable, glad-handing fellow. This just goes to show that you can take a man out of the mountains but not vice-versa, because, given his situation, Nero Wolfe is behaving in a perfectly reasonable fashion – for a city-bound mountaineer.

A friend of mine who grew up in the coves of eastern Kentucky got an education and an important job late in life, and he made his first trip to New York City when he was well past forty. When Garry got back to Kentucky after two weeks in Manhattan, I called him up and asked how he liked the Big Apple. There was a pronounced pause at the end of the telephone line, and then he said, “Did you know there’re people who go there on purpose?” I am certain that if my friend Garry or Spencer Arrowood, the Tennessee sheriff in my Ballad novels, were forced to stay in New York City longer than a few weeks, they, too, would be holed up in a brownstone, refusing to come out and confront that teeming mass of strangers.

And if Sheriff Arrowood had to stay in a concrete holler in midtown, he’d be growing anything that would take root up there on the roof, just out of homesickness for greenery. He would gather a family of sorts about him, just as Nero Wolfe has assembled a clan consisting of Archie, Fritz, Theodore, and Saul Panzer; and he would be as fiercely loyal to them as Wolfe is to his folks – though there might be some infighting when their egos rubbed together. Apologies would be rare.

When Nero Wolfe comes out of his brownstone lair, it’s for one of two reasons: authority (which he doesn’t like) has forced him out, or he’s going to the country. In Three for the Chair we have examples of both. In the novella “Too Many Detectives” Wolfe and Archie are summoned to the state capital for a wiretapping investigation, and Wolfe is at his irascible and uncooperative best with the Albany version of “revenuers.” In “Immune to Murder” Wolfe heads for the mountains – the Adirondacks – to cook brook trout for visiting diplomats.

Wolfe has all the good qualities of mountain people, as well as their solitary ways. He is whip-smart, honorable, and quite capable of adapting to the customs of the cultural elite. People underestimate Nero Wolfe – and the rest of us mountain folk – at their peril. We can jettison the accent, acquire a taste for opera and sushi, and stifle the glower of Wolfe under the sparkle of Archie’s charm and self-deprecating humor. Most of us feel like Wolfe but have to act like Archie. We manage. But we tend to count trees when nobody’s looking, and we always, always hold something back. Inside each of us there’s a brownstone fortress, and it takes some doing to get us out of it.

Nero Wolfe has outlived his creator, and even now he is practicing the art of detection from his Manhattan home; but if he had been allowed to retire, I think I’d see another mountain trait in him. I saw it in my great-uncles, who spent forty years between youth and retirement working in the car factories in Detroit. When their working lives came to an end, they went back to the mountains. The lucky ones never leave; the rest come home when they can. Wolfe settled in New York because you can’t be an eminent and well-paid private detective in, say, Banner Elk, North Carolina; but for all Wolfe’s success, I am not convinced that he felt at home in the city. I think his residence there would have ended when he quit the gumshoe business.

Maybe Nero Wolfe wouldn’t have made it all the way back to the hills of Montenegro, but if he’d ever been allowed to stop crime solving, I think I’d know where to look for him. You’d be walking on the Appalachian Trail, in the green wilderness somewhere between Springer Mountain, Georgia and Mount Katahdin, Maine, and as you started to climb over a split-rail fence to reach a spring, a voice would yell, “Get away from my rhododendrons!” And you’d see a pear-shaped hulk glowering down at you from the deck of a glass and cedar chalet up on the ridge. Walk softly, dear reader. Archie’s no doubt somewhere on the premises. He’s probably armed. Now git.

–Sharyn McCrumb