Rex Stout (1886 – 1975)
American author of detective fiction best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe.
There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.
Of course 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.
The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.
The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.
There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.
Stout was almost as witty as Raymond Chandler. His detective had splendid putdown lines almost as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And his mysteries were constructed a lot more smoothly than Agatha Christie's. But you do not expect Chandlerian wit from Conan Doyle, or Conan Doyle's superbly breathless sense of atmosphere and melodrama from Christie, or Christie's scathingly clear, unblinking vision of the monstrous crimes that average human nature is capable of all from the same pen. Stout gives you all of it. He is the Willie Mays or Derek Jeter of the mystery genre: a brilliant all-rounder more talented in each area than any single writer should ever dream of being.
His narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.
I saw every performance Nijinsky danced in New York, and I see every baseball game I can get to. You watch a good second baseman digging for a badly thrown ball without letting his foot leave base and it's the same beautiful impossibility as a good pas de deux in Swan Lake.
Rex Stout's witty, fast-moving prose hasn't dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I've spent the past four decades reading and re-reading Stout's novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor.
The incredible thing happens at the beginning of the story always, you notice, not the end. A Sherlock Holmes story is never a trick story.
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.