Lives of the Mystery Writers

...He started teaching himself Latin by comparing two versions of Bacon's Novum Organum, was champion speller of three states, and was put through a disquieting tour to demonstrate liis lightning calculation...

...He expressed his liberal political views not only on the podium but in his books...

...Christie's desire to oblige, her ability to speak with other people's tongues, and her carelessness about the form of her memoir, all come, I think, from the same source: She was truly humble...

...Actually, the adulation is no laughing matter...

...It may be her sadly comic senile grandmother, a wild brother, a visiting child who creeps into her bed delirious with measles, or the tyrannical woman at an archeological dig who has her claws in the much younger man with whom the author (though she does not know it then) is to spend the rest of her life...

...And so it is, to anyone trying to solve the mystery of why some of us feel such need to write and read about murder...

...Agatha Christie started her career unintentionally, to win a bet against her doubting sister...

...Working in a hospital dispensary during World War 1, she found herself with free time and some tempting knowledge of poisons...

...Besant when hearing her lecture.'' She returned to her Anglican pew only after a "brief but vivid interest in Zoroastrianism...

...Agatha Christie says hers "had nearly been received into the Roman Catholic church, had then bounced off into being a Unitarian and had from there become a budding Theo-sophist, but took a dislike to Mrs...

...The pressures of this period were too much for his psyche: a year and a half of fierce headaches kept him from desk, garden and workbench...

...Archie Goodwin would give a fine guffaw...

...Both were early readers, Rex at 18 months, if legend is believed, and Agatha before she was four, an age when Rex had been through the Bible and was getting on with Macaulay's Essays...

...Down deep under his more and more assertive claims for his own fiction, perhaps he feared he had wasted his literary talent despite the adulation he was receiving...

...His Nero Wolfe books were now being solemnly analyzed as literature...

...It seems that every visitor, every dinner party, every journey and side trip is recorded...

...the bibliography of pedantic essays was piling up...

...What did all this preparing lead to...

...When a child approached, "she would take time out to wash his face...

...Stout was able to write serious novels...

...As president of the Authors' League he put decades into the struggle for a new copyright law...

...This first Poirot story, recently republished with the last, Curtain, is full of amateurish phrases meant to force suspense (phrases, incidentally, that recur shamelessly in all of Christie's books...

...There is in Rex Stout's life, too, another story, as yet unwritten, that could be an American tragedy...

...Today, though, they are not even listed in the catalogues of the libraries where his Nero Wolfe mysteries compete in rapid circulation with Christie's tales of M. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple...

...Stout liked money and was used to having plenty of it, but now that he needed it, with the first of his two daughters on the way, the Depression was wiping out his income...

...Rex Stout's books and I have much enjoyed them...

...Even while reminding herself that she had sold billions of books, and that one of her characters had become a clue in a London Times crossword puzzle ("the High Water mark of fame"), she could allow herself to be snubbed by her husband's aloof young assistant...

...The Mysterious Affair at Styles resulted...

...rated by some critics at the time of their publication (1929-34) as better than Faulkner's...

...Nero Wolfe might well respond "Pfui...

...He was an early Leftist, helping to organize the New Masses and then withdrawing when it came under Communist control...

...They let her be...

...Stout's mother—though her "advanced" principles would not permit her to criticize—was deeply disappointed that he had taken murder as his subject...

...A dozen years later, Adolf Hitler would stand on the same spot...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" If you want to be a successful mystery writer, first choose a mother with a questing and credulous mind...

...Of Rex Stout's mother, descended from the brother of Benjamin Franklin, an old friend said, "Her curiosity about everything from 'Hudson's Laws of Psychic Phenomena' to 'Solar Biology' persisted until the end...

...His attraction for readers is supposed to be his godlike omnipotence, the assurance he gives of being able to learn everything, solve all problems, and in the end protect us from what we most fear, death...

...The book's loose ends and lapses in grammar would shock M. Poirot with his passion for order...

...Since reviewers said his novels often rang melodious changes on the brazen flanks of detective fiction," as his biographer chooses to put it, "he decided to try his hand at detective stories...

...That charming reminiscence was written during World War II, when she wanted to feel close to her husband, who was on dangerous duty far away...

...And this appetite seems to be increasing everywhere, growing by what it feeds on...

...Although Stout kept on turning out his novels—one or two a year, his first draft (produced in 35 days) the final one—he never lost the conscience implanted in him by his Quaker upbringing...

...She is most amazing when she introduces the Arab postmaster and chauffeur, the site foremen, religious Muslims, sheikhs, and French officials she came to know while spending part of each year in Iraq and Syria helping her archeologist husband, Max Mallowan...

...One novel, Absent in the Spring, finished in a 48-hour rush to express a truth she found compelling, turned out to be dreary and banal...

...This was remembered by Rex' sister Ruth, the famous provider of formulas against arthritis in the joints and weeds in the garden—and also of the liveliest material in John McAleer's heavy-handed, pretentiously "scholarly" biography...

...Each person she meets in the autobiography speaks as an individual—unpredictable, surprising, believable...

...But most are sincerely enthusiastic...

...In Paris, "One day Rex went to the In-valides and spent some time staring down at Napoleon's tomb...

...As the Bible says, 'Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?' " Agatha Christie: An Autobiography carries this happy-go-lucky defeatism a bit far...

...The superman detective has always been a great moral justification for murder mysteries...

...Rex Stout, too, had doubts about his own stature...

...Such diffidence makes the memoir by turns halting and discursive...

...Anthony Eden, Lord of Avon, states: "I have had the pleasure of reading some of Mr...

...If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene," she confides in this memoir, written between the ages of 60 and 75, "I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know I can't, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them...

...Rex Stout, as he grew older, stated more and more definitely that Nero Wolfe had killed his own wife...

...Mais tout de meme," he might add, "Ce livre, he is tres in-teressant...

...Jacques Barzun of Columbia University cries: "What sinewy, pellucid, propelling prose...

...Christie, born in 1891, attempted at mid-career to write serious fiction under the pen name Mary Westma-cott...

...A second novel, Unfinished Portrait, seems to give us many details omitted in the autobiography about the break-up of her first marriage and the subsequent mental collapse that ended with an attempted suicide...

...Buried among the exhaustive research is a fascinating story that Ruth could happily have told in a hundred pages...

...During World War II he gave his services to the government, organizing writers for propaganda and urging them into a hate-the-Germans line that not all accepted...

...Intellectuals will joyfully accept prose in detective stories that they would scorn in other novels, apparently just for the pleasure of the kill...

...She had nine children (Rex, born in 1886, was the sixth), and to give herself reading space "kept a pan of cold water and a washcloth at her elbow...

...But if now the all-wise, all-powerful detective himself becomes the killer, where are we to hide...

...McAleer tallies these, of course...

...She tends to condense this phase of her life, since she described it once before in Come Tell Me How You Live...

...But in her detective fiction the effect was spoiled by the plot's twists and turns...

...To write profound things about the human soul," he reasoned in making a crucial decision for his future, "your feelings about it have to be very deep, very difficult, as Dostoyevsky's were, or Melville's, or Balzac's...

...Slipshod as Christie often is, her hand is sure when people begin to talk...

...A certain arrogance, too, a determination to swing his weight in the world, impelled him to take strong public positions...

...Agatha Christie, who was an amiable woman, if a somewhat limited thinker, after learning to strew her fiction with corpses, could not resist the final touch in Curtain: She let Poirot, the scourge of killers, himself become one...

...She simply did not regard herself as worthy of as much attention as those around her—whether an Arab houseboy or a wilful stray dog...

...Long after his own arrangements were all that any author could ask, he went on fighting for contracts with publishers that would guarantee fair treatment to writers with less bargaining clout...

...His growing tendency to extremism led ultimately to the kind of rigid anti-Communism that made it possible for him to write a letter to Richard Nixon praising his policy in Vietnam...

...Rex Stout is laid out with each small section headed by a tribute from some famous person...

...For his stand on racism see the scene in Too Many Cooks (1946), where Nero Wolfe questions 14 black hotel workers...

...Christie never thought of herself as a "real" author...

...here no such distortion occurs...

...This ability to hear and reproduce very special kinds of speech calls for a concentration that Christie would not have admitted—perhaps did not realize—she always could bring to her work...

...Christie and Stout, brought up in different worlds—one lonely in the care of an English nanny, the other surrounded by competitively creative Midwestern siblings—had highly imaginative childhoods...

...And he searches for the seeds of fictional conflict in every pulp story from Stout's first, "Excess Baggage," published in October 1912, and comments on the most ephemeral articles about cooking and orchids signed by Nero Wolfe...

...He had already been in the Navy, written pulp fiction successfully and set up a school banking system with his brother that continued to pay him $30,000 a year after he left the management and set off with his second wife, Pola, for Paris and "legitimate" writing...

...That was in 1933, when Stout was 47...

...Between seven and 12 he read all Shakespeare's plays and memorized the sonnets...

...Nor did she feel too privileged to wade through miles of mud, try to sleep with mice crawling over her, or spend hours crouched on her knees in a 110-degree cubbyhole filtering sand out of cocoa-like water to develop the pictures she had taken of her husband's finds...

...Also she wanted to oblige the people who were "always asking...