The Last Drive and Other Stories

The Last Drive is a detective fiction novel — a murder mystery — that was serialized in Golfers Magazine in six installments from July to December 1916. Golfers Magazine primarily consisted of non-fiction for golfing enthusiasts, but some issues included a piece of golf-related fiction.

Rex Stout was never known as a golfing enthusiast, and the fact that he published fiction in Golfers Magazine was entirely unsuspected until 2011, when researcher Cattleya Concepcion came across a citation to this story in a Copyright Office register while searching under Stout’s name for something else. (It is fortuitous that the story was listed under Stout’s name; everything Stout published in other magazines during this period was copyrighted in the magazine owners’ names, not Stout’s.)

Stout’s earlier novella Justice Ends at Home and The Last Drive are the two main pieces from Stout’s early writing career from which one might have extrapolated important elements of the early Nero Wolfe books written twenty years later. But to say more of The Last Drive would spoil the story, so let us hold our thoughts for the afterword.