The Mother Hunt

Introduction

I can’t help it: I’m a sucker for quality and an admirer of someone who can take a set of basic materials and use simple tools to transform them into something vibrant, unique, and enduring. And that’s exactly what Rex Stout has done in the Nero Wolfe series.

Even before I met him on the pages of a book fifteen years ago, I knew quite a lot about Nero Wolfe. His reputation had preceded him: he was an imposing giant of a man who holed up in a spectacular midtown Manhattan brownstone, grew orchids, was a beer aficionado … and he was distinctly uncomfortable in the company of women.

Despite some initial reluctance to spend a whole book’s worth of time with a man who flirted with misogyny, I took the plunge. Wolfe, after all, had the good sense to live in Manhattan, and besides, you had to like a man who surrounded himself with exotic tropical plants, consumed epicurean meals, and had the chutzpah to make the universe conform to his rules. And when I met Archie Goodwin, his ebullience and his earthy, rakish charm won me over.

Hooked, I devoured as many Nero Wolfe books as I could find in one gluttonous wintertime reading orgy. Toward the end of the tenth book I realized that, cabin fever aside, I was getting impatient. I wanted to see Wolfe shaken up a little; the man was becoming downright complacent. And in The Mother Hunt that’s exactly what happens: Nero Wolfe not only leaves his brownstone, he actually sleeps in a strange bed in a different house. And to make matters more tenuous for the great man, he’s forced into several face-to-face meetings with women.

Delicious! With these challenges to the known and predictable world, Wolfe is thrown off balance. Will he wobble into ineffectiveness? Will the resounding fall make front-page headlines in all of New York City? Devoted readers of the series grow breathless wondering about the effects of everything tossed topsy-turvy. Suspense abounds as the bodies pile up and Nero Wolfe is forced to search for a solution without the solace of his orchids and his routine, his so-very-rational thought processes in danger of being corrupted by close contact with a woman.

Wolfe, of course, declines to be undone and he triumphs. Critical to solving the case is Archie’s delight in the company of women, in direct proportion to the discomfort his boss feels. From the vantage of the 1990s, Archie seems especially astute. Following a conversation with a woman, Archie observes, “Her reaction to the report had been in the groove for a woman. She had wanted to know what Carol Mardus had said, every word, and also how she had looked and how she had been dressed. There was an implication that the way she had been dressed had a definite bearing on the question, was Richard Valdon the father of the baby? but of course I let that slide. No man with any sense assumes that a woman’s words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.”

The italics are mine but the observation is pure Archie and way ahead of its time. Not until the nineties did gender differences in communication styles become a hot topic. I wonder whether Rex Stout considered himself a pioneer.

Despite Wolfe’s daring foray beyond Thirty-fifth Street, The Mother Hunt is really vintage Stout: lots of grumbling and fine dining and brilliant thinking on Wolfe’s part, while Archie has a grand old time out and about in the world. Rex Stout made the most of the contrast between thinker and doer, achieving a delicate, ever-changing balance between the curmudgeonly detective and his bubbly assistant. Yet just when Wolfe seems a purely cerebral being, his physical bulk and the very corporeal acts of eating and drinking remind you that he is indeed a creature of the flesh. Whenever Archie appears to be all action, chasing from button manufacturer to baby-sitter to a beachfront rendezvous with the shapely client in the name of detection, he comes up with a brilliant ploy proving that he is no slouch in the thinking department.

Between them, Wolfe and Archie ensure that justice will ultimately prevail, and they do it within a classic structure. The reader in me recognizes that the opening of The Mother Hunt is a staple of private-eye fiction, the ending a fixture of the “cozy village” mystery. The book begins with a client coming to Wolfe for help, and at once questions arise. Is she all that she seems, or is there a womanly abundance of secrets lurking in her past? Does she really want a solution to the question she hired Wolfe to answer, or is she after something else? Given Wolfe’s feelings about women, it’s easy to project duplicity all over the place. And after a Wolfe-thinks-Archie-does investigation, the final scene gathers the suspects together for a drawing-room confrontation/revelation.

The writer in me admires Rex Stout’s ability to shape those elements into something uniquely his.

I understood something about Rex Stout’s skill as a writer when I had the personal good fortune to meet one of his daughters, Rebecca Stout Bradbury, a warm, intelligent woman with a forthright gaze and a gracious charm that immediately put me at my ease. During the morning I spent with her, we talked about her father, our own children, and the state of the American economy. And she showed me several pieces of furniture—a desk and a dresser stand out in my memory—that her father had made.

The wood was so smooth it glowed with a burnished light. Strong and true joints (no nails used here!) held together the graceful, sturdy pieces, carefully crafted and lovingly made. When I was in school, girls took home ec. while boys went to shop. Harder, more mysterious than French toast, for sure, making furniture still seems to me to be just short of magic. The lightness of each element contributes to a whole somehow greater, more pleasing in its finished state than its parts would suggest.

The same can be said of Rex Stout’s mysteries, I realized on my way home that day. He chose his materials with care—characters with zest and a good share of quirky charm; a setting so palpable and familiar you can practically smell it; plots that play on readers’ assumptions—and he crafted them with the same attention to detail, sure hand, and joy in the act of creation that it takes to make fine furniture.

Lingering visions of rollt op desks and dressers with hidden jewelry compartments danced in my head as I drove home. And inspiration struck as I walked in my front door and nearly tripped over one of the piles of books that seem to sprout everywhere in my house.

Aha, I thought, maybe Rex Stout would have suggested a little extracurricular woodshop: learn how to make mortise-and-tenon joints for a new set of book- cases and thicken my plot at the same time….