Andrew McAleer is the author of 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists and co-editor (with Gay Toltl Kinman) of the mystery anthology Edgar & Shamus Go Golden, which has received three 2023 Shamus Award nominations from the Private Eye Writers of America. Andrew tells us he recently completed a volume of short mystery stories featuring his father’s Golden Age detective, Henry von Stray.  Previously he’s contributed a post about Edward D. Hoch to this site, and we expect that he’ll be posting sometime later this year about the work of James M. Cain.  —Janet Hutchings

In 1978, my father, John McAleer, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Rex Stout:  A Biography.  Although it is the definitive Stout biography, my father had more goodies to share about Rex, Nero, and Archie.  Accordingly, he published a companion to the biography consisting of his most memorable conversations with Rex Stout in a 74-page chapbook, Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout (1983, Pontes Press).

Their conversations take place at Rex’s New York/Connecticut estate, High Meadow, at various times from June 1972 until August 19, 1975.  While compiling Decree my father set out to answer the questions Stout fans would want answered, “[I]f Rex were alive answering his own mail.” In Decree readers can almost hear Rex’s stentorian voice discussing his craft, his peers, Nero and Archie, and the Wolfe corpus.

A mere 1,000 copies of Decree were printed and only a smattering distributed. Rex’s responses are too good to hoard. The following excerpts from Decree make their first online appearance anywhere exclusively for EQMM’s “Something is Going to Happen” followers. Enjoy!

* * *

McAleer:  Do you have a full grasp of your characters before your start to write?

Stout:  I know pretty much what my main characters are like, but beyond that I just have to wait to see what comes out of my typewriter.  I make up one-third of the things people say and do in the stories I write, but I have nothing to do with the rest.

McAleer:  How many days does it take you to finish a book?

Stout:  Thirty-eight.  The initial draft has always been the only draft, with an original and two carbons. . . . I have never revised . . .

McAleer:  A few critics say you don’t play fair with your readers.  What do you say?

Stout:  Every detective-story writer cheats.  The thing you have to ask yourself is how best to get away with it.  If a Watson tells it, you’re home free.  Your detective stays in the clear, where he belongs.  The most unforgivable thing a writer can do—I hate it—a man reports something to another man, has a conversation or sees something—“Of course there was one little thing that was important and he would keep it in his mind thereafter.”  And of course they don’t tell you.  It’s such a goddamn dirty little trick, and it’s unnecessary because, if you mention it, ninety-nine out of a hundred times you won’t be giving anything away.

McAleer:  Your culprits always capitulate plausibly.  Do you take care to see that they do?

Stout:  Everything in a story should be credible, but one of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder.  Therefore it is extremely important to “suspend disbelief” on that.  If you don’t, the story is spoiled.

McAleer:  Is a novelette easier to write than a novel?

Stout:  In a way, short fiction is harder to write than long.  An unnecessary page in a long novel doesn’t hurt it much, but an unnecessary sentence in a three-thousand-word story spoils it.

McAleer:  What are the advantages of using a first-person narrator to tell the Nero Wolfe stories?

Stout:  The big one, which Poe saw and used.  Since in a detective story the reader must not be inside the detective’s mind, third-person omniscience is impossible, and the best way to avoid it is to have someone else tell it.

McAleer:  What advice would you give a young writer who wants to develop a good prose style?

Stout: Read a lot and write a lot.  No one can develop “a good prose style” if it isn’t in him congenitally.  One of the essential elements of style is an excitement with words as words.  A man who didn’t have that couldn’t possibly have an interesting style.  How the hell could he?  It’s a damned shame they’ve stopped teaching Latin and Greek.  Almost any man who cares about things and words who did not have Greek probably regrets it.  I know I do.  I wish I’d had Greek.

McAleer:  Chesterton said once, “Next to the state of grace the most important thing you can have is a sense of humor.”  Do you agree?

Stout:  Yes, but my “state of grace” is not Chesterton’s.

McAleer: I know you like Jane Austen . . .

Stout: Probably, technically, she was the greatest novelist—Jane Austen. Jane Austen had an incredible, instinctive awareness of how to use words, which words to use, how to organize them . . . She was astonishing.

McAleer:  Do you hold Hammett in high regard?

Stout:  Certainly.  He was better than Chandler, though to read the critics you wouldn’t think so.  In fact, The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote. . .Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. . . .

McAleer: Did James M. Cain have any influence over your work?

Stout: Probably in a way, completely subconsciously, because I think he’s a hell of a good storyteller, a marvelous storyteller. I don’t think you can do it any better than The Postman Always Rings Twice. It can’t be done better than that…. There’s not a word in Cain that does not apply to the story he’s telling you. [Author’s Note: Cain died October 27, 1977, two years to the day after Stout.]

McAleer:  Did you ever meet Charles Laughton?  Do you think he could have portrayed Wolfe successfully?

Stout:  I met Laughton only once, at a party.  Of all the actors I have seen, I think he would have come closest to doing Nero Wolfe perfectly.  A motion picture producer (I forget who) asked him to do a series of Nero Wolfe movies, and he said he would agree to do one but would not commit himself to a series.

McAleer:  What would you have said in nineteen thirty-three if someone told you you had at least seventy more Nero Wolfe stories to write?

Stout:  “Nuts.”

McAleer:  How do you think your own reputation will stand?

Stout:  Obviously the books I’ve written have got something in them that distinguishes them from the ordinary run of books—obviously or there wouldn’t be all these goddamn articles and things, and I wouldn’t get all these letters.  What I don’t know is what the books have in them that lots of books don’t have.   I don’t know whether it’s the characters, or the ingenuity of the stories, or something about my basic attitude toward people and life that comes out in them.  I’m just curious as to what in the hell it is that, in so far as they are, makes them at all distinctive.  I’m very curious about it but I doubt if I’ll ever find out before I die. . . .

* * * Nearly a half-century after Stout’s death and almost a century after Wolfe’s birth, the Wolfe corpus remains “distinguished” and “distinctive.” The Wolfe Pack—the official Nero Wolfe literary society—continues to flourish and Wolfe and Archie are still fighting crime. For almost 40 years—with the full cooperation of Stout’s family—Nero-Award winning author Robert Goldsborough has done a superb job continuing the Wolfe mystery series.  Goldsborough’s latest Wolfe mystery, The Missing Heiress (his seventeenth [Mysterious Press, 2023]), has reached Amazon’s best-seller list in multiple categories. Based on the foregoing alone, even Wolfe would have to admit Stout’s reputation remains—satisfactory.