These changes were by no means matter-of-fact substitutions. Although the new story was only a third as long as the original, compactness actually gave it a snap and purpose that it lacked before. Most of the members of the supporting cast were enhanced. They were not on stage as long as they had been before, so the moment an opportunity came their way, they made their presence felt. By dividing Fox’s responsibilities between Wolfe and Archie, Rex showed how incomparable and how indispensable were the distinctive attributes of each member of his sublime duo. Each does superbly what Fox was able to do merely adequately. Working once again with the characters he loved best, Rex found ways to involve them intimately in events as they unfolded.
In Bad for Business, Tecumseh Fox learns secondhand that someone (in a prefiguration of the Tylenol tragedy of later times) is adulterating, apparently with sinister intent, Tingley’s Tidbits, a liver paté. In “Bitter End,” Nero Wolfe actually partakes of the paté, which is laced with quinine, and all but explodes at the dinner table, splattering a landscape that includes Archie. Predictably, and reminiscent of his duel to the death with Arnold Zeck, he commits himself to seeking out and revenging himself on the adulterator. Furthermore, Cramer abducts a guest from Wolfe’s brownstone, simultaneously giving new scope to Wolfe’s vendetta and a scope to Cramer’s own performance that, by contrast, diminishes Inspector Damon’s role. In Bad for Business, Tecumseh Fox learns secondhand of a bloody murder. In “Bitter End,” Archie arrives on the murder scene as one of the first witnesses. Surprisingly, though Fox openly romances the heroine in Bad for Business, in “Bitter End,” Archie, though solicitous, keeps his distance. This enables Archie to give needed support to Amy’s true suitor, the inept Leonard Cliff.
The viewpoint in Bad for Business is that of the omniscient author. In “Bitter End,” naturally, Archie is the narrator. Rex Stout had proven that he could bring startling piquancy to a plot by relinquishing control of it to Archie, and we must concede that Stout showed excellent judgment in letting Archie be his spokesman throughout the Wolfe saga. When “Archie took control of the narrative,” he said, he himself was no longer responsible for what Archie said and did. And he meant it. So successful were the results in “Bitter End” that we must regret that Rex was never motivated to rewrite each of the Fox stories as Wolfe stories, with Archie narrating. Let those who may undertake to continue the saga not leave that avenue unexplored. In “Bitter End,” Rex Stout showed that it can be done with complete success.
It was not by chance that Bad for Business was never given separate hardcover publication in the United States or that Rex Stout dropped Fox after a few appearances. “Fox wasn’t a created character, like Wolfe,” Rex conceded. “He was put together piece-by-piece and wasn’t worth a damn.” Nonetheless, Fox’s precedence as the sleuth who unknotted the tangled Tingley fortunes (in Bad for Business) made Rex reluctant to include “Bitter End” in his volumes of Wolfe novellas. Stout never went back and reread the story because he could not forget that Wolfe had been called in on the case as someone from whom a second opinion was sought. It was not becoming to Wolfe’s dignity to sit him down to another man’s leavings.
Rex ought to have remembered that a good story always stands the test of rereading. And “Bitter End,” like the other seventy-two stories in the corpus, passes that test beyond quibble or sneer. Perhaps if Rex had remembered that it was this story that had shown him that Wolfe and Archie could thrive in a novella quite as well as in a novel, he would have given it due acknowledgment. Actually, in the last year of his life he may have come to that realization when he gave Michael Bourne permission to bring the story out in a limited edition of five hundred copies. Bourne conceived of this edition as a tribute to mark, in 1976, Rex’s ninetieth birthday. Plans for it were still afoot when Rex died. In 1977, it appeared instead in the volume called Corsage, as a memorial tribute. Although its publication brought joy to those who were aware of it, the restriction Rex had placed on the number of copies to be printed resulted in a volume known to few readers who were not avid bibliophiles.
The entry in Rex Stout’s Writing Record for “Murder Is No Joke,” appears between the entries for If Death Ever Slept and Champagne for One. It reads: “Murder Is No Joke” — 48 pp. Began 8/5/57, finished 8/15/57. 1 day out, 10 days writing time.” Rex’s breakdown, reporting his day by day output, shows that he worked on the story on eleven different days but counted two days as half days because he did not put in a full nine hours at his desk. On the thirteenth he had been interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. On the fifteenth he quit early because half a day’s work brought him to the end of his labors. As usual, of course, he did no revision. Whatever had to be done was always done in his head. The first draft was always the only draft. “Murder Is No Joke” was the fourth story Rex worked on that year, because, in addition to If Death Ever Slept, which he had begun in mid-May and finished in mid-June, he had finished “Easter Parade” in the first days of the new year, and then in March, in nine days, had written “Fourth-of-July Picnic.” All were Nero Wolfe stories. Indeed, after World War II he wrote nothing else.
Notations in Rex’s file on “Murder Is No Joke” disclose further writing labors for that year that were not entered in the Writing Record. On November 23, to oblige The Saturday Evening Post, he began work on an expanded version of “Murder Is No Joke.” Taking only two days off, Sunday the twenty-fourth and Saturday the thirtieth, to celebrate his seventy-first birthday (when family and friends gathered at High Meadow, his eighteen-acre domain at Danbury, Connecticut), he completed the rewrite in thirteen days, having increased the original forty-eight pages to seventy-nine. Characteristically (Rex found holidays disruptive and, within reasonable limits, preferred to ignore them), he had written five pages on Thanksgiving Day and four on his birthday. Typically, also, he had not merely padded the old manuscript. He had thought the story through again, adding much that was new and enhancing what he kept. Now two different versions of the story existed, the latter clearly the superior of the former. Since that fact was self-evident, it should logically have followed that the original was suppressed in favor of the rewrite.
Yet that is not what happened. On February 14, 1958, as “Murder Is No Joke,” the original was published in And Four to Go. On June 21, June 28, and July 5, 1958, as “Frame-Up for Murder,” the rewrite was published in three installments in The Saturday Evening Post. Those who owned the book probably never compared their version to the Post’s version. Those who read the Post’s version probably never compared it to the version in And Four to Go. Thus no one complained that thirty-one pages of vintage Stout were buried in back issues of The Saturday Evening Post. But they were, and that was deplorable. Here, after a twenty-eight-year delay, as “Frame-Up for Murder” achieves publication in book form another injustice is swept away.