In “Frame-Up for Murder,” Inspector Cramer is given more to do than he was given in “Murder Is No Joke.” We may commend him, perhaps, for his restraint in not pointing out that this attempt to deceive Wolfe repeats an episode from The Rubber Band. Perhaps it was Cramer’s prudence on this occasion that induced Rex Stout to allow him to speak the words “Murder is no joke,” which gave the story its title and accounts, as well, for Wolfe’s generous reiteration of these words at a crucial moment in the story. It is surprising to observe, in scrutinizing the original manuscript, that Rex Stout once marked these words for excision. It is more surprising yet, to discover from his notes that originally he had settled on a different murderer. No harm can come from mentioning the name now, because no reasonable reader will see him as a possible suspect. We are referring to Carl Drew! It was a good day’s work when Rex changed his mind.
While odd circumstances attended the writing of “Bitter End” and “Frame-Up for Murder,” the history of one other Wolfe novella is even more unusual — that is, the story serialized as “The Counterfeiter’s Knife” in The Saturday Evening Post, in the issues for January 14, 21, and 28, 1961. Unaltered, the same story was published the following year as “Counterfeit for Murder” in Homicide Trinity, one of the tripartite Wolfe volumes. Rex’s Writing Record for this story reads: “73 pp. Began 3/6/59, finished 3/31/59. 9 days out, 17 days writing time.” His breakdown of days shows that he actually worked on it on twenty-three different days, but sometimes only for short intervals, which he recorded as fractions of days. Only on the nineteenth and twentieth, when he was in New York, and on the twenty-ninth, Easter Sunday, was he away from his desk entirely. For Rex to give so much time to a single novella was unusual. But we do not have to look far for an explanation. As he noted in his Writing Record, underlining the word twice for emphasis, the story he wrote in that twenty-six-day interval was a “Rewrite.” Just ahead of the entry given above he had recorded these particulars concerning the original version of the story: “ ‘Counterfeit for Murder’ — 74 pp. Began 1/22/59, finished 2/11/59. 3 days out, 18 days writing time.” Only on two days did he do no writing at all, the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of January, when he had to be in Providence. Fractions of days show that he could have reduced the total of working days by another three, making, in all, five days out. But, all things considered, the work had gone well; so that, quite up to his usual average, he had written four or five pages on twelve of the nineteen days he had written. Nothing in his notes suggests that he was dissatisfied with the results. Yet, less than a month later, he discarded all but the first seven pages of this story and, starting again at that point, took events in a direction so contrary to that in which they had moved before, that the lady who quickened Archie’s heartbeat in the original is here hastily dispatched with a bread knife, and the dowdy boardinghouse keeper, who had promptly fallen prey to a hit-and-run motorist in the first version, here escapes with a grazing, is reanimated, and given liberty to engage Wolfe as well as Archie in some of the liveliest dialogue to be found anywhere in the corpus. She, Anthony Boucher said of Miss Hattie Annis, “is the most entertaining client to visit West Thirty-fifth Street in some time.” And indeed she was.
A perusal of the two versions of “Counterfeit for Murder” shows that Hattie Annis’s reappearance is so thoroughly desirable that it completely justifies Rex Stout’s repudiating his folly in snuffing out a character that was endowed with her remarkable vitality. But was that the actual reason for his decision? We can only conjecture because, on July 11, 1972, when I asked Rex why he had rewritten this story, he said, “There must be a reason, but I have forgotten what it was.” We know, at least, that Rex was not acting on the advice of anyone else, either editor or friend, because, in the twenty-three-day interval that elapsed between his completing the original and beginning the rewrite, he had shown the manuscript to no one. He arrived at the decision entirely on his own. Only one possible explanation can be offered. In that interval Rex had spent a fishing holiday, at Paradise Island, Florida, with his friend Nathaniel Selleck (the second of the three Nathaniel Sellecks who were Rex’s physicians successively over a forty-five-year period). On the day that Rex returned from Florida, word reached him that Dr. Selleck had dropped dead moments after his departure. On receipt of the news Rex resumed writing at once, perhaps, in the creative act of calling back to life someone who had died, resorting to a form of therapy mysterious to some but not at all mysterious to those who write.
Hattie Annis is the most successful of several characters Rex based on his mother’s sister, Alice Todhunter Bradley, who as a young woman, in the 1880s, traveled through the West alone, lecturing, serving as schoolmistress to Brigham Young’s kin and, eventually, as a confidante to Eugene Debs. In the original “Counterfeit for Murder” Hattie does not meet Nero Wolfe. In the rewrite she not only meets him, she flabbergasts him by asking him for “lamb kidneys bourguignonne” when he invites her to lunch. This scene alone justifies the rewrite. Rarely is Nero Wolfe ever put out of countenance by anyone. By story’s end Wolfe is won over by Hattie’s homely candor and integrity. No mistake about it, Hattie is a straight-arrow.
If it is incumbent on us to ask what else readers gain in the rewrite of “Counterfeit for Murder,” the question can at least be speedily answered. Wolfe is given more to do here. Once again he is able to utilize, to good advantage, the services of Saul, Fred, and Orrie, and to stage one of his revealing assemblies. We also learn the source of the counterfeit bills, a detail skimped on in the original story. And, finally, Wolfe is able to compromise severely the dignity of Albert Leach (that his surname recalls a parasite is not accidental), a T-man whose patronizing attitude has awakened his indignation. This scene foreshadows Wolfe’s brilliant coup in humbling J. Edgar Hoover, six years later, in The Doorbell Rang.
We need not suppose that the rewrite of “Counterfeit for Murder” cannibalized the original, stripping from it its most meritorious parts. Tamaris Baxter, who changes roles with Hattie in the rewrite, to become the needed corpse, is intelligent and resourceful but a bit starchy, probably because she is not the person she pretends to be. To dispense with her is no hardship. But the original story has several wonderful scenes that can ill be spared. The restoration of them to a place in the corpus is a gain that all discriminating Neronians will applaud. Early in the story tensions run high between Wolfe and Archie. Archie comes upon Wolfe studying a terrestrial globe, “probably picking out a place for me to be exiled in.” Wolfe fires Archie, and Archie reports, “I turned and marched out, chin up, with my ego patting me on the back, and mounted the stairs to my room.” It is a joy to see Wolfe later weasel out of this commitment when he realizes he needs Archie after all.
Midway in the story we are treated to two superb scenes, one treading close on the heels of the other. Albert Leach, accompanied by a team of four other T-men, invades the brownstone and conducts an inch-by-inch search, even to sifting through the files in Wolfe’s office and the osmundine in his plant rooms. “ ‘My house has been invaded, my privacy has been outraged, and my belongings have been pawed,’ ” Wolfe declares. He locks himself in his bedroom and refuses to emerge until the T-men are gone. Unfortunately, for himself, Inspector Cramer chooses this disagreeable hour — it is eleven-thirty at night — to call, and Wolfe, with unprecedented vigor, uses his physical bulk to block his entrance, in what surely is one of the great moments of the saga.