Trouble in Triplicate Rex Stout Series: Nero Wolfe [15] Published: 1993 Tags: Cozy Mystery, Vintage Mystery, Early 20th Century
Cozy Mysteryttt Vintage Mysteryttt Early 20th Centuryttt
SUMMARY: A repackaged Nero Wolfe mystery--the perfect companion for anyone who savors a good murder served up with true flair. Features an introduction by noted writer Randy Russell and never-before-published memorabilia from the life of Rex Stout.
Rex Stout
Trouble in Triplicate
Introduction
Nero Wolfe gives me the creeps. I warn my friends to stay away from him. He is anything but ideal.
He grows those damn flowers, for one thing. They’re orchids brought indoors from the nether reaches of the rain forest, as I understand it. In blossom, orchids look like veined slices of flesh, slivers of pale tissue, of muscle limp in humidity. They’re fed on feces and filtered sky. Orchids are a rare delicacy when grown indoors in New York City, on the roof of a brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street. I suspect Nero Wolfe of eating them.
Of course, he’s always eating. Nero Wolfe is a monster screaming to be fed. The ravenous Wolfe, whose body exists only to be endlessly fed, is the plant from another planet. But which one? Nero Wolfe is also the imperial, if closeted, mind. Rather than bodiless, he has been given a body grown too large, grown to universal uselessness. I think the planet he’s from exists within the solar system of our own thought processes. He’s the huge embodiment of the human mind.
Locked inside his own Draculan loathing of direct sunlight, of the outdoors (as if exposure would blister him), Nero Wolfe is the mystery reader’s brain in a jar. He’s a brain with a voice, but a voice of mere reasonings afloat in the solution of crimes.
That’s as spooky as it gets. Yessiree, we’ve got a monster on our hands. Folded inside all that idle flesh is the working metaphor of the working mind. Thought, like tiny bits of light, is brought into the shadowy recesses, absorbed and stored, swollen with the occasional illumination of a blossoming idea. This is spooky stuff in a big way. It gives me chills. And I love it. But I no more want to touch him than I want to drill a hole in my skull and place a fingertip to my pulsing brain. Luckily, I don’t have to touch Nero Wolfe to know him. I have Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, to do that for me.
It generally takes reading three Nero Wolfe stories, in any order, before one begins to fully understand what’s going on between the mammoth man locked inside the brownstone and his seeming errand boy, likable Archie Goodwin. It is the relationship of these two characters that makes up the heart and soul of Rex Stout’s work. I like to think of it as a marriage of men, though I don’t always understand how the two of them get along. Archie is normal, after all.
Those who have mistaken Archie Goodwin as mere chronicler, as sounding board; those who have read one or two Nero Wolfe mysteries, by once or twice picking up a book found in a room or on a train, are missing the game. Three doses of Stout and the magic begins. Three doses of Stout, in any order, and Archie takes over as the character of interest.
Archie is Nero Wolfe’s sustenance. The immobile genius thrives on the details of Archie Goodwin’s activities. And Archie, despite his reluctance at times, is wedded to the eunuch mind inside the boundless bulk of Nero Wolfe.
They need each other. Archie feeds Nero Wolfe precise pieces of reality, facts from the real world outside the prison of Wolfe’s brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street, outside the prison of Wolfe’s intolerable immobility. Archie tends the monster so that the monster may live.
Why does Archie want him to live? Archie Goodwin’s need of Nero Wolfe is less easily defined. Archie, who possesses the complete range of humanity, from red-hot lust to the good humor of sassing the boss, is attracted to the genius of Nero Wolfe. Sometimes it seems that Archie’s own sense of justice keeps him feeding the freak. Archie wants the various crimes solved for the benefit of mankind.
Other times, Archie just gets a kick out of showing up the cops. He couldn’t do that without Nero Wolfe. Archie gets real satisfaction from Nero Wolfe’s successes. Maybe it’s an addiction. You’ll have to ask him. Maybe it’s a trick Nero Wolfe is playing on him. Who wouldn’t want to be a vital part of the solution to a mystery? Archie can’t break the habit. And Nero Wolfe can’t function without Archie. By manipulating him, however, Nero Wolfe controls Archie Goodwin and is thereby himself continuously fed. Like I said, pretty normal stuff for a marriage.
Rex Stout, as an author, can’t function without the reader. And the reader is manipulated by being continuously fed. It’s frightening, but after three doses of Rex Stout you, too, may be addicted. The fat white spider in the brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street catches another fly.
I caution you not to read this book unless you are prepared to be trapped, unless you are prepared for your own demise. I find Nero Wolfe, the fertile, the fecund mind, troubling, as troubling as I find the dark corners of my own mind.
I can’t get away from either one of them.
By reading Trouble in Triplicate you’ll be caught up by Archie and the monster mind. You won’t escape. There’ll be no place to hide.
Trouble in Triplicate is trouble in kind. It requires three stories of brownstone to contain the bulk of Nero Wolfe. If after reading three Nero Wolfe mysteries you are capable of pulling yourself free from the clutches of Rex Stout, you are stronger than most. You are stronger than Archie or I. We’re destined to return, to open the door to Nero Wolfe’s creepy old brownstone and walk right in for another but never a final time.
–Randy Russell
1. Before I Die
I
That Monday afternoon in October, life indoors was getting to be more than I cared to take. Meaning, by indoors, the office of Nero Wolfe, where I worked, on the ground floor of the house he owned on West Thirty-fifth Street not far from North River. Relief was due soon, since he spent two hours every afternoon, from four to six, with the orchids up in the plant rooms on the roof, but it was still thirty minutes short of four o’clock and I had had all of him I could stand for a while. I wasn’t blaming him; I was merely fed up with him. It was smack in the middle of the Great Meat Shortage, when millions of pigs and steers, much to the regret of the growers and slaughterers, had sneaked off and hid in order to sell their lives dear, and to Nero Wolfe a meal without meat was an insult. His temper had got so bad that I had offered to let him eat me, and it would be best to skip his retort. By that Monday afternoon he had got so desperate that he had started taking long walks, as, for instance, back and forth between his chair and the bookshelves, and sometimes even through the door into the front room, which faced on Thirty-fifth Street.
So at three-thirty I told him I was going out for an errand down the street, and he was sunk so far in misery and malice that he didn’t even demand to know what the errand was. Then, just as I was reaching for my hat on the rack in the hall, the doorbell rang. I let the hat wait, stepped to the door and opened it, and what I saw jerked my mind loose from the fastenings where it had got glued onto Wolfe’s huff. Standing there on the stoop was one of the most obvious articles I had ever looked at. Though the sun had been shining all day and still was, he had on a raincoat, belted tight. His hat, a glossy black felt number, was too small for him, and it looked out of place for the lids of his light gray eyes to be open because his face was embalmed-or, at least, after he had breathed his last and had been embalmed, his face would look exactly the way it looked now. “Your name’s Goodwin,” he told me impolitely, without overexerting any muscles.