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  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but, by the age of nine, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Nero Wolfe Mysteries

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  Other mysteries

  The Hand in the Glove

  Double for Death

  Bad for Business

  The Broken Vase

  The Sound of Murder

  Red Threads

  The Mountain Cat Murders

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  A FAMILY AFFAIR

  A Bantam Crime Line Book / published by arrangement with

  The Viking Press, Inc.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Viking edition published 1975

  Bantam edition / 1976

  Bantam reissue / February 1993

  CRIME LINE and the portrayal of a boxed “cl” are trademarks of Bantam Books,

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1975 by Rex Stout.

  Introduction copyright © 1993 by Thomas Gifford.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-15526.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

  form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin USA,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76815-5

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  The World of Rex Stout

  Introduction

  When I was a kid back in Dubuque, I developed several enthusiasms. Stan Kenton, P. G. Wodehouse, the Yankees, Adlai Stevenson, Tchaikovsky, Sinatra, Rex Stout. I should have stayed so bright! In the ensuing years I have been accused of being a typically phlegmatic, stubborn, comfort-loving Taurean, and, folks, that’s okay with me. I’m occasionally loyal to a fault—for instance, to a financial manager who lost all of my money on shady stock options—or so people have told me, and I guess that’s true, too. While I occasionally add new enthusiasms, it’s hell getting me to part with the old ones. In fact, it’s never been done. Take the foregoing list. What kind of jerk could ever grow weary of any of them?

  The years pass but some things endure, I guess, along the lines of Faulkner’s eternal verities. Personally, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with my belief that a whole lot of things really were a lot better back when I was a kid discovering my first enthusiasms. Certainly better than the fruits of progress that now surround, impinge on, and debase what we once quaintly referred to as “standards.” There are now millions and millions of creatures out there locked into their headphones, or bellowing their heads off in movie theaters, or chanting that the Red Sox or someone else “sucks.” These dullards are as unaware of what once served as concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, as a dog I know by the name of Bolivia is of space travel and the Hubble Telescope.

  This all comes to mind because I’ve been reading rather a lot of Rex Stout lately, and Rex Stout lived a very long and productive life devoted to just such principles and concepts. And yet Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels are in print! People are in fact buying them and reading them! Miracles do happen! How can this be? Because, I suppose, Stout wrote wonderful stories, and stories that hang together and involve you are pretty much available only on the printed page. They used to be there in the movies, but movie writing ain’t what it used to be. Anyway, Rex Stout, and by extension his timeless and therefore immortal creations Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, lived and wrote and built a fictional universe that was informed by a strict set of standards. Call it the morality of the civilized man. Not stuffy, boring, faux morality, but the real thing. Sure enough, somebody out there is reading this stuff.

  Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, American literature’s answer to Holmes and Watson, operate within a framework of right and wrong that is large enough and elastic enough and humane enough to encompass the issues Stout raised and faced during nearly half a century of worried, flustered, and frightened clients making their pilgrimages to the brownstone on West Thirty-fifth. And there the great detective gathers information and sends Archie forth to do his bidding and penetrates the mysteries and secrets of the rest of the world. Nero Wolfe gets it done.

  Is it any wonder, then, that Stout and Wodehouse were friends who mutually admired each other’s work? The worlds they constructed are perfect and true, and the point is not that they may never have existed but that they should have. Stout and Wodehouse created minutely detailed worlds, clockwork universes, to which the intelligence of a kind of superbeing might be applied to good effect, whether you’re thinking of Wolfe or Jeeves. And that’s where the comfort I so enjoy comes into it. And the comfort is precisely why one may read the novels of Stout and Wodehouse again and again and enjoy them each time as if they were new. It’s the character, the milieu, the manner—it all grabs you; you are back in the familiar world, you are safe, you are free t
o enjoy. Comfort.

  There is a wonderful formula at work in Stout and Wodehouse—formula in the very best, most instructive sense. The Colonel’s unique blend of herbs and spices, Pimm’s exact ingredients, Coke’s fabled recipe—all shrink in comparison. Workable formula is the key to all great fiction. Read Joseph Campbell on the hero in myth: he’ll convince you if you won’t just relax and take my word for it.

  Wolfe and Archie will somehow work it out. Nobody will rearrange the furniture in the office, or break the globe, or keep Wolfe from his appointed hours with the orchids. Or if they do interrupt the schedule and regularity of the establishment, they’ll damn well wish they hadn’t. And in the course of watching them work it out, you’ll learn a thing or two about words and moral philosophy and human nature and good food and God only knows what else. Through Wolfe and Archie, Stout shows you how people are supposed to behave. How grownups act when the pressure is on. So in the very best and wisest sense, and quite painlessly too, Stout shares his code with you and you are improved a bit. You would be hard-pressed indeed to find another popular writer of his era who more subtly and ably defined what it was to be civilized, to have standards.

  Which makes this, his final novel, completed shortly before his death, all the more remarkable. In the course of jotting down these remarks I have worked on the assumption that you are not unfamiliar with Wolfe and Archie. If indeed the novel you’re holding at this moment is your first journey into Wolfeland, I urge you to hold off reading it. There is a natural order to things, and the natural order of this particular thing is to read A Family Affair after you have read many others in the saga. In reading more or less chronologically, starting in the early 1930s, you will have the enormous pleasure of watching the whole thing develop, layer upon layer. It is worth watching, I assure you. And you will discover that Wolfe and Archie never age, though the world around them is changing and issues are dealt with that would have been incomprehensible a few years earlier. But Wolfe and Archie are immutable. Stout allowed as how it just would have been too much trouble, and besides, in the normal run Wolfe would have had to die—and Stout couldn’t bear that idea. More than once he said, “I want him to live forever!” And now he will.

  But you should build up to A Family Affair. In the first place, the adder has entered Eden. The comfort and certainty have been shaken and destroyed in a way previously unthinkable. Wolfe—and thereby the code, the standard, the very civilization—has been betrayed by someone close to him, someone he has always trusted. The viper at the bosom, damn right. It is a family affair, and the inevitable conclusion is that it must be dealt with inside the family—which drives Wolfe and Archie to actions unlike any others in their lives.

  And there is a parallel story as well—the story of Watergate and Nixon. This is Stout’s famous “Nixon book.” As Nixon betrayed America and the Constitution, and as the nation had to rid itself of the guilty one before going back to the business of life, so Nero Wolfe must face betrayal. And banish it. Nixon’s crimes pervade this novel, as they pervaded Stout’s thoughts at the time. Stout himself had lost some friends over his own support of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s war policies; yet he would not back down. He believed in the war and its aims. But equally steadfast was his anger and willingness to cast Nixon into the outer darkness over the subverting of the Constitution. Whatever Stout believed, he believed with passion.

  So I leave you with the “Nixon book.” It makes a fine companion piece, should you choose to link them, to another of his later novels, The Doorbell Rang, which is the “J. Edgar Hoover book.” Taking on Hoover and the FBI may have required even more of a damn-the-consequences attitude on Stout’s part. But most important, he is a novelist always in character himself, taking on both Hoover and Nixon toward the latter part of his life and sending them both packing.

  Stout is dead. Long live Stout and what he stood for. Great writing is always more than what it appears to be at first look. With that admonition I leave you to it. Pay attention!

  —Thomas Gifford

  Chapter 1

  When someone pushes the button at the front door of the old brownstone, bells ring in four places: in the kitchen, in the office, down in Fritz’s room, and up in my room. Who answers it depends on the circumstances. If it’s ten minutes to one at night and I’m out, no one does unless it won’t give up. If it keeps going, say for fifteen minutes, Fritz rolls out, comes up, opens the door the two inches the chain permits, and says nothing doing until morning. If I’m home I roll out, open a window and look down to see who it is, and deal with the problem.

  It doesn’t often ring at that hour, but it did that Monday night—Tuesday morning—late in October. I was home, but not up in bed. I was in the office, having just got in from taking Lily Rowan home after a show and a snack at the Flamingo. I always look in at the office to see if Wolfe has written anything on the pad on my desk. That night he hadn’t, and I was crossing to the safe to check that it was locked when the bell rang, and I went to the hall and through the one-way glass of the front door saw Pierre Ducos on the stoop.

  Pierre had often fed me. He had fed many people, in one of the three rooms upstairs at Rusterman’s restaurant. I had never seen him anywhere else—certainly never on that stoop in the middle of the night. I slipped the bolt back, opened the door, and said, “I’m not hungry, but come in.”

  He crossed the sill and said, “I’ve got to see Mr. Wolfe.”

  “At this hour?” I shut the door. “Not unless it’s life and death.”

  “It is.”

  “Even so.” I looked at him. I had never seen him without his uniform. I knew his age, fifty-two, but he looked older in a loose-fitting tan topcoat down to his knees. No hat. He looked as if inside of the topcoat he had shrunk, and his face looked smaller and seamier. “Whose life and death?”

  “Mine.”

  “You can tell me about it.” I turned. “Come along.”

  He followed me to the office. When I offered to take his coat he said he would keep it on, which was sensible, since the heat had been off for two hours, and we had lowered the thermostat four degrees to save oil. I moved up one of the yellow chairs for him and sat at my desk and asked him what it was.

  He gestured with both hands. “It’s what you said. Life and death. For me. A man is going to kill me.”

  “That won’t do. Good waiters are scarce, and anyway you’re not old enough to die. Who is he, and why?”

  “You make it a joke. Death is not a joke.”

  “Sure it is. It’s life that’s not a joke. Who’s going to kill you?”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Wolfe.”

  “He’s in bed asleep. He sees people only by appointment, but for you he would make an exception. Come at eleven in the morning. Or if it’s urgent, tell me.”

  “I—” He looked at me. Since he had seen me at close quarters at least fifty times, maybe a hundred, surely he had me sized up, so he may not have been considering me, but he was deciding something for at least ten seconds. He opened his mouth and shut it, then opened it again to speak. “You see, Mr. Goodwin, I know Mr. Wolfe is the greatest detective in the world. Felix says he is—not only Felix, everybody else. Of course you’re a good detective too, everybody knows that too, but when a man is sure he’s going to be killed unless he—unless …” His hands on his knees were fists, and he opened them, palms up. “I’ve just got to tell Mr. Wolfe.”

  “Okay. Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. What time do you go to work?”

  “I won’t go tomorrow.” He looked at his watch. “Just ten hours. If I could—there on that couch? I won’t need covers or anything. I won’t disturb anything. I won’t make any noise.”

  So he was really wide open, or thought he was. The couch, in the corner beyond my desk, was perfectly sleepable, as I knew from experience, having spent quite a few nights on it in emergencies, and on the other side of the projecting wall that made the corner was an equipped bathroom. But leaving anyone loose all night in the office, with the ten thousand items in the files and drawers, many of them with no locks, was of course out of the question. There were four alternatives: persuade him to tell me, go up and wake Wolfe, give him a bed, or bounce him. The first might take an hour, and I was tired and sleepy. The second was inadvisable. If I bounced him, and he couldn’t come at eleven in the morning because he was dead, the next time Wolfe lunched or dined in the little upstairs room at Rusterman’s he would be served by a new waiter, and that would be regrettable. Also, of course, I would be sorry.