Nine Short Stories
By Rex Stout
Bill Farden had had his eye on the big brick house on the corner for some time.
He had worked one in that block—the white frame with the latticed porch farther down toward Madison Street—during the early part of March, and had got rather a nice bag. Then, warned off by the scare and hullabaloo that followed, he had fought shy of that part of town for a full month, confining his operations to one or two minor hauls in the Parkdale section. He figured that by now things would have calmed down sufficiently in this neighborhood to permit a quiet hour’s work without undue danger.
It was a night or would have been but for the street lamp on the corner. That mattered little since the right side of the house was in deep shadow anyway. By an oversight I have neglected to place the scene of the story in the vicinity of a clock tower, so Bill Farden was obliged to take out his watch and look at it to call attention to the fact that it was an hour past midnight.
He nodded his head with satisfaction, then advanced across the lawn to that side of the house left in deep shadow.
Two large windows loomed up side by side, then a wide expanse of brick, then two more. After a leisurely examination, he chose the second of the first pair. A ray from his electric flash showed the old-fashioned catch snapped too.
Grinning professionally, he took a thin shining instrument from his pocket, climbed noiselessly onto the ledge, and inserted the steel blade in the slit. A quick jerk, a sharp snap, and he leaped down again. He cocked his ear.
No sound.
The window slid smoothly upward to his push, and the next instant his deft accustomed hand had noiselessly raised the inner shade. Again he lifted himself onto the ledge, and this time across it, too. He was inside the house.
He stood for a time motionless, listening. The faintest of scratching noises came from the right.
“Bird,” Bill observed mentally, and his experienced ear was corroborated a moment later when the light of his electric flash revealed a canary blinking through the bars of its cage.
Genre: Mystery/Detective | Short Story Collection
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Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout (December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975) was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels, and 41 novellas and short stories, between 1934 and 1975.
In 1959, Stout received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. The Nero Wolfe Corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon XXXI, the world’s largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century.
In addition to writing fiction, Stout was a prominent public intellectual for decades. Stout was active in the early years of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founder of the Vanguard Press. He served as head of the Writers’ War Board during World War II, became a radio celebrity through his numerous broadcasts, and was later active in promoting world federalism. He was the long-time president of the Authors Guild, during which he sought to benefit authors by lobbying for reform of the domestic and international copyright laws,[specify] and served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1959.
Biography
Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, but shortly afterward his Quaker parents John Wallace Stout and Lucetta Elizabeth Todhunter Stout moved their family (nine children in all) to Kansas.
His father was a teacher who encouraged his son to read, leading to Rex having read the entire Bible twice by the age of four. At age thirteen he was the state spelling bee champion. Stout attended Topeka High School, Kansas, and the University of Kansas, Lawrence. His sister, Ruth Stout, also authored several books on no-work gardening and some social commentaries.
He served in the U.S. Navy from 1906 to 1908 (including service as a yeoman on Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential yacht) and then spent about the next four years working at a series of jobs in six states, including cigar-store clerk.
In 1910–11, Stout sold three short poems to the literary magazine The Smart Set. Between 1912 and 1918, he published about forty works of fiction in various magazines, ranging from literary publications such as Smith’s Magazine and Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine to pulp magazines like the All-Story Weekly.
Not his writing, but his invention of a school banking system in about 1916 gave him enough money to travel in Europe extensively. About 400 U.S. schools adopted his system for keeping track of the money that school children saved in accounts at school, and he was paid royalties.
In 1916, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They divorced in February 1932 and, in December 1932, Stout married Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, a designer who had studied with Josef Hoffmann in Vienna.
Writings
Rex Stout began his literary career in the 1910s writing for magazines, particularly pulp magazines, writing more than 40 stories that appeared between 1912 and 1918. Stout’s early stories appeared most frequently in All-Story Magazine and its affiliates, but he was also published in Smith’s Magazine, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Short Stories, The Smart Set, Young’s Magazine, and Golfers’ Magazine. The early stories spanned genres including romance, adventure, science fiction/fantasy, and detective fiction, including two serialized murder mystery novellas that prefigured elements of the Wolfe stories.
In 1916, Stout was tired of writing a story whenever he needed money. He decided to stop writing until he had made enough money to support himself through other means so that he would be able to write when and as he pleased. He wrote no fiction for more than a decade, until the late 1920s when he had saved substantial money through his school banking system. Ironically, just as Stout was starting to write fiction again, he lost most of the money that he had made as a businessman in the Great Depression of 1929.
In 1929, Stout wrote his first published book How Like a God, an unusual psychological story written in the second person and published by the Vanguard Press, which he had helped to found. During this phase of his writing career, Stout also published a pioneering political thriller The President Vanishes (1934), which was originally published anonymously.
In the 1930s, Stout turned to writing detective fiction. In 1933–34, he wrote Fer-de-Lance, which introduced Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin. The novel was published by Farrar & Rinehart in October 1934, and in abridged form as “Point of Death” in The American Magazine (November 1934). The characters of Wolfe and Goodwin are considered among Stout’s main contributions to detective fiction. Wolfe was described by reviewer Will Cuppy as “that Falstaff of detectives”.
Rex Stout
