Good Writing & Mysteries: Rex Stout

Like romances, mysteries--especially "pulp" mysteries--can come in for unfair criticism. 

I'm not a huge Rex Stout fan, but the reason has nothing to do with his writing. I simply prefer the A&E version of Nero Wolfe, which, like Bertie & Wooster, appears to be perfectly rendered. 

I have read a few Rex Stouts and Archie Goodwin's voice is one of the strongest on record. As many mystery aficionados point out, Archie is as much a detective in his own right as Nero Wolfe though with a radically different approach and personality.

And The League of Frightened Men is a fantastically well-written book. 

As the book reaches its denouement, Archie gets knocked out with sleeping pills. This is not an unusual circumstance in action-mystery books. Rex Stout's writing stands out here because he keeps to first-person yet entirely places the reader in Archie's position. It is not always easy to describe tragedy when people are enduring it and it is even more difficult to explain shock since the point with shock is that people are not thinking clearly. 

The passages of Archie reviving are not only superbly rendered, they are poignant. Archie revives and naturally finds himself at loose ends. But he is a survivalist at heart and manages to crawl to the telephone. But he isn't entirely sure what he is doing except trying to reach Nero Wolfe. Even more remarkably, in keeping with Archie's usual voice, he doesn't try to explain himself or his circumstances. The reader gains an image of a young man at loose ends curled up on the floor beside a telephone table desperately trying to reach the most fundamental safety he knows:

It looked so far away that the desire to lie down and give it up made me want to yell to show I wouldn't do that, but I couldn't yell. I finally got to the stand and sat down on the floor against it and reached up for the phone and got the receiver off and shoved it against my ear, and heard a man's voice very faint. [He contacts Fritz who tells him that Mr. Wolfe has left to look for him.] I was having a hard time holding the phone, and it dropped to the floor, the whole works, and my head fell into my hands with my eyes closed, and I suppose what I was doing you would call crying. 

At one point, after help arrives, Archie tries to find his leather case, given to him by Nero Wolfe. He can't find it and he begins to cry again, behavior that he never exhibits in other, even more charged, circumstances. The relation of events is stark, and Archie never excuses himself. He isn't explaining. He is delivering the frustration and out-of-sync behavior of a man under duress.  

Great writing!