Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 02 - The League of Frightened Men Read online

  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 he 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 freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and as 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 Erie 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,” a 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-eight. 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

  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

  Introduction

  The League of Frightened Men, published both by the Saturday Evening Post (in serialization) and by Farrar & Rinehart in 1935, was Rex Stout’s second Nero Wolfe novel, appearing the year after Fer-de-Lance. It ranks as a personal favorite, for several reasons.

  First, the story’s pivotal figure, the quirky, brilliant, and depraved Paul Chapin, supplies Wolfe with his most complex adversary, a far more intriguing character, for instance, than the megalomaniacal underworld kingpin Arnold Zeck, who makes his appearance several books deeper into the series.

  Chapin, author of “obscene” novels probing the dark side of the human spirit, was badly crippled as the result of a college hazing incident at Harvard. Chagrined classmates formed a “League of Atonement,” which paid his hospital bills and through the years tried in other, less tangible ways to make amends. Although accepting the group’s money and sympathy, Chapin remained bitter, sardonically reacting to their efforts.

  Now, at a class reunion, one member of the league falls to his death from a seaside cliff, and the others receive copies of a poem apparently authored by Chapin in which he claims credit for the act. Then another of the group dies violently, followed by another poem suggesting that more deaths will occur. And when a third member of the league disappears, Nero Wolfe is hired by remaining members to “stop Chapin.”

  Although famed clinician Karl Menninger praised the Wolfe stories because the detective “never dives into the realm of psychiatry” or “pretends to believe that murderers are mostly sick,” John McAleer wrote in his biography of Stout that in the early Wolfe stories, the author “still was close to his own interlude as a psychological novelist.” McAleer went on to suggest that “possibly such characterizations [as Paul Chapin] were intended to counterpoint Rex’s unannounced probing of his own psyche.” Whatever Stout’s motivation, Chapin remains the most interesting psychological study in the series, and one whom Wolfe comes to know primarily through reading his novels.

  In addition to the compelling characterization of Chapin, the book is a treasure trove for lovers of the corpus. In no other volume, for instance, do we find such a rich variety of Wolfean aphorisms:

  —“It takes a fillip on the flank for my mare to dance.”

  —“To assert dignity is to lose it.”

  —“All genius is distorted. Including my own.”

  —“To be broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.”

  —“If you eat the apple before it’s ripe, your only reward is a bellyache.”

  —“I love to make a mistake, it is the only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the burden of omniscience.”

  —“I have all the simplicities, including that of brusqueness.”

  The Archie Goodwin in this book, as in other early Stout works, is markedly more rough edged and unsophisticated than the smoother version who evolved in the postwar years. His grammar is deficient (“… the obscenity don’t matter” and “Where’s the other club members?”), but that is as integral to his street-smart persona as his colorful phrasing. For example, he complains of inactivity to Wolfe: “If you keep a keg of dynamite around the house you’ve got to expect some noise sooner or later. That’s what I am, a keg of dynamite.” Or his threat to a would-be tough guy: “Don’t try to scare me with your bad manners. I might decide to remove your right ear and put it where the left one is, and hang the left one on your belt for a spare.”

  Inspector Cramer shows an uncharacteristically self-effacing side in League, when he tells Archie that “I arrested a man once and he turned out to be guilty, that’s why I was made an inspector.” And in what other Wolfe book does the cigar-chomping Cramer actually light one of his stogies? And smoke a pipe, too? You can look it up.

  Cramer’s match-lighting moments are only two of several singular occurrences in League. A sampling of others:

  —The “client” is actually a committee, the members of which Wolfe assesses varying rates, depending on their financial condition.

  —Wolfe is “kidnapped” from the brownstone in a car driven by a woman.

  —Archie gets drugged and Wolfe is forced to rescue him. br />
  —Wolfe claims he once was married.

  —Name brands, which Rex Stout normally avoided in his writing, are extolled by Archie, specifically Underwood typewriters and the Cadillac in which Cramer is chauffeured.

  Back to the psychopathic genius Paul Chapin, who makes Archie nervous (“for once Wolfe might be underrating a guy”) and Wolfe cautious (“He is possessed of a demon, but he is also, within certain limits, an extraordinarily astute man”). Chapin refers to one of Wolfe’s ploys as “vulgar and obvious cunning,” and later he tells the detective that he, Wolfe, will be a character in an upcoming Chapin novel. “You will die, sir, in the most abhorrent manner conceivable to an appalling infantile imagination. I promise you.”

  We are never to learn whether Paul Chapin indeed dispatched the detective in print, but the suggestion was enough for Archie to “permit myself a grin at the thought of the awful fate in store for Nero Wolfe.”

  —Robert Goldsborough

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  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

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Wolfe and I sat in the office Friday afternoon. As it turned out, the name of Paul Chapin, and his slick and thrifty notions about getting vengeance at wholesale without paying for it, would have come to our notice pretty soon in any event; but that Friday afternoon the combination of an early November rain and a lack of profitable business that had lasted so long it was beginning to be painful, brought us an opening scene—a prologue, not a part of the main action—of the show that was about ready to begin.

  Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia. I was reading the morning paper, off and on. I had read it at breakfast, and glanced through it again for half an hour after checking accounts with Hortsmann at eleven o’clock, and here I was with it once more in the middle of the rainy afternoon, thinking halfheartedly to find an item or two that would tickle the brain which seemed about ready to dry up on me. I do read books, but I never yet got any real satisfaction out of one; I always have a feeling there’s nothing alive about it, it’s all dead and gone, what’s the use, you might as well try to enjoy yourself on a picnic in a graveyard. Wolfe asked me once why the devil I ever pretended to read a book, and I told him for cultural reasons, and he said I might as well forgo the pains, that culture was like money, it comes easiest to those who need it least. Anyway, since it was a morning paper and this was the middle of the afternoon, and I had already gone through it twice, it wasn’t much better than a book and I was only hanging onto it as an excuse to keep my eyes open.

  Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, “He’s in a battle with the elements. He’s fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That’s the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination.” I said aloud, “You mustn’t go to sleep, sir, it’s fatal. You freeze to death.”

  Wolfe turned a page, paying no attention to me. I said, “The shipment from Caracas, from Richardt, was twelve bulbs short. I never knew him to make good a shortage.”

  Still no result. I said, “Fritz tells me that the turkey they sent is too old to broil and will be tough unless it is roasted two hours, which according to you will attenuate the flavor. So the turkey at forty-one cents a pound will be a mess.”

  Wolfe turned another page. I stared at him a while and then said, “Did you see the piece in the paper about the woman who has a pet monkey which sleeps at the head of her bed and wraps its tail around her wrist? And keeps it there all night? Did you see the one about the man who found a necklace on the street and returned it to its owner and she claimed he stole two pearls from it and had him arrested? Did you see the one about the man on the witness-stand in a case about an obscene book, and the lawyer asked him what was his purpose in writing the book, and he said because he had committed a murder and all murderers had to talk about their crimes and that was his way of talking about it? Not that I get the idea, about the author’s purpose. If a book’s dirty it’s dirty, and what’s the difference how it got that way? The lawyer says if the author’s purpose was a worthy literary purpose the obscenity don’t matter. You might as well say that if my purpose is to throw a rock at a tin can it don’t matter if I hit you in the eye with it. You might as well say that if my purpose is to buy my poor old grandmother a silk dress it don’t matter if I grabbed the jack from a Salvation Army kettle. You might as well say—”

  I stopped. I had him. He did not lift his eyes from the page, his head did not move, there was no stirring of his massive frame in the specially constructed enormous chair behind his desk; but I saw his right forefinger wiggle faintly—his minatory wand, as he once called it—and I knew I had him. He said:

  “Archie. Shut up.”

  I grinned. “Not a chance, sir. Great God, am I just going to sit here until I die? Shall I phone Pinkertons and ask if they want a hotel room watched or something? If you keep a keg of dynamite around the house you’ve got to expect some noise sooner or later. That’s what I am, a keg of dynamite. Shall I go to a movie?”

  Wolfe’s huge head tipped forward a sixteenth of an inch, for him an emphatic nod. “By all means: At once.”

  I got up from my chair, tossed the newspaper halfway across the room to my desk, turned around, and sat down again. “What was wrong with my analogies?” I demanded.

  Wolfe turned another page. “Let us say,” he murmured patiently, “that as an analogist you are supreme, Let us say that.”

  “All right. Say we do. I’m not trying to pick a quarrel, sir. Hell no. I’m just breaking under the strain of trying to figure out a third way of crossing my legs. I’ve been at it over a week now.” It flashed into my mind that Wolfe could never be annoyed by that problem, since his legs were so fat that there was no possibility of them ever getting crossed by any tactics whatever, but I decided not to mention that. I swerved. “I stick to it, if a book’s dirty it’s dirty, no matter if the author had a string of purposes as long as a rainy day. That guy on the witness-stand yesterday was a nut. Wasn’t he? You tell me. Or else he wanted some big headlines no matter what it cost him. It cost him fifty berries for contempt of court. At that it was cheap advertising for his book; for half a century he could buy about four inches on the literary page of the Times, and that’s not even a chirp. But I guess the guy was a nut. He said he had done a murder, and all murderers have to confess, so he wrote the book, changing the characters and circumstances, as a means of confessing without putting himself in jeopardy. The judge was witty and sarcastic. He said that even if the guy was an inventor of stories and was in a court, he needn’t try for the job of court jester. I’ll bet the lawyers had a good hearty laugh at that one. Huh? But the author said it was no joke, that was why he wrote the book and any obscenity in it was only incidental, he really had croaked a guy. So the judge soaked him fifty bucks for contempt of court and chased him off the stand. I guess he’s a nut? You tell me.”

  Wolfe’s great chest went up and out in a sigh; he put a marker in the book and closed it and laid it on the desk, and leaned himself back, gently ponderous, in his chair.

  He blinked twice. “Well?”

  I went across to my desk and got the paper and opened it out to th
e page. “Nothing maybe. I guess he’s a nut. His name is Paul Chapin and he’s written several books. The title of this one is Devil Take the Hindmost. He graduated from Harvard in 1912. He’s a lop; it mentions here about his getting up to the stand with his crippled leg but it doesn’t say which one.”

  Wolfe compressed his lips. “Is it possible,” he demanded, “that lop is an abbreviation of lopsided, and that you use it as a metaphor for cripple?”

  “I wouldn’t know about the metaphor, but lop means cripple in my circle.”

  Wolfe sighed again, and set about the process of rising from his chair. “Thank God,” he said, “the hour saves me from further analogies and colloquialisms.” The clock on the wall said one minute till four—time for him to go up to the plant-rooms. He made it to his feet, pulled the points of his vest down but failed as usual to cover with it the fold of bright yellow shirt that had puffed out, and moved across to the door.

  At the threshold he paused. “Archie.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Phone Murger’s to send over at once a copy of Devil Take the Hindmost, by Paul Chapin.”

  “Maybe they won’t. It’s suppressed pending the court decision.”

  “Nonsense. Speak to Murger or Ballard. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?”

  He went on towards the elevator, and I sat down at my desk and reached for the telephone.

  Chapter 2

  After breakfast the next morning, Saturday, I fooled with the plant records a while and then went to the kitchen to annoy Fritz.

  Wolfe, of course, wouldn’t be down until eleven o’clock. The roof of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street where he had lived for twenty years, and me with him for the last seven of them, was glassed in and partitioned into rooms where varying conditions of temperature and humidity were maintained—by the vigilance of Theodore Horstmann—for the ten thousand orchids that lined the benches and shelves. Wolfe had once remarked to me that the orchids were his concubines; insipid, expensive, parasitic and temperamental. He brought them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the limits of their perfection, and then gave them away; he had never sold one. His patience and ingenuity, supported by Horstmann’s fidelity, had produced remarkable results and gained for the roof a reputation in quite different circles from those whose interest centered in the downstairs office. In all weathers and under any circumstances whatever, his four hours a day on the roof with Horstmann—from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to six in the afternoon—were inviolable.