Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Rex Stout and Georges Simenon

Like a lot of lifelong readers, I started reading detective-fiction in my early teens, beginning--in my case--with Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes. More people of my generation probably began with the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, but in the house I grew up in, novels featuring them weren't available, and I don't know that I would have liked the books anyway. Even as a kid, I didn't much like kid-detectives.

. . . I've been re-reading Poe, and truly it is amazing how much he anticipated, in the detective-fiction tradition, with his three stories: "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter." With these three stories, he gave us the genius-detective; the peripheral narrator who plays sidekick to the genius-detective; the locked-room mystery; the invasiveness of "the colonies" (strange people and animals from the far-flung empire come back to haunt the imperial nation and its main city: Paris in Poe's case, London in Conan Doyle's); the conflict between the police and the amateur/private detectives; forensic science (this is explored by Ron Thomas in Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science); crime-and-detection as psychological drama; the rational detective as the torch-bearer of the Enlightenment--or: Descartes solves crimes. With "The Mystery of Marie Roget," Poe also foreshadows the interplay between the popular media and crime. In that story, Dupin shows how journalistic sensationalism not just exploits crime but also how it erodes rational detection. Just as Sterne, with Tristram Shandy, seemed to anticipate by centuries countless elements of the novel, Poe seems to anticipate, in just three stories, massive parts of the detective-fiction tradition. One gdevelopment Poe did not anticipate is the rapid, hard-boiled pace that most detective-fiction readers have come to expect. His stories are long and labored. His prose-style is Victorian, and even Conan Doyle seems quick by comparison. Watson's narrative voice is deliberate and unhurried, but those tales do move along. . . .

There were quite a few paperback detective-novels by Rex Stout and Georges Simenon floating around my house, in part because my aunt and my father used to trade paperbacks. My father, however, went in more for Westerns: Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox. As a teenager, I just couldn't "get into" Stout's Nero Wolfe novels or Simenon's Maigret novels. Too much subtlety for a teen, methinks. But later, when I did discover these two great authors and their fascinating, compulsive detectives, I found the reading irresistible. . . .

Nowadays, we would diagnose Wolfe as an obsessive-compulsive person who also suffers from agoraphobia. And, as readers, we get pulled into his obsessions. We come to depend upon the narrative's dependence on his iron schedule: breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time; beer at the desk while opening mail at the same time (and the counting of the caps from the bottles); orchid-care in the greenhouse atop the brownstone, at the same time every day. Because his brownstone and the lifestyle it cages require capital, Wolfe must work, but he hates work and fears leaving the brownstone. Hence the need for Archie, his life-line to the world, to normalcy, to work, which brings capital. Archie goes on dates, goes dancing, drinks milk, buzzes around NYC in a car. . . .

Maigret's Simeneon, the French inspector, is a cop, a man of the people. Like Wolfe, he is a man of routine. The stove in the office must be kept going. He must have his assistants on hand--Luca and Janvier. He smokes the pipe obsessively, and he orders beer and sandwiches from the brasserie. Whereas Wolfe tries to avoid work until the last minute and then solves cases with a bolt of genius-lightning (after Archie has brough back evidence like a birddog), Jules Maigret broods over cases. He attaches his mind, even his body, to them until they crack. Relentlessly but patiently he asks questions. He asks himself questions. But he always goes home to Madame Maigret, who often prepares coq-au-vin or a stew for lunch; good grief, who could go back to work after that?! Answer: a Frenchman.

Stout and Simenon are wonderful inheritors of Poe's treasures, and here is an homage-poem, from an avid reader of detective fiction to two of the splendid greats:


Homage to Stout and Simenon, Wolfe and Maigret

Rex Stout (1886-1975), George Simenon (1903-1989), creators, respectively of Nero Wolfe and Jules Maigret


Crime disrespects. It exploits
routine. It is impolite, time-
consuming, and distracting.
Grudgingly, the good detective
identifies those who
should have known better,
most especially the entitled.

Intelligent cooking; sufficient
rest; optional, moderate
consumption of alcohol and
tobacco; solitude; reflection—
these are worth preserving,
even if it means working
for a living, extracting
folly and vice.

Hence Jules Maigret and Nero Wolfe,
who would rather be left
alone but are drawn into prose
by their creators, into frays by
fate, necessity, and duty. Efficient
plots spring from good manners.

Whatever takes one away from
reading, dining, conversation,
solitude, repose, or—however modest
it may be--one’s enclave must be criminal.
Good manners and good detection
don’t belong to social class but
come from a certain strength of mind.
If only everyone would think things through.

Everyone doesn’t; therefore, detection
is called for, is restoration of balances, is
a bother to be concluded with swift precision,
for the rich life of common routine awaits.


Copyright 2007

No comments: