"A Chance to Say Something Nice"

The letters to Stout, which continued monthly, and at their most intense, biweekly, for the next six years—continued, in fact, until two days before Stout’s death, at age 89, in October 1975—were not McAleer’s first correspondence that would lead to a literary project. In 1965, McAleer had received a letter from an inmate at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole, who had read his Boston Globe review of a book on Dreiser and had some questions. Though taken aback by a letter that “barely seemed literate,” McAleer decided to reply. That correspondence lasted two years; the inmate, Billy Dickson, wrote daily, and McAleer wrote back almost as frequently. Two years and a combined twelve hundred letters later, with a sampling of the correspondence and the manuscript of a novel Dickson was writing in hand, McAleer successfully petitioned for Dickson’s early release. In 1980, under the joint authorship of Dickson and McAleer, the novel was published.²

The first letters McAleer sent to Stout in 1969, however, betrayed no sign of such lofty literary intent as a biography. Although there is no reason to doubt McAleer’s genuineness in heralding Stout’s intuitive grasp of “seminal ideas” (McAleer was teaching a course entitled “Seminal Ideas in American Literature” that semester), Stout, still, was primarily his bedside reading.

As the spring semester was nearing conclusion in May, the requested autographed first edition arrived at McAleer’s Lexington home. McAleer wrote back, with thanks for the “prompt and generous response to my high-handed ploy to adorn my Rex Stout shelf with an autographed volume.”³ This time the letter was a full three pages. McAleer told the 82-year old writer about his hobby as family historian; a recent death of a distant relative named Haughey; his day spent in the Brattle Bookstore hunting for Rex Stout books; his hay fever annoyances on account of used-book dust.

But alongside that gushing fan, the academic in McAleer must have had scholarship in mind. McAleer knew there was nearly no critical writing on Stout. He was eagerly awaiting the first substantive work by William Baring-Gould,⁴ to be published that year, and it gave McAleer an idea. He wrote Stout that he wanted to do a modestly sized scholarly article, “of forty pages or so in which I bring the whole epic of Wolfe and Archie under careful study, from the scholar’s viewpoint.”⁵ Was there a reason he’d mentioned that he was a family history buff? Was McAleer trying to prove something when he wrote that he’d already done a biography, on Stout’s “fellow Hoosier,”⁶ and had included the praise by Maxwell Geismar? If so, McAleer wasn’t ready to tell Stout explicitly.

In June, McAleer’s first opportunity for Stout scholarship came: the literary editor of the Boston Globe was going on vacation and asked McAleer to cover the “World of Writers” Sunday column while he was away. McAleer immediately typed a letter to his friend of two months: here was “a great chance to say something nice about Rex Stout and his new book, and all the books that came before it.”⁷ McAleer enclosed a page of seventeen questions and said he would be much obliged for the answers—if Stout decided “to bother with it” (Appendix A).

The deadline for the Globe article approached. McAleer had not heard from Stout. Pressed for time, McAleer reluctantly sent off a piece about writers and their tendency to have bad relationships with their fathers, entitled, “My son—ugh!—the author.”⁸ He had a “hunch” Stout had responded to the questions and that the letter was stuck in transit.⁹ The unavoidable delays of postal delivery—at a time before email—prevented him from writing about someone he’d always enjoyed reading, someone with whom he was now enjoying a correspondence.

McAleer’s hunch was right. A few days after McAleer submitted the Globe piece, Stout’s response arrived. The letter, a half-page only half-full of type, didn’t waste a word. “Dear Mr. McAleer,” he wrote,

He noted McAleer’s effusive letter-writing style:

McAleer was beginning to see that Stout’s “leanness” of style, as he had described the writer’s prose, manifested itself in his correspondence as well. Stout’s answers to the questionnaire were equally succinct (Appendix A). McAleer, however, was unfazed: “the almost epigrammatic terseness of your answers to my questionnaire poses no problem either. There is Stoutian whimsy there which I can turn to good advantage.”¹¹

McAleer did eventually publish the intended Globe article a year later, in simulated interview style, which he entitled, “Rex Stout writing number 70 at 83.”¹² The article combined the original questionnaire responses with other information McAleer picked up in letters. It began with McAleer proclaiming that the prolific Stout was still going strong: he was at work on a new Nero Wolfe novel. It ended with a query from the original questionnaire, which, given it’s placement in the article, apparently was important to McAleer: he wanted to know if writer had ever considered an autobiography. Stout’s response—the last words in the article ended—was a clear and unequivocal no. “Any man who writes an autobiography,” Stout said, “thinks too much of himself.”

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