"A Perceptive, Just, Balanced Study"

By January 1972, with the Dreiser book on its way and new semester and new year starting, McAleer was ready to devote himself more fully to turning his hobby into scholarly work.24 On a Saturday, the week before spring semester classes started—McAleer would be teaching “New England in Fiction,” “Counter Romantics in American Literature,” and “Major American Writers II,” none of which featured Stout—McAleer returned to his typewriter. He began the letter telling Stout how impressed he was with a new book by Robert Ardrey. In casual tones, he told Stout of the conversation he’d had with the chairman of the anthropology department at Harvard, who he swam with three times a week, and how the chairman “turn[ed] his nose up” at Ardrey. But on the second page of four, McAleer revealed he’d spoken to a publisher about doing a critical work on Stout’s Nero Wolfe character:

I’ve kind of put myself into a situation which I hope won’t be an embarrassment to you. After looking at a copy of Norman Donaldson’s In Search of Dr. Thorndyke (Freeman’s Thorndyke), published in 1971, by Bowling Green University Press, I got to wondering if they had anyone working on an appreciation of Nero Wolfe. Finally, I wrote and asked about it. I guess I was more eloquent about it then I realized because the director of the press has now written telling me that he wants such a book and wants me to write it.

At last, McAleer had his chance to insert his avocation into his vocation. McAleer wrote as if trying to convince Stout to allow him to write the book, and perhaps, in some measure, to convince himself that such a book would be worthy scholarship:

As you will have surmised, Bowling Green wants a book commensurate with the stature of a university press. As far as I’m concerned, it would have to be since I have neither the inclination nor the time to turn out anything slapdash. The book they want and which I envisage would take about three years to write, beginning now and not counting my literally daily exposure to the books over the past four years, though that has produced marginal notations on virtually every page of every volume I own of the series. And, as I’ve told you, I own them all. I’d want the book to earn the approbation of people of the caliber of Jacques Barzun. And that’s setting my goal high.

What I envisage would be neither a panegyric nor an august, sterile embalmment. Both those approaches would please me no more than they would you. What I want to come up with is a perceptive, just, balanced study, highly readable and highly informative—quite the best book ever done on a figure in detective fiction (emend that to read “figures”; Archie must be dealt with the same attention Wolfe gets). I’d strive for a prose style I wouldn’t have to be ashamed of if Wolfe was reading my manuscript over one shoulder and Archie the other, as I wrote.

You can see the Bowling Green offer has stirred me up. And why not? I’d be doing something that would meet B.C.’s expectation that we engage in meaningful research and publication, and having the time of my life while I was doing it. That’s the kind of situation every scholar dreams of finding himself in.

Stout wrote back eleven days later. Whether McAleer had been carefully planning things to this point—giving Stout his book on Dreiser, hinting at smaller scholarly projects, suggesting an autobiography—or whether events had happened without conscious intent, he now needed Stout’s approval. In total, Stout wrote:

Of course the chairman of the anthropology department at Harvard turns up his nose at Ardrey. All Chairmans (sic) of anthropology departments do, on reason being that [Ardrey] writes readable prose. So do you, and if Bowling Green University Press wants you to do a book on Nero Wolfe and you are willing and you’ll send me chapters as you do them and I can lump what I don’t like and I live long enough to see a bound copy and BGUP will give me a proper discount on 42 or 43 copies, I’ll be delighted.25

Stout was finally ready to let this scholar with “readable prose” write about him. Stout ended the characteristically brief letter in his now characteristic (and characteristically abbreviated) valediction: “Yr. obt. Svt.” Stout was McAleer’s obedient servant.

Later that month, McAleer talked with Mark Carroll, the director of Harvard University Press. Carroll thought that what McAleer should be writing was a book focused on Stout, not on his private detective. Carroll made contact with Little, Brown and Company. At the end of February, McAleer met with the publishers: they agreed on a book of about 400 pages, with 16 pages of illustrations, a complete bibliography of Stout’s works, plus any endnotes McAleer felt necessary. In other words, it was going to be a scholarly work. “Their books have a way of earning Pulitzer prizes,” McAleer wrote in a letter to Stout, “and I don’t see why this book shouldn’t be in serious contention for one.”26

He attached a full-page questionnaire, whose queries ranged everything from genealogy (“What was your maternal grandmother’s name”) to literary craft (“Was [How Like a God] in any sense autobiographical?”) to current politics (“Any suggestions for making [Spiro] Agnew vanish?”)27 (Appendix B). McAleer had composed what would be the first questionnaire of a series sent each consecutive Sunday for more than two years.

By the end of March, McAleer had set up 87 files for the project.29 McAleer wrote Stout with exciting news: Boston College had approved a course themed on detective fiction. No longer would he be sneaking Stout into his American Romanticism course; no, now Stout, alongside Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and half a dozen others, would be the focus of the course. They would draw on critical voices like Gide, Malraux, Krutch, Barzun, Wilson and Van Doren. To McAleer’s knowledge, Boston College would be only the second college in the country to offer a course specifically on detective fiction.29

McAleer taught the course, which he entitled “Crime Fiction and Folk Myth,” the following fall, in the Evening College. His questions for the final exam did not directly address Stout, but in general prompted students to respond to the concern of detective fiction and its relation to the canon: (“The detective story is the one clearly defined modern genre of prose fiction impeccably classical in form.” “The detective story is modern man’s Passion Play.” Appendix C). McAleer would teach the course again in the spring of 1975, and the fall after that, teach it as a regular university course. McAleer also was allowed to design a course titled “American Literary Biography,” which he taught in 1974 and 1975, a second way he was able to combine his teaching with his work on the Stout biography (Appendix D).

In the meantime, during 1972-3, work on the Stout biography increased exponentially. In June, his files numbered more than 200; he was reading through microfilm of 1930s New York Times articles; he reserved three hours after class each afternoon for the project, after which he swam a mile and thought about what he’d read.30 By the end of 1972, he had sent out 800 query letters relating to the project.31

McAleer’s letters to Stout regularly reported he findings, which fell into three main categories: genealogical information, publication and bibliographic records, and the landslide of anecdotes and historical color he was gathering.

McAleer created a standard questionnaire to send out to many of his correspondents. With technology of the typewriter and photocopy, there was no easy way to send out customized questionnaires. Many of the questions seem intended to gauge a picture of the respondent’s general estimation of Stout: “What detective fiction writers would you put on a par with Stout? What detective fiction writers do you think he may have influenced?” (Appendix E).

One question, however, stands out as echoing the almost defensive praise in that first fan letter, the defense that Stout was worthy of academic scholarship: “How would you defend yourself if an erudite colleague or friend said to you, with disdain, ‘You read Rex Stout?’” Perhaps it was just curiosity. Or perhaps McAleer still hadn’t found a satisfactory reply himself.

Stout, however, was McAleer’s greatest contributor to the project, responding to each week’s questions, giving taped interviews, allowing full access to his papers and records. A unique contribution among the records was Stout’s roster of how long it took him to write. For the span of his literary career, he had produced finished copy in his first drafts,32 so he could easily mark when he’d begun and ended a work. When McAleer came across the record, he was delighted:

I find your work roster so interesting that I am mesmerized by it everytime I pick it up. For me, it’s like it would be for a Shakespearean if he suddenly put his hands on Shakespeare’s work record—“Hamlet—87 pages. Begun 5/20/04, finished 7/2/04. 10 days out;” It will be useful in a thousand ways.33

This letter ended with a personal note, which was becoming more and more common, and which attests to the close relationship the two had developed:

My mulched tomatoes vindicate your sister’s methods. I may start mulching the children, especially Andrew, who broke his right arm in two places on 4 July, falling off a seesaw. He will be five on 8 August.

By the time the fall semester of 1973 started, McAleer had 686 files, 1464 letters sent out, 1225 responses received.34

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