I find myself speculating on the lasting effect McAleer’s book had on detective fiction scholarship. Robert Goldsborough's Chicago Tribune review lauds the “formidable” biography’s comprehensive treatment of the novels, as well as the “myriad other facets” of Stout’s life. But Goldsborough is critical of the “biographical friendship” that accompanied the making of the biography. He doesn't use the word ‘hagiography,’ but he is concerned the relationship may have distorted the facts: “Perhaps I was overly distracted by McAleer’s practice of invariably referring to Stout by his first name, but I had the feeling that the reader was being insulated from some of the most tempestuous periods in Stout’s colorful and wide-ranging life.” Commenting on how Stout told McAleer to omit nothing, even the “warts,” Goldsborough says, “If McAleer did put the worst things in, then Rex Stout led a most exemplary life indeed.”

But overall, Goldsborough is positive: “In total, however, McAleer’s volume is solid and interesting, and worthy of a subject who during the last 10 years of his life had more books in print than any other living writer.” And there was critical appreciation. McAleer was awarded the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Critical or Biographical Work for 1977.

The research he’d done on Rex Stout proved to be McAleer’s richest source of scholarship in subsequent years. Though his 1984 biography of Emerson garnered the greatest praise (it was nominated for a Pulitzer), he published a book on his conversations with Stout, another on conversation with Stout’s sister, and even a detective novel of his own. He continued to teach detective fiction at Boston College. One of his students, David Anderson, later published a critical work on the Nero Wolfe novels. A new and expanded edition of the biography, Rex Stout: A Majesty’s Life, was published in 2002.

It is fitting that McAleer's last academic course—-he had agreed to co-teach “Master Sleuths” in the Fall 2003 when he died, at age 80, of cancer—-involved his first love, detective fiction.