Rex Stout‘s larger-than-life sleuth left an indelible legacy on crime fiction, according to Orrin Grey from Murder & Mayhem… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Who Is Rex Stout?
Born in Indiana in 1886, Rex Stout moved to Kansas with his Quaker parents when he was still very young. He attended high school in Topeka and later graduated from the University of Kansas. After school, Stout served in the Navy and worked as a cigar store clerk.

Stout first began publishing in the 1910s, penning stories for various magazines. He published over 40 stories between 1912 and 1918 alone. Yet it wasn’t his early writing that gave him the capital he needed to tour Europe and live a life of comparative ease. Instead, he invented a school banking system that was put into place in more than 400 schools across the United States. During this time, Stout actually put his literary career on pause, abstaining from writing to focus instead on making and saving enough money from his business ventures. Things were going well, until 1929—when Stout lost most of his earnings in the financial crash.

It was during this same year that Stout published his standalone novel How Like a God, and his literary career took flight.

Rex Stout Creates Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin
In addition to his early serialized narratives, Rex Stout’s first published standalone book was How Like a God. The psychological narrative was released in 1929 by Vanguard Press, an imprint that Stout helped found. As Stout entered the 1930s, he pivoted to writing detective novels, and introduced readers to Nero Wolfe.

Nicknamed “that Falstaff of detectives” by critic Will Cuppy, after Shakespeare’s portly, vain, and boastful knight, Stout introduced his armchair sleuth Nero Wolfe in the 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance. The novel was abridged in The American Magazine as “Point of Death.” Wolfe was unique among literary sleuths in that he preferred not to “get his hands dirty,” as the saying goes. Instead, he spent his time in a luxurious home where he read books, ate gourmet meals, and tended to his orchids.

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