Back to the Classics #9

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Red Threads - Rex Stout

The Barnes & Noble website touts its e-book version as “An Inspector Cramer Mystery” as if Stout made the hard-boiled head of NYPD homicide a series hero. Cramer was never a series hero. Cramer usually played the flatfoot foil in Stout’s classic mysteries starring the PI duo of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. And in this 1939 novel, he merely assists the heroine trap the perp.

This mystery contains the prototypical elements of a story from the so-called golden age of detective fiction. The close reader catches a whiff of the spiritualism and mysticism that was popular in the 20 years after WWI. The color prejudice – this time involving American Indians – is about what we would expect for the late Thirties. The usual whodunit snobbery is on display. The glamorous characters are well-off and famous in the arts, design and technology. The victim is a millionaire, killed in the ostentatious tomb of his wife, which is located on the grounds of his swanky country estate. As for the final debit, what can we say about the prose:

He stopped, gazing at her, and put out a hand and took it back again. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to plead with you. I did that, and what good did it do? But all the same, I won’t tolerate it – what you’re doing with Guy Carew. Now that the fortune is his – the wings for your ambition. I know you can do it – he’s a half-primitive infant – may be you’ve already done it – but I won’t tolerate it and I won’t allow it. I won’t, Portia! You’re mine! By God, you are!”

Pee-yew, is what I say, but maybe that’s just me. To be charitable, he wrote this in 1939, just after one of the better Wolfe and Archie novels, Some Buried Ceasar.  Too much to expect two home runs in a row.

On the credit side, Stout is a reliable feminist whose female characters work hard and enjoy success on their own terms. Smart cookies, too. A textile artist and fashion designer upstages Inspector Cramer by using a peach pit, a red thread from an antique weave, and the call of a whippoorwill to solve the mystery.

Also to his credit, Stout has a longish set piece with Cramer and the DA playing tag-team interrogating the fashion designer. Besides yelling and pressure, they use sleep and sensory deprivation, denial of food and drink, denial of clean clothes and hand and face washing, and denial of the toilet to break down the fabric artist’s resistance to answering questions about The Obvious Suspect who happens to be on the edge of being her boyfriend. Stout doesn’t make a big deal of sleep deprivation as torture, but the reader can tell Stout is not a supporter of harsh interrogation techniques routinely used in the good old days on basically anybody. It's admirable of Stout to kick against a practice that most people of the time accepted as part of the normal course of things.

Finally, in the tradition of Golden Age mysteries, the reveal tests patience and credulity in terms of to what degree will we accept silly and over the top.  I can recommend this one only to hard-core fans who have already read a fistful of Nero Wolfe mysteries and, bless us reading gluttons one and all, even read an Alphabet Hicks or a Doll Bonner.

Reviews of other Stout Novels
The Golden Spiders
Hand in Glove
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Rubber Band
The Second Confession
The Silent Speaker
Where There's a Will
The Case of the Black Orchids
Too Many Cooks
Trouble in Triplicate
Over My Dead Body
And Be a Villain
In the Best Families