Tue 11 Apr 2023
REX STOUT – Death of a Doxy. Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin #42. Viking Press, hardcover, 1966. Reprinted several times.
The word “doxy†is no longer a common word, certainly not one in everyday language today. To get this review started, allow me to quote from page 45 of the 1995 Bantam paperback edition:
“My sister was a what?â€
“D, O, X, Y, doxy. I happen to like that better than concubine or paramour or mistress….â€
Or a “kept woman,†perhaps, but maybe that’s a phrase that’s outdated and old-fashioned, too.
Dramatis personae:
Isabel Kerr, the doxy, formerly in show business
Avery Ballou, rich businessman and Isabel’s sugar daddy
Orrie Cather, private investigator
Jill Hardy, Orrie’s fiancée, an airline stewardess
Stella Fleming, Isabel Kerr’s sister
Barry Fleming, Stella’s husband, a mathematics professor
Amy Jackson, a.k.a. Julie Jaquette, a night club singer and Isabel’s best friend
Archie Goodwin, private investigator and assistant to
Nero Wolfe, private investigator
Orrie Cather, one of three freelance PI’s Wolf calls upon when needed, is suspected of killing the doxy, with who Cather had has an ongoing relationship and who was using it to threaten his current engagement with Jill Hardy (see above). Conferring with Sanul Panzer and Fred Durken, the other two of Wolfe’s staff of standby PI’s, he and Archie agree that Orrie is innocent, and that they must take his case, even though he is not a paying client.
And so they do. The real killer identifies him/herself quickly. Evidence to support their conclusion is non-existent. The problem is threefold: (1) find such evidence, but in such a way that (2) the sugar daddy (see above) is not identified, and if possible (3) get paid.
All of which requires quite a bit of finesse, which is accomplished in a most exemplary fashion, assisted in large part by one of the most fascinating female characters I’ve ever encountered in one of Wolfe and Archie’s cases, that being Julie Jaquette, the dead woman’s best friend who agrees to pull off a huge bluff to entice the killer out into the open, a ploy that involves more than a hint of danger.
Not only is she gutsy, but she’s a woman who’s also not shy, can think on her feet (listen in on her conversation with Inspector Cramer when he becomes a little too inquisitive, for example). She goes toe-to-toe in banter and other conversation not only with Archie but Wolfe himself. She may be the only woman who’s ever stayed in the brownstone overnight and called Wolfe “Nero†in the morning.
And what’s more, the ploy works to perfection.
Right now this has become my favorite Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin novel, and that’s saying something. I don’t want to crowd in on Matthew Bradley’s ongoing series about the TV adaptations of the books and stories, so I’ll just mention in passing that Death of a Doxy was shown in two parts on the A&E Nero Wolfe series, and that the first ten minutes of it (all I’ve seen so far) is pitch perfect in execution.
April 11th, 2023 at 8:24 pm
Stout always seemed at his best when he was writing these “in house” stories and books that fed us background on the mythology of the series.
April 11th, 2023 at 9:42 pm
One additional thought on this one. The paperback edition is only 175 pages lone. A lot of mystery writers, no names mentioned, could take a small lesson from that.
April 13th, 2023 at 8:50 am
David: Well said. The books were all great, but “mythology” ones like, say, The Black Mountain stand out in particular.
Steve: Indeed, the books are comparatively short, but never (at least to me) feel insubstantial; ditto the novellas. And thanks for respecting my turf! It will obviously be a while before I get to this one, since I’m still in the 1940s…
April 15th, 2023 at 2:59 pm
My favorite Nero Wolfe mystery is THE GOLDEN SPIDERS, but DEATH OF A DOXY is right up there.
Art Scott and Steve Stilwell have read each Nero Wolfe book over 50 times. Somehow Rex Stout concocted a winning formula to please some readers.
April 15th, 2023 at 3:23 pm
Fifty times? There are some Wolfe stories that I haven’t gotten to once!
My fault, I know, but I am impressed.
April 16th, 2023 at 7:57 am
My next post will, coincidentally, explicate my long relationship with the Wolfe canon. It is certainly amazing that, with so many books written over so many years and a formula that is limited on purpose, Stout was able to keep them so fresh.
April 16th, 2023 at 9:53 am
The paperback edition is only 175 pages long.
Just out of curiosity … which paperback edition are we talking about?
Seriously, Steve, you and I (and just about everybody here) have been around long enough to recall how mass-market paperback books have evolved/devolved/mutated/whatever over our many years.
My “collection” here at home still has many ’60s vintage paperbacks, with their 50c price tags, close printing, tiny typefaces, quick-to-yellow paper, all that stuff we grew up with from the spinner racks.
The years went by, and many of us got newer editions of our favorites, priced at well over $2 (or more), with larger type, whiter paper, slightly sturdier covers – and maybe we noticed that the physical books seemed larger in size than the ones we got at Kresge’s and Woolworth’s when we were kids …
Of course, there’s the other point – that Rex Stout (and so many others like him) wrote more concisely; they got to the point, kept things moving, told the story, that sort of thing.
Something to think about – and the older I get, the more I think about it …
April 16th, 2023 at 12:24 pm
My copy is the Bantam paperback shown lowermost down in the review itself. It came out in 1995 as part of the Rex Stout Library, which was abandoned as I recall before it was completed. As for the history of the paperback goes in general, as the price went went up on them, so did the size — more pages, bigger print — to help justify the price hikes. Good for those of us who can no longer read the print in those old paperbacks from the 50s and 60s!
April 16th, 2023 at 1:52 pm
Funny you should mention the Rex Stout Library. I first read the Wolfe books back in 1981, getting at least the majority of them from the library. But then, anal-retentive nut that I am, I started buying them, some new and some used at library booksales, so that many of my copies were actually unread when I embarked upon my series of posts.
I was sure I had acquired them all in one form or another over the decades…but I was wrong, and discovered I did not have Before Midnight. Mortified, I called my LOCAL, INDEPENDENT, BRICK-AND-MORTAR BOOKSTORE and, to my relief, learned that they could get me a copy from the publisher, Bantam, ironically now part of the Penguin Random House corporate megalith that owns my ex-employer and Stout’s longtime publisher, Viking Press.
Money being, relatively speaking, no object, I raised a Spock-like eyebrow at the $17 price tag for what I assumed would be a mass-market paperback, yet soon dismissed it. When Madame B was kind enough to pick it up for me, I was disappointed to see that it was a trade paperback from said Rex Stout Library. Don’t get me wrong, trade paperbacks have their place, but first, barring a couple of hardcovers, my other Wolfe books were all mass-market, which I prefer for fiction, and as noted, I’m an anal-retentive nut.
More important, the Wolfe books are pretty short, so they really had to struggle not to make a wafer-thin mint of a book, using the tricks of typography, etc. To add value and/or bulk, they apparently had an introduction written for each book by a “name” writer (in this case Robert Crais, with whose work I am unfamiliar), and added some sort of ephemera, in this case some sort of report from Viking’s legal department about any possible problems with the name of the fictional perfume company. So, while I’m glad to complete the series at last, I’d have preferred an old-fashioned mass-market paperback.
April 16th, 2023 at 2:11 pm
BTW, among those few hardcovers was the 1983 Avenel volume mistitled Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels (since one of the seven was a collection), which contains The Silent Speaker. As long as we’re strolling down Memory Lane, I’m sure a few other old-timers will recall those convenient omnibus editions, which I think may have been made exclusively for sale in places like, or perhaps only, the late, lamented Waldenbooks. I have one containing five of the six Charlie Chan novels (how frustrating is that?) and, in my #1 genre of horror/SF, one containing five Jules Verne novels plus selected short stories. Of course their wonderful Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, with its wealth of background information, is another kettle of fish. But boy, do they bring it back.