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By and About Rex Stout

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Motivated by money alone, Nero involves himself in a crime which has been broadcast over a great national network. A leading lady of the microphone interviews a racetrack tout and a professor of mathematics. In the course of the interview, as a plug for one of the sponsors, a noted soft-drink manufacturer, each guest is served a bottle of the beverage. To the astonishment of the radio public, the embarrassment of the soft-drink manufacturer, and the annoyance of the New York Police Department, the racetrack oracle instantly drops dead of cyanide poisoning. How did cyanide get into the drink? And how could anyone be sure that the tout would receive the fatal bottle? Or, for that matter, was the poisoned bottle intended for him at all?

     This is only the beginning of a case more complicated than any Nero ever faced before. To solve it requires a degree of tramping around New York and rounding up of suspects far beyond the sedentary habits of Nero, and even beyond Archie Goodwin's capacity for swift motion and rapid-fire interrogation. There's only one thing for Nero to do. He must put the New York police force to work for him.

I often wonder how Rex Stout came up with the names of his characters.  A recent obituary in The New York Times may reveal the answer, at least in regard to a memorable Stout villain, Arnold Zeck.

Zeck figures in a trilogy of Wolfe novels:  And Be A Villain, 1948; The Second Confession, 1949, and In the Best Families, 1950.

Stout was always involved in the politics of his day and would certainly have been following the Nuremberg trials of 1947 and 1948.  There, one of the legal team that prosecuted I.G. Farben for war crimes was a lawyer named William A. Zeck.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.

The real Mr. Zeck died in 2002.  His wife, Belle Mayer Zeck, a co-prosecutor who married him after the trials, died on April 5, 2006.

Ettagale Blauer

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