Rex Stout's Mistake

Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's "Watson," once mentioned having a picture of Sherlock Holmes over his desk. Rex Stout thought that was a mistake.

Stout, creator of Wolfe and Archie, was one of the original members of the Baker Street Irregulars and the author of that scandalous essay, "Watson Was a Woman."

He had his own Watson in the person of my late friend John McAleer, author of the authorized biography Rex Stout. In that magnificent work, McAleer recounts that on Aug. 12, 1969, Stout answered a number of questions, including:

Did Archie hang up the picture of Sherlock Holmes that is found over his desk, or did Wolfe put it there?

I was a damn fool to do it. Obviously it's always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done.

Wolfe was one of the greatest of the 20th century's Great Detectives. In physical appearance and his armchair approach to crime solving, he reminds many Sherlockians of Mycroft Holmes.

But William S. Baring-Gould, author of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, maintained -- as did others -- that Nero Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes and (who else?) Irene Adler. John T. Lescroart picked up this idea in Son of Holmes and Rasputin's Revenge, calling his protagonist Auguste Lupin, clearly a different name for the young man later known as Nero Wolfe.

And what did Stout say about that? He was asked repeatedly over the decades. Being a wise man , he always -- in various ways -- maintained a golden silence.

Watson Was a WHAT?

Ever since reading Kieran McMullen's blog post about a female Dr. Watson, I've been thinking of Rex Stout's scandalous essay "Watson Was a Woman." I haven't written about it until now only because I wanted to first retrieve a certain letter from my safety deposit box.

Stout delivered his astonishing revelation orally at meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars on the night of January 31, 1941. Ellery Queen, in the book In the Queen's Parlor, called it an H-Bomb -- H for Holmes, of course.

The talk appeared in book form in several places, including the Edgar W. Smith-edited Profile by Gaslight, where it is followed by Dr. Julian Wolff's rebuttal, "That Was No Lady." I hope you can find a copy of the book and read both; I am simply not up to the task of summarizing their very entertaining verbal gymnastics.

Long an admirer of Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin mysteries, I wrote the author a letter when I was 14 years old asking him which story he considered his best and positing the outrageous theory that Archie was the true author of "Watson Was a Woman."

Displaying the graciousness which always characterized him, Stout took the trouble to write a young boy the letter above, which I keep in my safety deposit box 45 years later.

The postage on the letter was five cents, but to me the contents have always been priceless.