Davies on A Stout Stanza of Many Meanings, Maybe: The Romantic Roots of Some Buried Caesar @GB2d @horacefuller @georgemasonlaw

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Stout Stanza of Many Meanings, Maybe: The Romantic Roots of Some Buried Caesar at 25 The Gazette, a Journal of Detective Fiction 4 (Autumn 2023).

This paper presents a bit of speculation — actually, two speculations — about Rex Stout’s sixth Nero Wolfe / Archie Goodwin novel, Some Buried Caesar. I hope those speculations will inspire — or perhaps it would be better to say incite — discussion about Stout’s choice of title for the tale. First, the question: Where did the title for this story come from? Second, the answers: (a) Stout’s familiarity (during an early romance) with the bloody yet bucolic lines from a famous poem — Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát — made the titling of a bloody murder mystery with a romantic plot thread in a bucolic setting easy, and (b) the Rubáiyát was connected in Stout’s mind not only with fine poetic lines about bloodshed and bucolics, but also with fraud, which was also a plot thread in Some Buried Caesar.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on A Great Borrower and a Great Originator, and Also, Perhaps, a Great Lender @horacefuller @NeroWolfePack

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Great Borrower and a Great Originator, and  Also, Perhaps, a Great Lender, at The Gazette–The Journal of the Wolfe Pack, Fall 2021, at 3. Here is the abstract.

This is the full, annotated, original version of a paper that was delivered as a toast to Rex Stout at the The Wolfe Pack's Black Orchid Dinner (on Zoom) on December 5, 2020. The abbreviated toasty version was published (without footnotes), on pages 3 to 5 of the Fall 2021 issue of The Gazette — The Journal of the Wolfe Pack. The paper argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Rex Stout did NOT borrow from Agatha Christie when he wrote his first Nero Wolfe detective story; rather, it was more likely Christie who borrowed from Stout.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Rex Stout's "Justice Ends at Home"

Ross E. Davies, George Masson University School of Law; The Green Bag, has published Leg, Culp, and the Evil Judge at 2012 Green Bag Almanac and Reader 321. Here is the abstract.

Nobody could have known it at the time, but when Rex Stout’s novella Justice Ends at Home was published in 1915, it foreshadowed not only the rise of two enduringly popular fictional heroes (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin), but also the fall of one enduringly objectionable actual villain (Judge Martin T. Manton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit). Leading scholars of the work of Rex Stout agree that the two main heroic characters in Justice Ends at Home — the flabby, phlegmatic, middle-aged Simon Leg and his sharp, energetic, youthful assistant Dan Culp — prefigured the fat Nero Wolfe and svelte Archie Goodwin who made their first appearance in Stout’s 1934 novel, Fer-de-Lance. As Stout biographer John McAleer puts it, “eighteen years before Fer-de-Lance was written, Wolfe and Archie already lived nebulously in the mind of Rex Stout.” Unlike Simon Leg and Dan Culp, Judge Fraser Manton — the main villainous character in Justice Ends at Home — has passed largely unnoticed by scholars of Stout and of the law. But the fictional Judge Manton is in fact a prefiguration of the infamous real-life Judge Martin T. Manton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The similarities go beyond the names. Indeed, the two Mantons have enough in common to support an inference that Stout based his fictional Judge Fraser Manton on the real Martin Manton, although the real Manton would not become a judge until 1916 — the year after Justice Ends at Home was published. In other words, Stout’s selection of a corrupt Judge Manton for the lead bad-guy role in Justice Ends at Home was intriguingly prescient.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Rex Stout's Influences

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law & The Green Bag, and Cattleya M. Concepcion, The Green Bag, have published Fore-Shadowed: Where Rex Stout Got the Idea for Fer-De-Lance,  at 2012 Green Bag Almanac and Reader 151. Here is the abstract.

Researchers describing the discovery of something they are not equipped to fully understand run the risk that their reach will exceed their grasp. And so, as mere enthusiastic newcomers to the study of author Rex Stout, we will limit ourselves to: (1) reporting that we have run across an early (1916) detective story written by Stout and (2) sharing a few thoughts that would likely occur on first reading to anyone - and especially a lawyer - familiar with Stout’s later (beginning in 1934) detective stories featuring his Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin characters.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.