Rex Stout didn’t create the concept of the armchair detective, such as Nero Wolfe, who remains in one place while others bring him the threads and pieces of a mystery for him to solve. Nor, of course, did he invent the hardboiled, smart-mouth detective which Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin, personifies so well. What Mr. Stout did do is merge the two genres into something new, brilliant and never successfully duplicated. Several of Mr. Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels were topical in nature touching on such issues as racism in A Right To Die, labor union corruption in The Silent Speaker and Watergate in A Family Affair. So when it became obvious that J. Edgar Hoover was getting too big for his britches Mr. Stout decided to have Nero Wolfe bring him down a peg in The Doorbell Rang. Personally, from what I’ve heard of Hoover, I tend to agree with Nero Wolfe’s poor opinion of him. I even consider it possible the initials FBI did, in fact represent Hoover, but only in the sense of Fat Bald Ignorant. Realistically there’s no doubt Hoover did this country a lot of good, but by using the FBI for his own personal, often unethical ends he did it a lot of bad as well.
In The Doorbell Rang a very wealthy woman offends Hoover; not by breaking the law, but by taking a stand against his lack of ethics. In retaliation Hoover sets his agency to pestering her with not-so-subtle background checks to start rumors about her, open tails that are annoying and embarrassing and digging into the woman’s past to unearth whatever skeleton’s can be found with which she could be embarrassed or blackmailed. Angry, and a little frightened, she pays Wolfe the biggest retainer he’s ever received to tell the FBI to lay off and make it stick. Wolfe takes the case; not due so much to the money as for the challenge and out of his own dislike of Hoover’s method’s. With the help of a surprising ally Wolfe sets his most intricate trap ever to gain a lever on the FBI by proving their involvement in an unsolved murder. This is a masterpiece by the grand doyen of deductive fiction and one of Mr. Stout’s best.
Average Grade: A+
