The League of Frightened Men
| The League of Frightened Men |
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| Author(s) | Rex Stout |
| Cover artist | Winifred E. Lefferts |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Nero Wolfe |
| Genre(s) | Detective fiction |
| Publisher | Farrar & Rinehart |
| Publication date | August 14, 1935 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 308 pp. (first edition) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | Fer-de-Lance |
| Followed by | The Rubber Band |
The League of Frightened Men is the second Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. The story was serialized in six issues of The Saturday Evening Post (June 15–July 20, 1935) under the title The Frightened Men. The novel was published in 1935 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The League of Frightened Men is a Haycraft Queen Cornerstone, one of the most influential works of mystery fiction listed by crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen.[1]
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
An author, Paul Chapin, is on trial for alleged obscenity in his popular novel, and Archie is telling Wolfe the scurrilous details as found in the newspaper. Wolfe and Archie have an argument about obscenity law, and its upshot is that Wolfe tells Archie to have the book sent over in the morning.
Wolfe reads the book, then tells Archie that Andrew Hibbard, a potential client, had visited while Archie was away on another case, and that Hibbard had asked Wolfe to arrange to protect him from a man whose name he would not disclose. However, Hibbard did include other particulars,
- many years earlier, a "boyish prank" upon his friend (now nemesis) had had a lasting and tragic outcome
- in Hibbard's opinion the man was a psychopath
- following the deaths of two their mutual friends at gatherings (reunions), they had received lengthy typewritten unsigned masterfully word poems/threats each saying, among other things that "he had embarked on a ship of vengeance"
- the man had had recent commercial success
At the time, Wolfe sent Hibbard away with two recommendations
- Get some life insurance
- Find another agency specializing in personal protection
Now, after reading the Chapin cited in the court case, Wolfe has found the curious phrase "embark on a ship of vengeance" twice in that novel, and from that and other considerations forms the surmise that Paul Chapin was the man Andrew Hibbard feared but would not name.
Wolfe considers his surmise to have been validated by confirmation that Chapin had been crippled in a hazing accident at a Harvard dorm many years before, and also by knowledge that Chapin has a new successful play on Broadway.
Hibbard has been missing for a week or two -- but Wolfe locates some the other members of the "League of Atonement" through Hibbard's niece -- and as already told by Hibbard in the first attempt to engage Wolfe, some of the League have begun dying, though from the actions of Paul Chapin, other menaces, or simply the ordinary course of life is not yet known.
Therefore surviving members of the League enter into an agreement with Wolfe that he should provide the League removal of threats and apprehensions from the following sources
- Paul Chapin
- Person, possibly Chapin, who has sent typewritten poetic taunts/threats members of the League have recently received (and caused the League of Atonement set up after the hazing accident to be recently dubbed The League of Frightened Men)
- Person or persons responsible for the recent deaths of two of their number (and possibly Hibbard as well, as noted earlier)
The effectiveness of Wolfe's work is to be decided by a majority vote of the League members.
[edit] The unfamiliar word
"Nero Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic," said Michael Jaffe, executive producer of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery.[2] Nero Wolfe's erudite vocabulary is one of the hallmarks of the character. Examples of unfamiliar words — or unfamiliar uses of words that some would otherwise consider familiar — are found throughout the corpus, often in the give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie.
- Viva voce, chapter 2. Wolfe refers Archie to a conversation in the office that was transcribed by a stenographer hired while Archie was away:
- I nodded, glancing over the typewritten pages. "Andrew Hibbard. Instructor in psychology at Columbia. It was on October twentieth, a Saturday, that’s two weeks ago today."
- "Suppose you read it."
- "Viva voce?"
- "Archie." Wolfe looked at me. "Where did you pick that up, where did you learn to pronounce it, and what do you think it means?"
- "Do you want me to read this stuff out loud, sir?"
- "It doesn't mean out loud. Confound you." Wolfe emptied his glass, leaned back in his chair, got his fingers to meet in front of his belly, and laced them. "Proceed."
- Juridical, chapter 21. Wolfe urges objectivity from the assembled League members:
- "You cannot be at the same time juridical and partisan, at least not with any pretense at competence."
[edit] Reviews and commentary
- Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime — Archie gets some rough handling and even cries in this longish and complicated story of threatened and actual violence embracing two and a half dozen men of various occupations and characters, who in the past have injured a youth whose revenge they now fear.[3]
- Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker — The second book about Nero Wolfe, newest of eccentric detectives, and good enough to prove that his success isn't just a fluke. An excellent story about thirty men scared to death by a cripple, told out of the side of the mouth.[4]
- Terry Teachout, About Last Night, "Forty years with Nero Wolfe" (January 12, 2009) — Rex Stout's witty, fast-moving prose hasn't dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I've spent the past four decades reading and re-reading Stout's novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor ... It is to revel in such writing that I return time and again to Stout's books, and in particular to The League of Frightened Men, Some Buried Caesar, The Silent Speaker, Too Many Women, Murder by the Book, Before Midnight, Plot It Yourself, Too Many Clients, The Doorbell Rang, and Death of a Doxy, which are for me the best of all the full-length Wolfe novels.
- The prominent American man of letters Edmund Wilson wrote in a review in The New Yorker that the book "makes use of a clever psychological idea."
[edit] Popular culture
"A number of the paintings of René Magritte (1898–1967), the internationally famous Belgian painter, are named after titles of books by Rex Stout," wrote the artist's attorney and friend Harry Torczyner.[5][6] "He read Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre, as well as Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout and Georges Simenon," the Times Higher Education Supplement wrote of Magritte. "Some of his best titles were 'found' in this way."[7] Magritte's 1942 painting, Les compagnons de la peur ("The Companions of Fear"), bears the title given to The League of Frightened Men when it was published in France by Gallimard (1939). It is one of Magritte's series of "leaf-bird" paintings. Created during the Nazi occupation of Brussels, it depicts a stormy, mountainous landscape in which a cluster of plants has metamorphosed into a group of vigilant owls.[8]
[edit] Adaptations
[edit] The League of Frightened Men
Columbia Pictures adapted the novel for its 1937 film The League of Frightened Men. Lionel Stander reprised his Meet Nero Wolfe role as Archie Goodwin, and Walter Connolly starred as Nero Wolfe.
[edit] Publication history
- 1935, The Saturday Evening Post, June 15–July 20, 1935, as The Frightened Men[9]
- 1935, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, August 14, 1935, hardcover
- In his limited-edition pamphlet, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I, Otto Penzler describes the first edition of The League of Frightened Men: "Black cloth, gold lettering on front cover and spine; rear cover blank. Issued in a mainly black, white and gray pictorial dust wrapper … The first edition has the publisher's monogram logo on the copyright page. The second printing, in September 1935, is identical to the first except that the logo was dropped."[10]
- In April 2006, Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine estimated that the first edition of The League of Frightened Men had a value of "$15,000 and up."[11]
- 1935, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1935, hardcover
- 1935, London: Cassell, 1935, hardcover
- 1937, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1937, hardcover
- 1940, New York: Triangle, January 1940, hardcover
- 1942, New York: Avon, 1942, paperback
- 1944, Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Company, The Nero Wolfe Omnibus (with The Red Box), January 1944, hardcover
- New York: Lawrence E. Spivak, Jonathan Press Mystery #J-33, not dated, abridged, paperback
- New York: Lawrence E. Spivak, Mercury Mystery #48, not dated, abridged, paperback
- 1955, New York: Viking Press, Full House: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus (with And Be a Villain and Curtains for Three), May 15, 1955, hardcover
- 1961, London: Penguin, 1961, paperback
- 1963, New York: Pyramid (Green Door), October 1963, paperback
- 1979, New York: Jove, June 1979, paperback
- 1995, New York: Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-76298-2 January 1995, paperback
- 1996, Burlington, Ontario: Durkin Hayes Publishing, DH Audio ISBN 0-88646-418-8 September 1996, audio cassette (read by Saul Rubinek)
- 2004, Auburn, California: The Audio Partners Publishing Corp., Mystery Masters ISBN 1-57270-404-7 July 2004, audio CD (unabridged, read by Michael Prichard)
- 2008, New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group (with Fer-de-Lance) ISBN 0-553-38545-3 June 2008, paperback
- 2010, New York: Bantam ISBN 978-0-307-75602-2 April 28, 2010, e-book
[edit] References
- ^ Haycraft Queen Cornerstones Complete Checklist at Classic Crime Fiction.com; retrieved July 1, 2011
- ^ Quoted in Vitaris, Paula, "Miracle on 35th Street: Nero Wolfe on Television," Scarlet Street, issue #45, 2002, p. 36
- ^ Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN 0-06-015796-8
- ^ The New Yorker, August 17, 1935, p. 60
- ^ McAleer, John, Rex Stout: A Biography, p. 578. McAleer quotes a letter dated May 24, 1974, that he received from Torczyner, a New York collector who was also Georges Simenon's attorney.
- ^ "We know the importance granted to the words by Magritte in his paintings and we know the impact that literary works such as Poe's, Rex Stout's or Mallarmé's had on him." The Brussels Surrealist Group, Magritte Museum (retrieved July 31, 2011).
- ^ Danchev, Alex, "Canny Resemblance"; Times Higher Education Supplement, June 30, 2011
- ^ Matteson Art – 1931–1942 Brussels & Pre-War Years; retrieved July 31, 2011
- ^ Townsend, Guy M., Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980, New York: Garland Publishing; ISBN 0-8240-9479-4), pp. 9–10. John McAleer, Judson Sapp and Arriean Schemer are associate editors of this definitive publication history.
- ^ Penzler, Otto, Collecting Mystery Fiction #9, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part I (2001, New York: The Mysterious Bookshop, limited edition of 250 copies), p. 10
- ^ Smiley, Robin H., "Rex Stout: A Checklist of Primary First Editions." Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine (Volume 16, Number 4), April 2006, p. 32
[edit] External links
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