Word: stouts
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...DOORBELL RANG by Rex Stout. 186 pages. Viking...
...when the mystery novel is designed more for the economy-class airline traveler than for the home armchair reader, Rex Stout's way has not changed. After 31 years, Nero Wolfe is still 286 Ibs. large, still guzzles at least a dozen beers and tends his orchids for precisely four hours daily, still abhors leaving his Manhattan house on business, and never goes near a sports car or chases a blonde. While thus ignoring Bondomania and its sibling rivals, Stout and Wolfe are doing just fine. If The Doorbell Rang holds true to recent form, it will sell...
Casting the FBI as villain has brought Author Stout publicity he has not had in years. It just seemed to make a good plot, he says, though admitting that "I think the untrammeled power of FBI is subversive to the American democratic idea." Normally, he does not let his views suffuse his mysteries. "By the age of 47," says the spare, spiny-bearded author, who is now 78, "I had written four so-called serious novels that had got some critical praise. But I realized that I was not and never would be a great writer. I had decided, though...
...Stout once said all that he thinks is important to say. A good mystery writer, he wrote, merely tells the reader: " 'Let's run a race. Here goes my mind, I'm off, see if you can catch me.' " In Doorbell, even FBI fans will have to admire his agility...
Those schools known as the Ivy League have long held the gridiron to be a masculine domain. Stout-hearted lads with long horns and strong drink can and have provided all the cheer the serious university needs. There is certainly no total exclusion of women. They are permitted to sit in the stands. But if they are allowed to gambol on the field of play who is to stop them from participating in the very contests themselves? Are we to countenance the sight of the finest products of our young ladies' seminaries, helmeted, and padded, raging at each other like...