Yesterday was the birthday of Rex Stout (1886-1975, #nicelonglife), author of the Nero Wolfe detective novels. The 46 novels (and numerous novellas) have sold 45 million copies in 22 languages.

(Yes. I’m one day off, addled by all the turkey and stuffing I’ve ingested. Sue me.)

Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, but grew up in Kansas, the sixth of nine children in a Quaker family. Stout was a math prodigy and spent part of his childhood performing all over Kansas, adding up long columns of numbers at a glance. His parents eventually put a stop to this and pulled him out of school, and for a time instead of formal schooling he read the 1,200 books of fiction, philosophy, and history in his father’s library.

Stout studied briefly at the University of Kansas, then enlisted in the Navy and spent two years—I am not making this up—playing cards on President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. (Your great-great-grandparents’ tax dollars at work.) After his discharge, Stout wrote for pulp magazines and eventually, with his brother, came up with a highly successful school banking system: children brought pennies to school on Bank Day, and Stout passed these depositors on to bankers, who felt warm and fuzzy at the good PR. Stout took his chunk of money, moved to Paris, and wrote several serious novels—critically well-received but not commercially successful.

Stout lost a lot of money in the 1929 stock market crash. He returned to the U.S. and started writing detective fiction as a way to make money. He published the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, in 1934. The books were an immediate success and gave Stout (by now on his second wife) financial security. He took a break from writing during WWII to wage his own war against Hitler and Nazism, joining several pro-democracy organizations and taking part in national radio programs that debunked Nazi propaganda. (Just to review: Nazis are the bad guys. They were then; they are now.)

After the war, Stout returned to writing Nero Wolfe novels. But Stout was a man with wide and varied interests, from fine dining to gardening (he grew prize pumpkins and peaches) to baseball to chess, so…think busy. Stout won the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1959, and the last Nero Wolfe novel, A Family Affair, came out one month before Stout’s death at the age of 88.

Fun fact: the brilliant, agoraphobic Nero Wolfe resembled his creator in many ways, but one theory about the origins of Wolfe holds that Wolfe was based on Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s fat, brilliant younger brother. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Stout

Travel safely this fine Monday, if you happen to be traveling, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.