Quotes from Rex Stout

How old are you?" That was for my benefit. He had a triple conviction: that a) his animus toward women made it impossible for him to judge any single specimen; that b) I needed only an hour with any woman alive to tag her; and that c) he could help out by asking some blunt impertinent question, his favorite one being how old are you. It's hopeless to try to set him right.

What that bird would have done with a couple of Martinis under his fur would have been something to watch from an airplane.

They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you did it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it.

It was delightful; but on awakening this morning I felt so completely water-logged that with only myself to consider I would have remained in bed to await disintegration. Names battered at me: Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, Theodore Horstmann; responsibilities; and I arose to resume my burden. Not that I complain; the responsibilities are mutual; but my share can be done only by me.

Saul Panzer stood facing the cast, not the audience. There is nothing impressive about Saul. He is undersized, his nose and ears are too big, and his shoulders slant. With Saul a thousand wrongdoers had made the mistake of believing what they saw. He spoke. "I believe this is the way it was Thursday evening when Mr. Wolfe entered. Does anyone disagree?

The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person. It is mine. I am sometimes successful.

Is all this necessary?" Bowen wanted to know. "Perhaps not," Wolfe allowed, "but I'm exposing a murderer and claim a measure of indulgence. You must have expected to spend hours here. Am I tedious?" "Go ahead.

Mrs. Jaffee a little earlier. I asked if he was escorting Mrs. Jaffee. "Certainly," he said virtuously. "She is my client. What's that noise you're making?" "It's something special," I told him, "and takes a lot of practice. Don't try it offhand. It's a derisive chortle.

His oratorical baritone was raspy and supercilious under the strain. "You say you are not interested," he told Wolfe, "in the factors of means and opportunity. The motive is palpable for all of us, but it is also palpable that Miss Duday is biased by animus. She cannot support her statement that after June thirtieth my income from the corporation would have ceased. I deny that Miss Eads intended to take any action so ill advised and irresponsible.

But Mr. Cramer,." Wolfe protested, "is it my fault if destiny likes this address?

Helmar took his time replying. Finally he said, "I'll reserve my answer to that." "I doubt if aging will help it," Wolfe said dryly. "Now that you know that Miss Eads had not gone to Venezuela, and I assure you she had no intention of going, how do you explain her backing out from her appointment with you, her departure, her asking you not to try to find her?" "I don't have to explain it.

He looked at her. That was the first time I had seen him give her a direct and explicit look, and, since she was just off the line from him to me, I had a good view of it. It demolished one detail of his exposition—the claim that a man of his training and temperament couldn't possibly commit a murder. His look at her was perfect for a guy about to put a cord around a neck and pull tight. It was just one swift, ugly flash, and then he returned to Wolfe.

When people's brains stop working, just go somewhere else." (Death of a Doxie)

To anyone seeing him but not knowing him, Saul Panzer was nothing but a little guy with a big nose who never quite caught up with his shaving.

As I trotted down the hall, Fritz was holding the street door open and three people were entering in the shape of a sandwich – a dick, Zorka, and another dick.

The sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife, his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster.

He lowered the magazine. "Archie. You may remember that I once returned a retainer of forty thousand dollars which a client named Zimmermann had paid me, because he wanted to tell me how to handle his case instead of leaving it to me. Well?" He lifted the magazine. He lowered it again. "Please type the report." He lifted it again.

She marched across to his desk, extended a hand, and told him cordially, "You look exactly right! Just as I thought! I would—" She broke it off because she was getting a deep freeze. He had moved no muscle, and the expression on his face, while not belligerent, was certainly not cordial. She drew back. He spoke. "I don't shake hands with you because you might later think it an imposition. We'll see. Sit down, Miss Eads.

Your presence here, Miss Eads, is preposterous. This is neither a rooming house nor an asylum for hysterical women; it is my—" "I'm not hysterical!" "Very well, I withdraw it. It is not an asylum for unhysterical women; it is my office and my home.

Opinions, from experts, cost money.

Of course the Times tried to insist on speaking with Wolfe. When the last trumpet sounds the Times will want to check with Gabriel himself, and for the next edition will try to get it confirmed by even Higher Authority.

When I told [Lily Rowan] I wouldn't be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words.

This," Herb said, "is the acme. The absolute acme. Why don't we just pull up to him and ask where he's going?

for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.