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Rex Stout’s Black Orchids

Black Orchids is Rex Stout’s darkest novel, written in 1940 and 1942. Nero as a name is often construed to mean “dark” or “black,” suggesting that black orchids are Nero’s special province.

Calling Black Orchids a novel is not strictly correct; it is two novellas, loosely knit together with a few paragraphs of inserted narration from Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin. The first depicts Wolfe’s acquisition of the black flowers. In the second, Wolfe sends a spray of the dark posies for the coffin of his client, whose murder he eventually solves.

The first novella displays the worst sides of Wolfe’s character. To get the orchids, Wolfe blackmails their owner by threatening to reveal the aristocratic fancier’s involvement in murder, greedily insisting on all the specimens for himself. Then he tricks the murderer into gassing himself with Wolfe’s own fumigation setup. In real life, Wolfe would be lucky to get off with second-degree murder. On top of that, the novella’s inciting killing occurred when Archie pulled a string that discharged a pistol and drove a bullet into the top of the victim’s skull. The deaths in the first novella were all at the hand of the Wolfe establishment on a greedy mission. Black orchids indeed.

The second novella is similarly dark. Wolfe is hired by a woman who arranges swanky novelty parties and whom Wolfe clearly detests as a frivolous snob, but he takes her money. Archie investigates, attending a flamboyantly gruesome outdoor cocktail party with an obnoxious chimpanzee, a pair of cranky black bears, and an alligator that causes Archie to wound his hand. The human guests are equally sullen and unpleasant. When the chimp knocks a tray of drinks from the butler’s hands, glass shatters, and the client’s toe is cut. The wound is treated with what appears to be iodine but contains live tetanus bacilli. Three days later, the client dies a tortured and miserable death from lockjaw. The farewell scene is uttered from between clenched teeth and interrupted with bone-cracking spasms. Nero sends black orchids to the funeral but refuses to investigate until he is angered by the hapless Inspector Cramer. To spite the police, Wolfe finally acts, and the murder is eventually caught through an act of self-mutilation. Yikes.

Peeking under the covers into Stout’s life may be questionable criticism, but the early 1940s when Black Orchids was written were fraught. The Nazis were ascendant in Europe and the U.S. was torturing itself over the decision to enter the war. Stout was in the center of the argument, urging American entry and contending with the America First movement that opposed involvement. John McAleer, Stout’s biographer, says that Stout began having trouble with indigestion, which is echoed in Wolfe resorting to Amphogel antacid in the second novella. Wolfe’s execution of the first murderer with cyanide gas is also telling as rumors of holocaust gas chambers were beginning to enter the American consciousness. I find it easy to think that Black Orchids reflected Stout’s tense mood as World War II began.

Dark stories are not bad stories. Last week was at least my fourth reading of the two novellas and I’ve enjoyed them every time including this last.

But on this read, I noticed their darkness. In most of Stout’s stories, Wolfe’s brownstone in mid-town Manhattan is an island of stability where orchids are always tended for two hours twice a day, meals are never interrupted by business, and the conversation is always witty. The gourmet meals are painted as exotic, but they are closer to Sunday dinner in Stout’s home Kansas than Le Bernardin. Wolfe may be a sophisticated émigré from the Balkans, but he usually acts more like a shrewd mid-western autodidact. Most of Stout’s work is in some way optimistic and uplifting, but he slipped deep shade into this pair of novellas. It’s quite an achievement to write stories as gloomy as Black Orchids and yet leave the impression that they are typically placid Nero and Archie tales.

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Jefferson’s Revelation

A few days ago, I pulled Henry Adams’ history of the Jefferson administration off the shelf and started reading it, hoping to distract myself from 2019. I bought the Library of America edition a few years ago after reading Adams’ autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. His vigorous, sharp-edged prose captivated me; I wanted to read more. As happens too often with me, the volume rested on the shelf until this week.

Looking for an antidote, I found a revelation.

Here is Adams quoting Jefferson in about 1800:

“Progress is either physical or intellectual. If we can bring about that men are on the average an inch taller in the next generation than in this; if they are an inch larger around the chest; if their brain is an ounce or two heavier, and their life a year or two longer, that is progress. If fifty years hence the average many shall invariably argue from two ascertained premises where he now jumps to a conclusion from a single supposed revelation, -that is progress! I expect it to be made here, under our democratic stimulus, on a great scale, until every man is potentially an athlete in body and an Aristotle in mind.”

This is refreshing, although women would not be left out of this formulation in the 21st century. On the physical side, the US has done well. In the intervening two centuries, we have become taller, we live longer, and we are better educated.

Reasoning from “ascertained premises” has been a triumph and a constant struggle. I marvel at the way Jefferson captures today’s dilemma more clearly than our claims and counterclaims of facts, alternative facts, and lies. He uses “ascertain” in a way that I intend to use more often. Webster’s Unabridged defines it as “to find out or learn for a certainty (as by examination or investigation).” Jefferson does not insist that premises be true. Instead, he asks for ascertainment: examination and investigation of the premises. Ascertainment is his only touchstone.

Truth does not enter the discussion. He requires investigation and examination, not truth. But action must wait for ascertainment, which is never final. Further ascertaining may yield more useful results, but Jefferson asserts that ascertained premises, and the more the better, yield progress. The opposite of ascertained premises, supposed revelation yields stagnation.

There is no need to examine and investigate a revelation, which is a great help to lazy thinkers. Pick any supposition from the sloshing pool of revelation. You know your inauguration was the largest ever, your tax cut is the biggest, and your trade policies are better than fried pickles at the county fair. These are your revelations. Investigating and examining revelations is a waste because revelations are truth. You are free to move on to your next great thought, go play golf, or take a nap with your trophies.

According to Jefferson, basing action on ascertainment, examining and investigating, rather than revelation made the United States different from Europe. When monarchs speak, they voice a revelation that is true because a monarch said it. But the United States have no monarchs. Its government’s actions are based on dynamic examination and investigation of the premises of the argument, not stagnant revelations.

The Jeffersonian method of progress is to ascertain, examine and investigate, rather than blindly accept revealed truth. Jefferson did not trust monarchs, established institutions, wealth, or revealed truth in any form. But he did trust the people’s examination and investigation of every premise.

In Adams’ view of Jefferson’s day, Americans were struggling, as they struggle today, to prove wrong the reactionary belief, now prevalent in Russia and China, that democracy will inevitably lead to lives, in Hobbes’ words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Not an easy task. In 1800, the United States’ debts from the revolutionary war dwarfed the rest of the budget. The country had little industry. Agriculture was disorganized and inefficient. Heavy transportation was by water and much work was needed before rivers would be reliably navigable. We had almost no roads and none fit for freight. Natural resources were abundant, but without means to extract them, they had little effective value. Schools were few. Artists, engineers, and scientists were scarce. Americans did not have the expertise to design their own capital and traveling anywhere was slow and arduous. The country was debilitated by a plague that debased slaves and demoralized slave-owners. The vultures of Europe were circling to pick the carcass of the infant nation’s demise.

But here we are today. Jefferson’s vision, that the ascertained premises of the people would generate progress that would crush archaic vultures and push away nasty, brutish and short lives, that revelation has prevailed. Ascertained premises won two world wars, put a man on the moon, conquered small pox, and elected a black president.

This is the antidote I sought.

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Word For Writers

“The biggest problem with Word is that it is way too much program for 90% of creative writers and self-publishers.” JW Manus.

Yep. I read discussions of Word on the network all the time. Many of the comments are negative. Sometimes I take time to defend Word or offer tips on how to use Word more effectively. But I have to admit that something about Word is seriously broken, but not the application itself. It’s better than ever.

Agile programing and continuous update have changed the software industry. In the old days, we spent months or years designing a program down to the last detail. Then code and unit test for another year or so. Then quality assurance system testing executed tests based on the design, not the as-built code. Every failed test was a dagger in your heart. If you were “lucky” QA was cut short to meet roll out deadlines. And, more often than not, when the product finally hit the customers, it was a travesty.

Software is maddeningly complex, and its presence often changes its environment in ways that invalidate the requirements which the software is intended to meet, and software is more fluid than any physical object. A program designed several years before a real user touches it, never meets user expectations.

The enormous cost overruns and failed projects that plagued software of the 1990s were largely due to a methodology called called “waterfall development.” In the waterfall, design, construction, testing, and acceptance of the final product proceed in strict order. Each phase must be completed and signed off on before the next phase can begin. Administrators loved it because they always had signed documents to shake in people’s faces. It worked great for bridges, skyscrapers, World War II, and the moon landing, but failed for software.

Today, the prevailing approach is to build software in small increments. Build a single feature, release to a test user group, look at the problems and let the release generate further ideas, then fix the defects, incorporate the ideas, and roll out another incremental release. Keep the increments small and rinse and repeat forever. The network bandwidth and speed available today makes it possible to develop continuously in small increments. This has proven to be much more successful than the waterfall.

Microsoft and many other software developers have adopted the agile methodology, but the new methodology has its own problems.

An unforeseen consequence of agile programming and continuous update is that documentation doesn’t keep up well with the development of the product. Microsoft has opened a fire hose of development and innovation in Word and documentation has not kept up.

Writing and revising documentation often takes as much time as developing and testing code. Asking a writer to document incomplete code easily degenerates into a time-wasting mess. Distinguishing defects from features is often hard and software can turn on a dime. The documentation often has to be rewritten at the last minute anyway. Consequently, the documentation usually trails behind the product.

However, documentation is also critical to software quality. If a feature is not clearly enough documented for a customer to use it well, the system is broken, no matter how perfectly it works.

Microsoft Word has suffered from the efficiency of agile development and frequent updates. Word processing in general has leaped ahead in the last few decades and it becomes more powerful with every automatic software upgrade, faster processor, increase in available memory and storage, and jump in network bandwidth.

So often, when I read of writer’s problems with Word, I think of some poor sap trying to cut a two-by-four with a Skillsaw without plugging it in or turning it on.

And I sympathize. They’re writers. They don’t have time or inclination to become experts on a huge and challenging system like Microsoft Word. Writers usually learn just enough to get the job at hand done and then get back to their serious business of writing. The solution might work but be all wrong down the road. Two months later, when they tackle a similar problem, their half-learned and half-remembered solution lets them down. And intervening updates may have improved the process, but they also changed it. Who wouldn’t be mad?

Microsoft has not made it easy. These days, most developers aspire to programs that are so simple to use, they don’t need documentation. But that’s an aspiration that is devilishly difficult to realize when the work done by the program is as complicated and hard to understand as word processing today.

I’m a software engineer and architect who coded his first word processor at the same time he started using word processors forty years ago. In recent years, I’ve burned hours puzzling over Word help forums. I’ve resorted to reading the xml in docxs and studying Word OLE documentation to get a feeling for Word’s internals. I used to know developers on the Word dev team and watched them stumble while using Word. In the end, I’ve always concluded that Word is a good product, well-designed with surprising power and flexibility, but first priority for writers is to write, not become Word experts.

Nevertheless, the writers who plug in their Skillsaw, instead of going back to a handsaw, will make more sawdust.

Today, if you are having trouble with Word, I suggest getting a copy of Word For the Wise by JW Manus. It will help. I have some disagreements with some of her approaches—I go farther with styles and I think my process is easier and more foolproof—but you won’t go wrong following her advice. Her book is still the best I’ve seen.