Quotes about stout Quotes
7 quotes
"If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature."
"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."
"Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American detective novel. With great wit and cunning, he devised a form which combined the traditional virtues of Sherlock Holmes and the English school with the fast-moving vernacular narrative of Dashiell Hammett."
"When Stout is on top of his game, which is most of the time, his diabolically clever plotting and his storytelling ability exceed that of any other mystery writer you can name, including Agatha Christie, who invented her own eccentric genius detective, Hercule Poirot."
"Stout was almost as witty as Raymond Chandler. His detective had splendid putdown lines almost as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And his mysteries were constructed a lot more smoothly than Agatha Christie's. But you do not expect Chandlerian wit from Conan Doyle, or Conan Doyle's superbly breathless sense of atmosphere and melodrama from Christie, or Christie's scathingly clear, unblinking vision of the monstrous crimes that average human nature is capable of all from the same pen. Stout gives you all of it. He is the Willie Mays or Derek Jeter of the mystery genre: a brilliant all-rounder more talented in each area than any single writer should ever dream of being."
"Rex is a perfect writer – economical, rapid, free of cliché. Epigrammatic, intelligent, charming. What else? That's enough."
"As a philosopher Stout is quite difficult to situate. His relation to English Idealism is complicated. We know that he advanced a position that Metz describes as ‘a “meeting” of pragmatist, realist and idealist motives’. Metz goes on to label Stout either an ‘old realist’ or a ‘new realist’ but definitely not an idealist. Passmore, more accurately, describes Stout as ‘pre-eminently … a philosopher of the middle way’. It is in this way that Stout is usually painted by much of the literature – a philosopher who was interested in reconciliation and compromise. This I think is true of his philosophy after about 1900."