Rex Stout: Killer Conversations (formerly Royal Decree) is a must read for aficionados of detective fiction. Here Edgar winner John McAleer shares some of his most memorable conversations with Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout. Featuring an updated Introduction by crime fiction icon William G. Tapply and an Afterword by Grand Master Edward D. Hoch, Killer Conversations is an essential collectors’ volume. These in-person discussions with Stout were compiled to inform and gratify, in Stout’s own words, the millions of Rex Stout fans who would be putting these questions to him as if he were alive answering his mail from Wolfe’s West 35th Street Brownstone. Hailed by CBS as the “American Conan Doyle,” in Killer Conversations Stout discusses, among other things, his writingcraft, the Wolfe mysteries, plotting methods, characterization, the modern detective story, his service aboard President Teddy Roosevelt’s yacht, and offers his appraisal of crime fiction icons such as—Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, G. K. Chesterton, and more. Killer Conversations will keep mystery fans glued to their chair till midnight chimes the hour. And why not, isn’t that what a Stout mystery does?

McAleer: When you were writing for the pulps, between nineteen twelve and nineteen seventeen, did you see yourself as a hack writer or as an aspiring young writer on his way to the top?
Stout: I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

McAleer: I know a writer who, before beginning a book, separates a ream of paper into unequal piles of twenty-three, thirty-seven, forty, twenty-seven, and so forth, because he knows in advance how many pages will go into each chapter. How does that strike you?
Stout: He isn’t a writer, he’s a puzzle fiend. Revolting.

McAleer: You’ve said you’d rather have written Alice in Wonderland than any other book in English written in the last century. Why?
Stout: I could write pages about it and they would have to be well written. While giving glorious entertainment in the form of playful nonsense, it does the best job in the English language of exposing our greatest fallacy, that man is a rational animal. A couple of instances out of many: The Queen’s “Off with their heads” shows that the greatest danger of unlimited power is not that it can act by malice but that it can act on whim. The shifting of places at the Mad Hatter’s tea party shows that if all of the members of a group wish to make a change it is not true that they should change in unison in the same direction. To do this right would take hours.

McAleer: Yet you hold Hammett in high regard?
Stout: Certainly. He was better than Chandler, though to read the critics you wouldn’t think so. In fact, The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote. . .Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

McAleer: Inspector Cramer is called “Fergus” Cramer in Where There’s a Will. Later, in The Silent Speaker, his initials are given as “L. T. C.”. How do you explain this discrepancy?
Stout: No significance. Laziness. I didn’t bother to check whether he already had a first name. Of course all discrepancies in the Nero Wolfe stories are Archie Goodwin’s fault.