How like a God

This noir novel was Rex Stout's very first, published in 1929, five years before Fer-de-Lance, Stout's first Nero Wolfe novel. According to the publisher, this is its first re-issue in more than 50 years. The title is borrowed from Hamlet's "What a piece of work is man" soliloquy, and the main character, William Sidney, dwells on the bad luck visited upon him and the mistakes he's made in a way that is about as Hamlet-like as possible. Sidney contemplates all of this as he climbs the stairs of a New York apartment building with a revolver in hand, intent on killing the person at the top. The situation itself is dramatic, but Sidney's review of his life can be tedious at times. Stout alternates between third person narration and a gripping and sometimes eerie second person narration. A surprise awaits at the top of the stairs. Though probably not Stout's best published work, this is his first. Libraries may want this re-publication in the interests of literary history.

The frame story of Stout's first novel, out of print since 1929, follows a gun-toting man up several flights of stairs while the rest of the tale, unfolding in a long series of interspersed flashbacks, explains where he is and what he plans to do. By any rational standard, William Barton Sidney has it made. His sister Jane's decision to seize control of the family business when their father dies ends up costing him nothing because his old school frenemy, wealthy Dick Carr, hires him as assistant treasurer of the Carr Corporation and keeps raising his salary for no particular reason. After a distinctly bumpy series of amatory encounters, Will marries Dick's sister, Erma, who makes a perfectly serviceable wife for anyone who's not bothered by her many blasé infidelities. So Will, nothing daunted, embarks on a series of adulterous relationships of his own, the most damaging of them with someone who emerges without warning from his past. Maybe he doesn't have it made after all. Stout presents this doom-laden backstory in an innovative second-person narrative that's at once uncanny, disorienting, and brutally self-critical: "You do, after all, know fairly well what's going on; it's only when you presume to take a hand in it that you become an idiot." The best indication that he'll launch Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin on their far less disturbing adventures in five more years is the fascination already well established here with the nexus between emotional turmoil, murder most foul, and the apparently normal rhythms of business and domestic life. Perfect for fans who thought reading Wolfe's case files over and over told them all there was to know about their creator. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.