THE REX STOUT LIBRARY
Ferde-Lance
The League of
Frightened Men
The Rubber Band
Where There's aWill
The Final Deduction
The Hand in the Glove
Black Orchids
The Doorbell Rang
If Death Ever Slept
Murder by the Book
Not Quite Dead Enough
Prisoner's Base
And Four to Go
Might as Well Be Dead
A Family Affair
Please Pass the Guilt
Triple jeopardy
The Mother Hunt
The Father Hunt
Trouble in Triplicate
Homicide Trinity
The Black Mountain
Too Many Cooks
Before Midnight
Over My Dead Body
The Mountain Cat Murders
The Silent Speaker
And Be aVillain Too Many Clients
Three Men Out
A Right to Die
Curtains for Three
Available from Bantam Books
Rex Stout
Al/ff f\P
, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was edu I bi a country school, but, by the age of nine, he was throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. t briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to I in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant g&n board President Theodore Roosevelt's yacht. When I Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance ; worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant r. Later he devised and implemented a school system which was installed in four hundred cities \ throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired s world of finance and, with the proceeds of his bank left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote els that received favorable reviews before turning to fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Ferde-Lance, ift 1934. It was followed by many others, among Jlfbo Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Ifffce Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which i Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Gardner's famous protagonist, Perry Mason, ^world War n, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign t Nazism as chairman of the War Writers' Board, roaster of the radio program "Speaking of Liberty," , member of several national committees.