The Black Mountain – Rex Stout, 1954 [No Stars]

A Mountain Not Worth Climbing

There are two kinds of challenges reading a mystery novel. One is figuring out the guilty party. The other is soldiering through when the plot doesn’t gel, characters are dense and/or unsympathetic, the setting is bland and thin, and you don’t give a damn whodunit. The Black Mountain proved a textbook example of this latter experience.

Nero Wolfe, a private detective who lives and works in a brownstone on West 35^th Street in Manhattan, allows a rare disruption of his dinner routine when he is told by sidekick/amanuensis Archie Goodwin that old friend Marko Vukcic was just gunned down elsewhere in town. The automobile-phobic Wolfe even hazards a taxi ride to visit the morgue where Vukcic’s body is laid out. He vows to bring the killer to justice.

Goodwin explains to a coroner why Wolfe cares so much:

I told him a few things about Marko Vukcic. That he was one of the only ten men I knew of that Nero Wolfe called by their first names. That for years he had dined once a month at Wolfe’s table, and Wolfe and I had dined once a month at his restaurant. That he and Wolfe had been boys together in Montenegro, which was now a part of Yugoslavia.

This is the money sentence of the whole book. Montenegro means “black mountain,” our book’s title. Wolfe sends Goodwin behind the Iron Curtain to investigate the cause of Vukcic’s murder, but with a twist to the normal Nero Wolfe formula: This time Wolfe tags along. Goodwin can’t speak Montenegrin; Wolfe happens to be a native.

I guess this is a reason The Black Mountain is well regarded in general by Wolfe fans. Stout flips his usual formula to give us some insight into Nero Wolfe. The result is neither compelling nor believable.

My 1993 Bantam paperback edition includes a brief promotional article written around the time of The Black Mountain’s 1954 publication. In it, Stout explains why he doesn’t like the word “mysteries:”

Author Rex Stout wrote 33 Nero Wolfe novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and 1975. He once said: "I never would be a great writer, and I saw no point in tearing my soul out writing serious fiction, so I thought why not have fun writing detective stories?" Image from http://www.sleuthsayers.org/search/label/Rex%20Stout

“I think it is kind of silly. Which is why I think it is rather too bad in the last 10 years that what publishers call ‘suspense novels’ are printed as mysteries and reviewed as mysteries, which they aren’t at all.”

What is the difference? You see it in The Black Mountain. Yes, there’s a murder, but other than a quick look at the body and some questions at the restaurant the victim owned, Wolfe and Goodwin do little investigating. Instead, Stout reintroduces Wolfe to a former one-shot character, his adopted daughter Carla Britton, now a committed activist for Montenegrin independence. Carla says Vukcic was murdered because he supported independence, too. While no partisan himself, Wolfe’s interest is enough to risk his life (and Archie’s) by travelling to the land of his birth.

I’m writing this in a general way so as to avoid spoilers, though I don’t feel there’s much to spoil. There’s another big death in the novel, bigger one would think than Vukcic’s though not at all played that way. Once in Montenegro, Wolfe and Goodwin find themselves having a devil of a time figuring out whom to trust, though they are hardly cagey, throwing themselves in front of both partisans and policemen with the flimsiest of disguises. Wolfe does offer a fake name, and another for Archie, as Nero Wolfe is a name even more famous in his own world than it is in ours, but for undercover field work he’s lacking.

In one scene, Wolfe takes Archie to the police station in Podgorica, Montenegro’s main city, at this time renamed “Titograd” after the Yugoslavian dictator then controlling the country. Wolfe’s big gambit is to announce he has no papers, that he’s a native who wants to return because he is curious about conditions in his home country and seeks an old friend.

The police captain, Gosop Stritar, asks why he should believe him. Wolfe could be a CIA agent, an American ally of the Montenegrin resistance group “Spirit of the Black Mountain,” or even sent over from Belgrade by the Yugoslavian secret police to test his vigilance:

“But I ask myself, if you are any of those, why in the name of God are you not provided with papers? It’s ridiculous.”

“Exactly,” Wolfe nodded approvingly. “It is a pleasure to meet with an intelligent man, Mr. Stritar. You can account for our having no papers only by assuming that my fantastic story is true.”

Before Stritar can ponder this “Get Smart” gambit, Wolfe goes on to ask for a month to wander through Montenegro without any papers, taking with him his “son,” Goodwin, who speaks no Montenegrin. For some reason, Stritar goes along with this.

Contrivances like this are a big problem with The Black Mountain. Another is Goodwin. He’s the narrator throughout the series, and is so here, with a catch. Most of the dialogue is in Montenegrin. Goodwin doesn’t understand a word.

In an introductory “Warning,” Goodwin spells out how he was able to set down the first-person narrative before us:

Nero Wolfe put it in English for me every chance he got. For the times when it had to be on the fly, and pretty sketchy, I have filled it in as well as I could. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to tell it at all, but I hated to skip it.

This backfilling conceit doesn’t wash with the narrative the way it is set down, with moment-by-moment commentary of how people talk and react to each other, omnisciently filtered through the sensibility of one who can’t understand a word they say.

Goodwin is usually the narrator for these Wolfe adventures, and Stout needs his churlish, wiseacre sensibility to keep things light. Yet even the light tone feels wrong.

Wolfe has been visited by murder involving people close to him, so you expect something of a dour spirit from him and Goodwin, a soulful sigh or somesuch. Instead, once in Montenegro, Goodwin cracks wise about pretty farm girls and sleeping in hayricks. Wolfe complains obsessively about the state of his feet from walking endless rocky inclines.

Zla Kolata, the highest mountain in Montenegro, is one of many such peaks along the Albanian border. This vertiginous terrain forms the backdrop of much of The Black Mountain's second half. Montenegrin independence, a chief focus of many of the novel's characters, was finally gained in 2006. Image from Wikipedia.

There is no mystery to the story, and precious little suspense. Most of the suspense involves people, both government and resistance leaders, threatening to kill Wolfe and Goodwin in drawn-out conversations. Since Goodwin is narrating, and not even privy to the conversations as they take place, we know how these encounters turn out.

Solving the crime of Vukcic’s murder proves ridiculously easy. Wolfe and Goodwin happen upon the bad guys’ lair just as they are torturing the killer into making a full confession, after which the bad guys’ leader explains his part in the crime in the form of an extraneous summing up. It’s the sort of resolution I thought went out with Tom Mix.

Even that’s not the worst part of the novel, which is the very end. Because Wolfe cares about justice, he manages to both save the killer and bring him to justice for Vukcic’s murder, all the time trumpeting his faith in the Constitution as hope of mankind:

“If personal vengeance were the only factor I could, as you suggested, go and stick a knife in him and finish it, but that would be accepting the intolerable doctrine that man’s sole responsibility is to his ego. That was the doctrine of Hitler, as it is now of Malenkov and Tito and Franco and Senator McCarthy; masquerading as a basis of freedom, it is the oldest and toughest of the enemies of freedom.”

How does Wolfe get justice in the end? I could try to tell you, but I’m not sure I know myself, as it’s fairly convoluted and involves our favorite secret policeman Stritar being a complete dunce again. Basically Stout wanted a clever wrapper to reaffirm our faith in Nero Wolfe and the American justice system, so he devises a finale that features both being used to the most improbable effect.

The Black Mountain strikes me as a novel written not for a casual reader but devoted Nero Wolfe fans, people who wanted a story that pushed the detective out of his plush Manhattan environs to revisit the foreign country where he was born and raised. It’s less story than stunt.

In a special introduction for the Bantam paperback, noted crime-fiction author Max Allan Collins notes the unusual nature of The Black Mountain. As a tough-nosed thriller with political overtones, it suggests a response to rival crime-fiction writer Mickey Spillane, as noted for his right-wing sensibilities as Stout was for being a liberal. As an exotic adventure yarn with a lot of mountain climbing in inhospitable weather, it suggests to Collins that bestselling Scotsman, Alistair MacLean.

I agree with Collins on both counts, but don’t see Stout benefiting from the comparison. Spillane and MacLean may be notorious for meathead sensibilities, but they also knew something about developing suspense and executing surprises, talents that elude Stout here.