Bob Goldsborough is not only a story writer, he's a storyteller.
And you don't have to offer him a beer to get him going . . . just put a microphone in front of him.
And I always have a microphone.
More stories about writing Nero Wolfe stories
Way back there in the last century—between 1985 and 1994—Chicago crime writer Bob Goldsborough, with the okay of the Rex Stout estate, wrote seven Nero Wolfe novels which Bantam published.
And Bob did well, thank you very much.
"I never quit my day job," he says.
"I've always been a writer and an editor, first with the Chicago Tribune and then with Advertising Age.
"The Nero Wolfe books happened for me at the time that all four of my kids were going through college. Within seven years, all were in college, sometimes two at once, sometimes three at once. So the bump in my income from the Nero Wolfe books was perfect."
How perfect?
How many books did Bob sell?
"The first editions came out in hardcover from Bantam. This was at a time when Bantam was first printing hardcover books; they had been a paperback publisher only for years.
"So each book got printed in hardcover and one year later it came out in paperback.
"I don't think in hardcover I ever sold more than 10,000 copies of a book."
Can't get too excited about that, but, wait, what about the paperback sales?
"Taken together, the seven books sold over a million copies. Whatever money I made came from those sales."
That reminded Bob of a Hemingway story.
"I don't know if it's apocryphal, but it doesn't sound like it," he says.
"Hemingway was sitting in a bar in Key West, and a man came up to him with one of Hemingway's paperbacks. He said, 'Mr. Hemingway, would you be able to sign this? I apologize that it's only a paperback.'
"And Hemingway is supposed to have said, 'Don't apologize. My publisher makes the money on the hardcovers. I make the money on the paperbacks.'
"His paperback sales were immense. And he signed the book."
The Nero Wolfe experience was a joy for Bob.
"It's that ensemble company of characters that Stout developed that I really liked," he says.
"I once counted up to 20 who came in and out of the books at various frequencies. What that did for me was to allow me to bring one of the secondary characters up to be more prominent in a specific book I was writing.
"I tried to keep the personalities of the characters and the tone of the stories to Stout's. For example, I never had Nero Wolfe do anything that would be out of character. It would have been inappropriate to do so, and the roof would have fallen in on me."
Wolfe fans would have gone to Bob's house with buckets of hot tar and pillows to break open for the feathers they contained.
"I got a lot of letters from readers," he says, "and I'm happy to say 90 percent of them were positive."
Bob did make one mistake in the layout of the rooms in Nero Wolfe's brownstone.
"I put the dining room on the wrong side of the hall, and, boy, did I hear about that.
"And the bad thing is I had a map of the brownstone. So I knew where the rooms were supposed to be in relation to one another, but I screwed it up anyway."
One woman reader attacked Bob for the amount of swearing he put in one book.
"I responded in a letter saying I went through a Rex Stout book and it had damns and hells in it in about the same amount that I did.
"It didn't faze her. She said in a letter, 'I'm still not going to read your books anymore.'"
A year later, after Bob's next Nero Wolfe book came out, the Michigan woman wrote back again.
"'You still haven't got it right,' she said.
"So I wrote her another letter, and I said, 'Please don't read any more of my books because they make you unhappy and I'm not going to change.'"
© Jerry Peterson.
