A Right to Die

Infobox Book |
name = A Right to Die
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Rex Stout
cover_artist = Bill English
country = United States
language = English
series = Nero Wolfe
genre = Detective fiction
publisher = Viking Press
release_date = October 22, 1964
media_type = Print (Hardcover)
pages = 182 pp. (first edition)
isbn = NA
preceded_by = Trio for Blunt Instruments
followed_by = The Doorbell Rang

"A Right to Die" is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by the Viking Press in 1964.

Plot summary

The novel is set against the background of the Civil Rights Act conflict in the Johnson Administration. At the beginning of the book, Paul Whipple, a black character from the earlier 1938 novel "Too Many Cooks", of whom Wolfe had gained the trust against a strong West Virginia atmosphere of prejudice, comes to tell Wolfe that Wolfe has since become his hero, and that he has also achieved the dream, stated in the earlier novel, of being an anthropologist. He has come, however, to draw upon the favor he did Wolfe 26 years earlier, by asking Wolfe to prevent his son Dunbar Whipple [Paul was a waiter at the Kanawha Spa resort in West Virginia when he and Wolfe first met. In that story, the none-too-friendly county sheriff has already questioned Paul and several other black restaurant staff and learned nothing. Wolfe attempts to convince them that he has quite a different opinion of black men than the sheriff, but has little success until he quotes cogently from the work of noted early Black-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Paul, an anthropology student at Howard University, recognized the work. That act of respect for Black-American culture convinces Paul and his buddies that Wolfe is no sweet-talking trickster more polite than the sheriff but with the same racist agenda. Paul and his buddies reward Wolfe's respect with some key information, and Paul has immortalized the incident by naming his future son—now a young man -- "Dunbar" in joint honor of both Wolfe and the poet.] from marrying a rich white girl, Susan Brooke, he is apparently in love with. While denying that he is not opposed, in principle at least, to mixed-race couples, Paul Whipple thinks that sensible rich white girls don't fall in love with poor black men, even if the rich white girl is working for a black civil rights organization in New York. Wolfe is loath to interfere in the matter, but agrees to at least learn what he can about the true motivations of the socialite girlfriend and why she would be interested in a Negro boyfriend.

Before the real mystery story gets underway, Stout allows some give and take on the concept of racism being a two-way street: blacks preferring their own as much as whites.

The matter takes a much nastier turn when Susan Brooke is murdered and Dunbar Whipple is arrested as the prime suspect.

As a whodunit, the book is not very complex, but it is a good period piece showing racial attitudes both of self-consciously unprejudiced people of that era (Stout himself, and the characters in the book) and those of bigots. Regarding the latter, Stout shows how a climate of racism, combined with mundane realities of life can incite the bigot to violence. In fact, the violence might have occurred without the racial overtones, and over-emphasis on race can be seen a poisonous element to everybody concerned. In the course of the book, Susan Brooke is shown to have been a "femme fatale" [By the end of the book, one previous boyfriend is dead by suicide, another murdered, and a third charged with her murder] for at least one earlier white boyfriend, perhaps justifying Paul's initial suspicions, or perhaps just being an unfortunate coincidence depending on the reader's own attitudes to such things.

At the end of the book, Dunbar Whipple takes an interest in a black girl, which disappoints Archie (who was himself interested in dating her) but pleases Dunbar's parents, particularly his mother.

The use of Paul Whipple as a character in a 1964 Nero Wolfe novel was problematic, since Rex Stout never allowed his recurring characters to age. Whipple was a young man in "Too Many Cooks," but had aged 26 years and was a middle-aged academic in "A Right to Die." In all this time, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin miraculously remained the same age, but Whipple never noticed or mentioned this oddity.

Civil rights

As noted earlier, Rex Stout had already had Nero Wolfe make civil rights a central issue in his 1938 Wolfe novel "Too Many Cooks", although in that case his client was a not a black man, and so while many books were being written in that time period about the civil rights of Black Americans, few mainstream authors were writing a civil-rights "sequel" to a novel from 1938.

The right to die

The book's title causes some consternation even to many who have read the book several times. In principle, the plot is age-old: a woman punishes the woman who jilted her son and drove him to suicide. None of this anything to do with civil rights: all the people mentioned are upper middle class white Americans.

If that had been the extent of it, Dunbar Whipple would have been safe, and Brooke might not have been killed. It was only when Brooke started working at an NAACP-like organization in NYC (as does her might-have been mother-in law whom she never remembers meeting) and dating a black man that the syllogism formed: Brooke might be a precious creature better than any man, and her nemesis even accepted that — none too happily — until Brooke saw fit to romance a nigger — to use her word — showing that her son was no better than one of "those" men for whom she had formed such hatred at her husband's factory in southern Indiana — and Susan therefore had a right to die: civil rights in her view included the right of vengeance.

Literary significance and criticism

"Archie bestirs himself in Louisville and Evansville on the trail of a murderer whose identity is suggested to Nero by the abnormal frequency of a certain diphthong. How timely all this is is shown by the fact that Wolfe's client is a black whose son is about to marry a white girl, and by the nature of Wolfe's light reading: "Science, the Glorious Entertainment".Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. "A Catalogue of Crime". New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN 0-06-015796-8]

Release details

*2003, USA, The Audio Partners Publishing Corp., Mystery Masters ISBN 1572703156 May 2003, audio CD (unabridged, read by Michael Prichard)
*1991, USA, Bantam Crimeline ISBN 0553240323 April 1, 1991, paperback

References