The Last Drive and Other Stories

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Despite these obstacles, Stout collectors and bibliographers did ultimately locate the majority of these early Stout stories. The greatest number of them appeared in a popular pulp magazine, The All-Story, and its successors, All-Story Weekly and All-Story Cavalier Weekly, all published by the Frank B. Munsey Company. Others appeared in somewhat more upscale magazines: Short Stories, The Black Cat, The Smart Set, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and Smith’s Magazine.

McAleer discussed the stories he had found in several chapters of his magisterial Rex Stout: A Biography, later republished as Rex Stout: A Majesty’s Life. (On reading McAleer’s first draft, Stout opined that “I think there is too much detail of... the stuff I wrote in my twenties,” though he conceded that he was an interested party and “I can’t safely trust my judgment.”) McAleer also published a collection chosen from the early stories, Justice Ends at Home and Other Stories, in which the lead story was Stout’s first murder mystery, as well as an edition of Under the Andes, a serialized 1914 novel representing Stout’s foray into science fiction. McAleer’s introductions to the two volumes are required reading for fans of early Stout. Later collectors published two more collections of the early short stories (Target Practice, which reprinted the stories from All-Story, and An Officer and a Lady and Other Stories) and three more early novels (Her Forbidden Knight, A Prize for Princes, and The Great Legend). But no one knew whether all the early works of Rex Stout had yet been found.

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