Synopsis of Rex Stout: Killer Conversations

Rex Stout: Killer Conversations (formerly Royal Decree) is a must read for aficionados of detective fiction.

Here Edgar winner John McAleer shares some of his most memorable conversations with Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout. Featuring an updated Introduction by crime fiction icon William G. Tapply and an Afterword by Grand Master Edward D. Hoch, Killer Conversations is an essential collectors’ volume.

These in-person discussions with Stout were compiled to inform and gratify, in Stout’s own words, the millions of Rex Stout fans who would be putting these questions to him as if he were alive answering his mail from Wolfe’s West 35th Street Brownstone.

Hailed by CBS as the “American Conan Doyle,” in Killer Conversations Stout discusses, among other things, his writingcraft, the Wolfe mysteries, plotting methods, characterization, the modern detective story, his service aboard President Teddy Roosevelt’s yacht, and offers his appraisal of crime fiction icons such as—Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, G. K. Chesterton, and more.

Killer Conversations will keep mystery fans glued to their chair till midnight chimes the hour. And why not, isn’t that what a Stout mystery does?