Love Quote by Rex Stout

There is a sly shrug in Rex Stout calling himself a "professional writer of detective stories" as if it were a trade like plumbing, then yoking it to the plainest American pleasure: keeping up with ballplayers. The line works because it collapses hierarchies. Stout, architect of elaborate puzzles and the famously brainy world of Nero Wolfe, refuses the pose of the lofty man of letters. He plants his flag in the bleachers.

"String along" is the tell. It suggests fandom as a kind of chosen dependence: you let athletes dictate your moods, your conversations, even your calendar, and you like it. For a detective writer, it also winks at narrative craft. Baseball is already a serialized drama with heroes, villains, stats as clues, and suspense paced by innings. Stout is admitting that his appetite for plot doesn't end at the desk; he chases it in the box score too.

The subtext is less about sports than about legitimacy. Mid-century popular culture often treated genre fiction and mass entertainment as guilty pleasures. Stout flips that. He pairs detective stories and baseball not to apologize for either, but to normalize them as work and joy, side by side. It's also a neat bit of self-branding: the mystery novelist as regular guy, emotionally invested in something unsolved until the last out. That identification matters because it invites readers to see his puzzles as part of the same American pastime machine - communal, addictive, and proudly unpretentious.