Life & Wisdom Quote by Rex Stout

Rex Stout’s compliment is a sly act of positioning: it praises Conan Doyle while quietly sharpening Stout’s own critical authority. “I think” softens the claim into conversational taste, but the sentence is doing something firmer. Stout isn’t saying the Holmes canon is uniformly great; he’s carving it up, elevating “one or two” late entries as peaks rather than afterthoughts. That’s a writer’s tell. Readers tend to romanticize origins, but working authors often respect the hard-won craft that arrives after the machinery is built: voice settled, pacing tightened, the detective’s habits turned from gimmick into instrument.

The subtext is also a mild rebuke to the myth that late work equals decline. Holmes is a franchise before “franchise” was the word, and “later stories” carry baggage: repetition, audience expectation, the gravitational pull of an icon. Stout’s line suggests that within that pressure cooker, Doyle occasionally produced something unusually sharp - not despite the formula, but because of it. That’s a professional’s admiration for constraint.

Context matters because Stout was himself a maker of series fiction, with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin proving that iteration can be an art, not a compromise. When Stout singles out a couple of late Holmes stories, he’s implicitly defending the mature detective story: the idea that longevity can yield refinement, and that the best installment isn’t always the first blaze of invention, but the later one where the writer knows exactly which screws to turn.