Customer Reviews

The Rex Stout Reader: Her Forbidden Knight and A Prize for Princes

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A PRIZE FOR PRINCES is a pretty good Rex Stout novel, but HER FORBIDDEN KNIGHT is just awful. Otto Penzler, I used to think you had some integrity, but calling this reprint of schlock THE REX STOUT READER is the act of a con man playing the shell game in old Times Square to rook the tourists. Wouldn't a real "REX STOUT READER" have something in it with Nero and Archie? Not these two undiscovered "gems" from a pre World War I period! A PRIZE FOR PRINCES has a kind of detective story plot, but really it's a sort of noir novel, the kind that Robert Hichens used to turn out by the carload in turn of the century England. This one, like many of Hichens' books, revolves around the evil antics of a continental vamp called Aline Solini, Princess of Marisi, who captures men like flies and twists them in her web of evil. Her dark glamor is contrasted with the lighter soubrette charms of a French girl, Vivi Janvour, whose lighter, sunnier disposition is ultimately what a real man presumably wants. She is "distinctly French from the tip of her toes to the top of her head." You can tell that Stout was writing by the word, for chapter after chapter comes out padded to ridiculous lengths. "I don't know." "What do you mean?" "Well--that is to say--I do know--and yet--I don't know really." Aline is the kind of part Theda Bara used to play in silent movies, dangerously irresistible, not the kind of girl you take home to Mother, sort of a vampire Goth feeling about her. She knows how to apply poison to the tip of a sword; why, she knows everything about men's bodies and how weak we poor saps are.

Penzler adds as a bonus a previously uncollected story from the same period, "Out of the Line." This brief tale takes us to the birthday of a well to do American woman, Agatha, who, at age 31, has entered middle age, so "henceforth Time's sickle would descend with increasing rapidity and more disastrous stroke." Brother, do I know the feeling!