Publisher's Synopsis
- This book contains "Justice ends at Home" and "The Last Drive," two stories that foreshadow the characters and the stories of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The introduction details the connection between the early characters and what would become the signature characters of Rex Stout. The second story, "The Last Drive," is illustrated with the 14 images of the publication in "Golfers Magazine."Simon Leg and his assistant Dan Culp are the main characters the story Justice Ends at Home, a legal thriller and detective story published in All-Story Weekly (December 4, 1915). The scholars of Stout's work all agree that the middle-aged, phlegmatic Simon and the youthful Dan are Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin already living, perhaps subconsciously, in the mind of the author, eighteen years before Fer-de-Lance was written.Canby Rankin, the "Southerner who had turned detective," is featured in the story The Last Drive in Golfers Magazine (July-December, 1916). The story can be viewed as a precursor of Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin novel-length mystery, in the sense that the device used in this story is almost identical to the murder weapon at the center of Fer-de-Lance.
