Davies on A Stout Stanza of Many Meanings, Maybe: The Romantic Roots of Some Buried Caesar @GB2d @horacefuller @georgemasonlaw

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Stout Stanza of Many Meanings, Maybe: The Romantic Roots of Some Buried Caesar at 25 The Gazette, a Journal of Detective Fiction 4 (Autumn 2023).

This paper presents a bit of speculation — actually, two speculations — about Rex Stout’s sixth Nero Wolfe / Archie Goodwin novel, Some Buried Caesar. I hope those speculations will inspire — or perhaps it would be better to say incite — discussion about Stout’s choice of title for the tale. First, the question: Where did the title for this story come from? Second, the answers: (a) Stout’s familiarity (during an early romance) with the bloody yet bucolic lines from a famous poem — Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát — made the titling of a bloody murder mystery with a romantic plot thread in a bucolic setting easy, and (b) the Rubáiyát was connected in Stout’s mind not only with fine poetic lines about bloodshed and bucolics, but also with fraud, which was also a plot thread in Some Buried Caesar.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.