He also reveals that he suspects that FBI agents may be involved in the murder of Morris Althaus, a freelance journalist who was researching an article critical of the Bureau, two months earlier. Cramer reveals that the FBI are attempting to have Wolfe and Archie’s private investigator licenses revoked. Although initially suspecting an FBI trap, Archie is astonished to learn that the message is from Inspector Cramer. Vollmer, Wolfe’s physician, asking for a clandestine meeting. Archie’s initial investigations prove fruitless, but he soon receives an anonymous message from Dr. He is also sympathetic to both Bruner’s plight and the arguments made in the book, and decides not to withdraw in the face of what he sees as heavy-handed and bullying opposition tactics.Īs the FBI put Wolfe and Archie under surveillance, Wolfe plans to gain examples of FBI malfeasance and use it to persuade the FBI to back down. Although initially hesitant of making a powerful enemy, Wolfe is persuaded over Archie’s objections when Bruner offers a $50,000 retainer and then doubles it to $100,000, as well as a fee and any expenses he may incur. Having endured several incidents of harassment and prying, she offers to hire Wolfe to persuade the FBI to leave her alone. After reading a book called The FBI Nobody Knows, a prominent critique of the many unethical practices of the Bureau, she has mailed 10,000 copies of it to prominent figures across the country. Rachel Bruner, a wealthy Manhattan widow, has recently incurred the wrath of the FBI. Cook's 1964 exposé, The FBI Nobody Knows, is central to the plot of The Doorbell Rang Stout had not before used a Wolfe book to air his own political views so extensively, and did not do so again until 1975's A Family Affair. Stout's biographer states that Stout hit on the idea of the FBI while reading Cook's exposé Stout sent Cook an autographed copy of The Doorbell Rang, thanking him for "priming my pump".
Although Stout considered Hoover a " megalomaniac" and "one of the most objectionable people in our country", he maintained that he had targeted Hoover's FBI almost randomly in search of a new organizational antagonist for his detective duo which would make a good story, as a break from the NYC homicide detectives and the Westchester district attorney's office. Cook published The FBI Nobody Knows – collecting in book form several of his articles on FBI abuses that had previously appeared in The Nation. In 1964, American investigative journalist Fred J. Edgar Hoover's redirection of the FBI's resources away from its role in criminal investigation and toward its director's own political and ideological ends.
The backdrop to The Doorbell Rang is supplied by J. Edgar Hoover in 1961 The FBI and The FBI Nobody Knows : 461 But Clifton Fadiman, quoted in a Viking Press advertisement for The Doorbell Rang, thought it was "the best of all Nero Wolfe stories".įBI Director J. Some dismissed the book: National Observer described it as "little more than an anti-FBI diatribe", and Nero Wolfe fan John Wayne wrote Rex Stout a terse note of goodbye after reading the condensed magazine version. Edgar Hoover clashed and the Bureau was coming under fire for its investigations of Martin Luther King Jr. It was published at a time when the public's attitude toward the FBI was turning critical, not long after Robert F. The Doorbell Rang generated controversy when it was published, due largely to its unflattering portrayal of the FBI, its director and agents. Nero Wolfe is hired to force the FBI to stop wiretapping, tailing and otherwise harassing a woman who gave away 10,000 copies of a book that is critical of the Bureau and its director, J. Archie Goodwin writing in The Doorbell Rang, chapter 12
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