"Sam Buried Caesar"

"Josh Pachter, you will recall, is the creator of Inspector Ross Griffen of the Tyson County Police Force, a widower with eleven children all of whom he has named after detective heroes (and one heroine) of his youthful reading. The first and middle names of the ten sons are Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion, John Jericho, Parker Pyne, Gideon Fell, Augusus Van Dusen, Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe. The only daughter is named Jane Marple Griffen.

"You will also recall that Mr. Pachter has already given us two cases about E.Q. Griffen (December 1968 and May 1970). Now he gives us the first recorded case about ten-year-old Nero Wolfe Griffen and his friend, Archie Goodwin — oops, pardon, Artie Goodman — an undeniably Neroish and Wolfean investigation...

"Josh Pachter was 18 years old when he wrote 'Sam Buried Caesar.' What will he write when he is 28? When he is 38? The mind boggles..."

When I was 28 (in 1979), I wrote nothing — I'd quit writing in '74, and didn't return to the game until '84. When I was 38 (in 1989), I was writing Mahboob Chaudri stories. So the mind can now stop boggling.

In Rex Stout's novel, Some Buried Caesar, Nero Wolfe investigates the "murder" of a champion steer named Caesar. In this affectionate pastiche, a neighborhood kid named Sam hires Nero Wolfe Griffen — for a retainer of 15 cents! — to investigate the disappearance of Sam's dog Caesar.

Rex Stout was still alive at the time the story appeared in print, and I got a very nice note from him, telling me that he'd enjoyed it. Long gone, now, alas, both Stout himself and the note....

Fast forward to April 2016, when I got an out-of-the-blue email from Rebecca Stout Bradbury, Rex's daughter, inviting me to lunch. I was living in Herndon (VA), and Rebecca -- who was going to be visiting her daughter Lisa nearby in a couple of months -- had heard about “Sam Buried Caesar” and wanted to meet me. The three of us (Rebecca, Lisa, and I) had a very pleasant lunch that June, and Rebecca invited me to come to New York to speak to the Wolfe Pack, the international Nero Wolfe fan club, at their December Assembly. I did, and the Wolfe Pack gave me a very warm welcome, and Werowance Ira Matetsky printed up a reproduction of my story for the attendees.

Ira reproduced the story a second time in 2025, when I delivered the keynote address at the Wolfe Pack's Black Orchid banquet, which happens every year on the first Saturday in December. (The Assembly takes place the same afternoon.) As luck would have it, the EQMM website updated the same day as the Assembly and banquet to show the January/February 2026 issue, which included my translation of Finnish author Tapani Bagge's story "The Yellow Dog," and Tapani sent me scans of the covers of several old issues of EQMM containing Finnish translations of my stories, including the one that appears at the left of this page, which included "Caesarin hauta," or "Sam Buried Caesar." If the "3/1971"at the top of the cover means that the issue came out in March 1971, then the Finnish version of my story was actually published five months before the English-language version!

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