The Doorbell Rang was published by Viking Press in 1965. Rachel Bruner, a wealthy woman, has distributed ten thousand copies of Fred J. Cook’s The FBI Nobody Knows — a real book, published in 1964, that criticized J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. In retaliation, the FBI has begun harassing her: surveillance, phone taps, intimidation. She hires Wolfe to make them stop.
This is the most politically explosive novel in the Wolfe canon. Stout was not being hypothetical about FBI harassment — COINTELPRO was real, Hoover’s vendetta against critics was documented, and the FBI’s abuse of power was a genuine civil liberties crisis. By having Wolfe take on the Bureau directly, Stout was making a statement: this organization is not above the law, and a private citizen (even a fictional one) has the right to challenge it.
Wolfe’s strategy is characteristically indirect: he cannot outfight the FBI, but he can outthink it. The resolution involves Wolfe demonstrating to the Bureau that he possesses information they cannot afford to have made public — achieving a standoff through leverage rather than power. The novel was reportedly placed on an FBI “not to be reviewed” list, and Stout claimed (perhaps apocryphally) that Hoover’s agents attempted to intimidate his publisher.
Collecting The Doorbell Rang
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1965): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $50–$150
- Politically significant — sought by collectors of Cold War-era fiction