"If there's time to lean," or, What better time to think about the workplace than when you've taken a week of vacation to sit at home and read?

In Sam Lipsyte's coruscating, acid-tongued, and hilarious novel The Ask (2010), narrator Milo Burke describes his position in the ecology of the college development office in which he works like this:

I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence, bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgment.

Since Jean Edward Smith's Grant (2001) has had me thinking about Ulysses Grant's many good qualities as a boss, I started imagining what Grant would do with that sort of employee. If his approach to the slackness he found in the Army of the Potomac on taking over as general in chief in 1864 is any indication, Milo may want to commence worrying:

Virtually half the soldiers in Federal service were holding down rear-area jobs, guarding supply lines, providing garrisons for cities and forts in occupied areas, and were not available for battlefield duty. . . . Grant instructed Halleck to forward all new recruits to the field immediately, and to strip each department "to the lowest number of men necessary for the duty to be performed." By summer, Grant had cleaned out the rear areas and had reduced the ratio of garrison to combat troops by half, an accomplishment no previous general in chief had considered possible.

That change seems to have pleased the frontline troops immensely, impressing them immediately with Grant's seriousness and fairness. As for the folks ejected from their relatively cushy rear-area jobs, I expect enthusiasm was a bit more tempered.

Maybe Milo Burke should just go into retail . . . or, at least, retail like it used to be, the independent sort, before the chains and changes of habit forced even the most idiosyncratic of locally owned stores to hire employees who actually, you know, work. One of the many quiet pleasures in James Hynes's stunning new novel Next (2010) is this brief glimpse of the back-in-the-day retail life, record store phylum:

"The sixties were very, very good to Mick," the manager told Kevin once, when they were taking a break in the alley behind the store. Though the circumstances of the observation strike Kevin as ironic now--they had been sharing a joint at the time--the disjunction between the remark and its context went unnoted back then. In a hip, regionally famous, independent record store in Ann Arbor in the late seventies--long gone now, of course, strangled by the chains and the Internet and iTunes--reliability and even competence weren't necessarily the first things you looked for in an employee. Entertainment value counted for a lot, and McNulty had entertainment value to burn. During the long reaches of slow, midweek midsummer days when Big Star was nearly empty, Kevin would stand with McNulty behind the counter or in the back of the store by the jazz section, and McNulty would smoke and slouch and, from the depths of a heavy-lidded midafternoon coma, relate fantastic stories from his youth.

All of which, really, is just an excuse to share two of my favorite retail stories, neither of which is from my own experience.

The first comes from baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra (whose pithy daily rundown of baseball results for NBC sports's Hardball Talk should be part of every baseball fan's morning). Soon after Calcaterra was hired as a full-time blogger last fall, he wrote a post for his personal blog, "Jobs I've left: an inventory," that, in the midst of descriptions of fast-food jobs and office jobs, all of it worth reading, told of his time at the Ohio State University Bookstore, where he worked with a character who will be familiar, at least in outline, to any retail veteran:

Office supplies counter: I had this job for the balance of college. It was about half student employees, half-lifers. The lifers were a bit scary. One of them said that the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be for him to win a lottery when the jackpot was below $20 million. Why? "Because there are certain things I'll need to do if I win, and I'll need all of that money." His expression when he said that was serious, approaching dire.

And finally, there's my friend Jim, whom I've known since back in my own days as a bookseller, who said he once had a bookstore coworker from Russia who said to him, more than once,

The question you have to ask yourself is, "Which Karamazov am I?" We are all one of the Karamazovs, all of us. Only, which one are you? Which one are you?

I'm willing to assume that his expression at that moment was, to borrow from Craig Calcaterra, "serious, approaching dire."

Archie Goodwin on Shysters, Shysterball on Archie Goodwin

From Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance (1934)

"Oh no." I shook my head. "That's not the way us geniuses work, you can't shake us empty like a bag of peanuts."

A couple of days ago, at the suggestion of Terry Teachout, I picked up a Rex Stout two-fer, containing the first two Nero Wolfe mysteries, Fer-de-Lance (1934) and The League of Frightened Men (1935). Back in high school, I read the couple of Wolfe mysteries that my local library carried, but they didn't make much of an impression. This time around, spending time with Nero Wolfe has been a sheer joy.

When I read Stout all those years ago, I was interested almost exclusively in crime novels of a hard-boiled bent--having just progressed from Robert B. Parker to Lawrence Block. Wolfe, however, is decidedly soft-boiled, a willfully eccentric Sherlock Holmes who wholly eschews the physical component of the detective's art, in part because of his hippopotamean bulk. "You must pardon me," he tells a client, "for engineering reasons I arise only for emergencies."

All investigative activities that cannot be performed from the comfort of Wolfe's West 35th Street townhouse he leaves to his operative Archie Goodwin, who narrates the adventures in a voice that is somewhere between Huck Finn and Bertie Wooster, spinning a vibrant, slang-filled running monologue that offers a splendid contrast to Wolfe's lofty certainties. Here he is crossing off a suspect in Fer-de-Lance:

One look at Dr. Bradford was enough to show me that I had been wasting a lot of pleasant suspicions which might have been avoided if I had happened to catch sight of him somewhere. He was tall and grave and correct, the distinguished old gentleman type, and he had whiskers! There may have been a historical period when it was possible for a guy with whiskers to pull a knife and plunge it into somebody's back, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays it couldn't be done.

That's probably enough to give you a sense both of Archie Goodwin's mind and his voice--and also of the larger reason why I wasn't impressed with the Wolfe books back in high school: I simply wasn't attuned to the fun Stout was having with language and character. Revisit Agatha Christie's novels as an adult, and you find them almost murdered by their flat, even awkward prose and cardboard characters; revisit Stout's as an an adult and you find them offering pleasure after pleasure that simply didn't register when you were younger.

And now to explain this post's headline: in Fer-de-Lance, Archie describes the feeling of awe that always overtakes him when he enters the presence of Wolfe's enormous collection of orchids:

It was like other things I've noticed, for instance no matter how often you may have seen Snyder leap in the air and one-handed spear a hot liner like one streak of lightning stopping another one, when you see it again your heart stops.

Loving that image, I began to wonder what ballplayer Goodwin was talking about; when Baseball Reference turned up no appropriate Snyders, I appealed to Craig Calcaterra, proprietor of the wonderful baseball blog Shysterball. Craig was kind enough to put the question to his readers today, and you can read his post, along with his readers' thoughtful guesses, here.

In thanks, it's only right to share the following passage. Craig, as his blog's name indicates, is a lawyer, and it turns out that Archie Goodwin has a decided impression of lawyers:

When I consider the different kinds I've seen it seems silly to say it, but somehow to me all lawyers look alike. It's a sort of mixture of a scared look and a satisfied look, as if they were crossing a traffic-filled street where they expect to get run over any minute but they know exactly the kind of paper to hand the driver if they get killed and they've got one right in their pocket. This Derwin looked like that; otherwise he seemed very respectable.

I assume Craig has such a paper in his pocket at all times--unless, like Nero Wolfe, he's so powerful that he doesn't even need to leave the house?