What one reviewer at amazon said about Under the Andes:
This is a very bad book, but one very much worth reading, at least for Rex Stout fans. It was written at the beginning of his career, when he was much under the influence of the adventure writers like Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. It features all the outlandish elements of those books (beautiful women, romantic heroes, exotic locales, alien races), but much less deftly handled.
It is no surprise that after this fiasco, Stout took a long break before coming back with Fer de Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novels. Even then, he had not truly lost the brash, unsophisitcatd voice found in Under the Andes.
Don't read this book looking for a great plot, or nuanced characterization, or for the humor you will find in the Wolfe books. But if you love those books as I do, you might want to see how their author got to where he could write them.
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