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I suggest beginning with autobiographical sketches from each of us, and here is mine. I was born in Montenegro and spent my early boyhood there. At the age of sixteen I decided to move around, and in fourteen years I became acquainted with most of Europe, a little of Africa, and much of Asia, in a variety of roles and activities. Coming to this country in nineteen-thirty, not penniless, I bought this house and entered into practice as a private detective. I am a naturalized American citizen.
— Nero Wolfe addressing the suspects in "Fourth of July Picnic" (1957)
The Nero Wolfe stories take place contemporaneously with their writing and depict a changing landscape and society. The principal characters in the corpus do not age. Although it is not directly stated in the stories, Nero Wolfe's age is 56, according to Rex Stout.[2]
"Those stories have ignored time for thirty-nine years," Stout told his authorized biographer John McAleer. "Any reader who can't or won't do the same should skip them. I didn't age the characters because I didn't want to. That would have made it cumbersome and would seem to have centered attention on the characters rather than the stories."[3]
Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories, frequently describes Wolfe as weighing "a seventh of a ton" (about 142 kilograms). At the time of the first book, 1934, this was intended to indicate unusual obesity, especially through the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In 1947 Archie writes, "He weighs between 310 and 390, and he limits his physical movements to what he regards as the irreducible essentials."[4]
"Wolfe's most extravagant distinction is his extreme antipathy to literal extravagance. He will not move," wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in At Wolfe's Door: The Nero Wolfe Novels of Rex Stout:
He insists upon the point: under no circumstances will he leave his home or violate his routines in order to facilitate an investigation. The exceptions are few and remarkable. Instead of spreading the principles of order and justice throughout his society, Wolfe imposes them dogmatically and absolutely within the walls of his house — the brownstone on West Thirty-Fifth Street — and he invites those who are troubled by an incomprehensible and threatening environment to enter the controlled economy of the house and to discover there the source of disorder in their own lives.
The invitation is extended to readers as well as to clients.[5]
Perhaps Wolfe's most remarkable departure from the brownstone is due to personal reasons, not to business, and thus does not violate the rule regarding the conduct of business away from the office. That event occurs in The Black Mountain, when he leaves not only his home but the shores of the United States, to avenge the murder of his oldest friend. He abandons for a time his cherished daily habits and, despite his physical bulk, engages in strenuous outdoor activity in mountain terrain.
[edit] Tags:Nero Wolfe (disambiguation),Bitter End,American,Mystery,Rex Stout,Archie Goodwin,New York City,Brownstone,Bouchercon,2000,Edit,Montenegro,Fourth Of July Picnic,Do Not Age,The Black Mountain,Too Many Cooks,Over My Dead Body,Fbi,Louis Adamic,World War I,Austrian Government,Fought Against The Austrians And Germans,John D. Clark,Sherlock Holmes,Irene Adler,A Scandal In Bohemia,William S. Baring-gould,Nicholas Meyer,Mycroft Holmes,Ellery Queen,Edgar Allan Poe,Wold Newton,Arsène Lupin,Orchid,One-way Glass,Small Hole In The Office Wall,Inspector Cramer,Champagne For One,Too Many Clients,Murder By The Book,Too Many Women,The Red Box,The Silent Speaker,Death Of A Doxy,Randy Cohen,The New York Times,Ken Darby,Gramercy Park,A&e,A Nero Wolfe Mystery,Prisoner's Base,Gambit,Shad Roe,The Final Deduction,Plot It Yourself,The Golden Spiders,Oenophile,And Be A Villain,Fer-de-lance,The League Of Frightened Men,Where There's A Will,Voltaire,Aristology,Poison à La Carte,Vatel,The Doorbell Rang,Murder Is Corny,The Father Hunt,Prohibition,Bootleg,American Orchid Society,Cattleyas,Laelias,Odontoglossums,Oncidiums,Miltonias,Phalaenopsis,Phalaenopsis Aphrodite,Poison A La Carte,Laelia Purpurata,Dendrobium Chrysotoxum,The Second Confession,Arnold Zeck,Lily Rowan,Before Midnight,Some Buried Caesar,Too Many Detectives,In The Best Families,Death Of A Dude,Misogyny,Molly Haskell,The Rubber Band,Cramer,The Times,Archie Goodwin (fictional Detective),Haute Cuisine,Jacques Barzun,Dashiell Hammett,Sam Spade,Agatha Christie,Hercule Poirot,Nero Wolfe Supporting Characters,Fritz Brenner,Majordomo,Saul Panzer, | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Origins | 3>
Nero Wolfe and his boyhood friend Marko Vukcic hunted dragonflies in the mountains where Wolfe was born, in the vicinity of Lovćen
“
You, gentlemen, are Americans, much more completely than I am, for I wasn't born here. This is your native country. It was you and your brothers, black and white, who let me come here and live, and I hope you'll let me say, without getting maudlin, that I'm grateful to you for it.
”
— Nero Wolfe to the black staff of Kanawha Spa in Too Many Cooks (1938), chapter 10
With one notable exception, the corpus implies or states that Nero Wolfe was born in Montenegro. In the first chapter of Over My Dead Body (1939), Wolfe tells an FBI agent that he was born in the United States — a declaration at odds with all other references. Stout revealed the reason for the discrepancy in a letter obtained by his authorized biographer, John McAleer: "In the original draft of Over My Dead Body Nero was a Montenegrin by birth, and it all fitted previous hints as to his background; but violent protests from The American Magazine, supported by Farrar & Rinehart, caused his cradle to be transported five thousand miles."[6]
"I got the idea of making Wolfe a Montenegrin from Louis Adamic," Stout told McAleer. Everything Stout knew about Montenegrins he learned from Adamic's book The Native's Return (1934), or from Adamic himself, McAleer reported.
"Adamic describes the Montenegrin male as tall, commanding, dignified, courteous, hospitable," McAleer wrote. "He is reluctant to work, accustomed to isolation from women. He places women in a subordinate role. He is a romantic idealist, apt to go in for dashing effects to express his spirited nature. He is strong in family loyalties, has great pride, is impatient of restraint. Love of freedom is his outstanding trait. He is stubborn, fearless, unsubduable, capable of great self-denial to uphold his ideals. He is fatalistic toward death. In short, Rex had found for Wolfe a nationality that fitted him to perfection."[7]
Wolfe is reticent about his youth, but apparently he was athletic, fit, and adventurous. Before World War I, he spied for the Austrian government, but had a change of heart when the war began. He then joined the Serbian-Montenegrin army and fought against the Austrians and Germans. That means he was likely to have been involved in the harrowing 1915 withdrawal of the defeated Serbian army, when thousands of soldiers died from disease, starvation and sheer exhaustion — which might help to explain the comfort-loving habits that are such a conspicuous part of his character. After a time in Europe and North Africa, he came to the United States.
In 1956, John D. Clark theorized in an article in the Baker Street Journal that Wolfe was the offspring of an affair between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler (a character from "A Scandal in Bohemia"). Clark suggested that the two had had an affair in Montenegro in 1892, and that Nero Wolfe was the result. The idea was later co-opted by William S. Baring-Gould and implied in the novels of Nicholas Meyer, but there is no evidence that Rex Stout had any such connection in mind. Certainly there is no mention of it in any of the stories, although a painting of Sherlock Holmes does hang over Archie Goodwin's desk in Nero Wolfe's office. This suggests that in the Nero Wolfe universe, Sherlock Holmes is a real person, not a fictional one. Some commentators, noting both physical and psychological resemblances, suggest Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes as a more likely father for Wolfe. Commentators have noted a coincidence in the names "Sherlock Holmes" and "Nero Wolfe": the same vowels appear in the same order. In 1957 Ellery Queen called this "The Great O-E Theory" and suggested that it derived from the father of mysteries, Edgar Allan Poe.[8]
Some Wold Newton theorists have suggested the French thief Arsène Lupin as the father of Nero Wolfe. They note that in one story Lupin has an affair with the queen of a Balkan principality, which may be Montenegro by another name. Further, they note that the name Lupin resembles the French word for wolf, loup.[9]
[edit] | Tags: Brownstone | 3>
The Manhattan brownstone used in the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2001–2002)
“
I rarely leave my house. I do like it here. I would be an idiot to leave this chair, made to fit me —
”
— Nero Wolfe in "Before I Die" (1947), chapter 2
Nero Wolfe, who has expensive tastes, lives in a comfortable and luxurious New York City brownstone on West 35th Street. The brownstone has three floors, plus a large basement with living quarters, a rooftop greenhouse also with living quarters, and a small elevator, used almost exclusively by Wolfe. Other unique features include a timer-activated window-opening device that regulates the temperature in Wolfe's bedroom, an alarm system that sounds in Archie's room if someone approaches Wolfe's bedroom door, and climate-controlled plant rooms on the top floor. A well-known amateur orchid grower, Wolfe has 10,000 plants in the brownstone's greenhouse. He employs three live-in staff to see to his needs.
The front door is equipped with a chain bolt, a bell that can be shut off as needed, and a pane of one-way glass, which enables Archie to see who is on the stoop before deciding whether to open the door. Wolfe's office becomes nearly soundproof when the doors to the front room and hallway are closed. There is a small hole in the office wall, covered by what Archie calls a "trick picture of a waterfall."[10] A person in an alcove at the end of the hallway can open a sliding panel covering the hole, so as to see and hear conversations and other events in the office without being noticed. The chair behind Wolfe's desk is custom-built, with special springs to hold his weight; according to Archie, it is the only chair Wolfe really enjoys sitting in.[11] Near the desk is a large chair upholstered in red leather, which is usually reserved for Inspector Cramer, a current or prospective client, or the person whom Wolfe and Archie want to question.
As noted in Champagne for One (chapter 10) and elsewhere, the brownstone has a back entrance leading to a private garden from which a passage leads to 34th Street — used to enter or leave Wolfe's home when it is necessary to evade surveillance. Archie says that Fritz tries to grow herbs such as chives in the garden.
"That readers have proved endlessly fascinated with the topography of Wolfe's brownstone temple should not be surprising," wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in At Wolfe's Door:
It is the center from which moral order emanates, and the details of its layout and its operations are signs of its stability. For forty years, Wolfe prepares menus with Fritz and pots orchids with Theodore. For forty years, Archie takes notes at his desk, the client sits in the red chair and the other principals distribute themselves in the yellow chairs, and Wolfe presides from his custom-made throne. For forty years, Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins ring the doorbell, enter the office, and explode with indignation at Wolfe's intractability. The front room, the elevator, the three-foot globe — all persist in place through forty years of American history. ... Like Holmes's 221B Baker Street, Wolfe's West Thirty-Fifth Street remains a fixed point in a turning world.[12]
In the course of the books, ten different street addresses on West 35th Street are given:
506 in Over My Dead Body, chapter 12
618 in Too Many Clients, chapter 4
902 in Murder by the Book, chapter 7
909 in "Before I Die", chapter 10
914 in Too Many Women, chapter 24
918 in The Red Box, chapter 3
919 in The Silent Speaker, chapter 12
922 in The Silent Speaker, chapter 2
924 in "Man Alive", chapter 9
938 in Death of a Doxy, chapter 4[13]
"Curiously, the 900 block of West 35th Street would be in the Hudson River," wrote American writer Randy Cohen, who created a map of the literary stars' homes for The New York Times in 2005. "It's a non-address, the real estate equivalent of those 555 telephone numbers used in movies." Cohen settled on 922 West 35th Street — the address printed on Archie's business card in The Silent Speaker — as Nero Wolfe's address.[14]
Writing as Archie Goodwin in his 1983 book, The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe, Ken Darby suggests that "the actual location was on East 22nd Street in the Gramercy Park District. ... Wolfe merely moved us, fictionally, from one place to the other in order to preserve his particular brand of privacy. As far as I can discover, there never were brownstone houses on West 35th Street."[15]
The absence of brownstones in Wolfe's neighborhood sent the producers of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan for an appropriate home and setting for select exterior shots. This Manhattan brownstone, unlike the model specially constructed on the Toronto set where most of the series was filmed,[16] lacked some peculiarities of Wolfe's home — for example, the correct number of steps leading up to the stoop — and was therefore shown from angles that would camouflage any slight discrepancies.[17] The series settled on "914" for the brownstone's address. This number can be seen on the studio set representing the front door exterior in several episodes and on a closeup of Archie's paycheck in "Prisoner's Base"
[edit] | Tags: Food | 3>
“
Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup.
”
— Archie Goodwin in Gambit (1962), chapter 1
Along with reading, good food is the keystone of Wolfe's mostly leisured existence. He is both a gourmand and a gourmet, enjoying generous helpings of Fritz's cuisine three times a day. Shad roe is a particular favorite, prepared in a number of different ways. Archie, who enjoys his food but lacks Wolfe's discerning palate, laments in The Final Deduction (chapter 9) that "Every spring I get so fed up with shad roe that I wish to heaven fish would figure out some other way. Whales have." Shad roe is frequently the first course, followed by another Wolfe favorite, roasted or braised duck. Archie also complains that there is never corned beef or rye bread on Wolfe's table, and he sometimes ducks out to eat a corned beef sandwich at a nearby diner. But in "Cordially Invited to Meet Death", a young woman gives Wolfe a lesson in preparing corned beef hash. Another contradiction: in Plot It Yourself, Archie goes to a diner to eat "fried chicken like my Aunt Margie used to make it back in Ohio," since Fritz does not fry chicken. But in The Golden Spiders, Fritz prepares fried chicken for Wolfe, Archie, Saul, Orrie, and Fred.
Wolfe displays an oenophile's knowledge of wine and brandy, but it is only implied that he drinks either. In And Be a Villain (chapter 17), he issues a dinner invitation and regrets doing so on short notice: "There will not be time to chambrer a claret properly, but we can have the chill off." Continuing the invitation, Wolfe says of a certain brandy, "I hope this won't shock you, but the way to do it is to sip it with bites of Fritz's apple pie."
On weekdays, Fritz serves Wolfe his breakfast in his bedroom. Archie eats his separately in the kitchen, although if Wolfe has morning instructions for him, he will ask Fritz to send Archie upstairs. Regularly scheduled mealtimes for lunch and dinner are part of Wolfe's daily routine. In an early story, Wolfe tells a guest that luncheon is served daily at 1 p.m. and dinner at 8 p.m., although later stories suggest that lunchtime may have been changed to 1:15 or 1:30, at least on Fridays. Lunch and dinner are served in the dining room. If Archie is in a rush due to pressing business or a social engagement, he will eat separately in the kitchen because Wolfe cannot bear to see a meal rushed. Wolfe also has a rule, sometimes bent but very rarely overtly broken, against discussing business at the table.
In the earliest books, Archie reports that Wolfe is subject to what he terms a "relapse" — a period of several days during which Wolfe refuses to work, or even to listen to Archie badger him about work. The cause is unknown. Wolfe either takes to bed and eats nothing but bread and onion soup, or consults with Fritz on menus and the preparation of nonstop meals. In Fer-de-Lance (chapter 6), Archie reports that during a relapse Wolfe once ate half a sheep in two days, different parts cooked in 20 different ways. The relapse also appears briefly in The League of Frightened Men (chapter 11), The Red Box (chapter 6) and Where There's a Will (chapter 12), but subsequently disappears from the corpus as a plot device.
Wolfe views much of life through the prism of food and dining, going so far as to say at one point that Voltaire "... wasn't a man at all, since he had no palate and a dried-up stomach."[18] He knows enough about fine cuisine to lecture on American cooking to Les Quinze Maîtres (a group of the 15 finest chefs in the world) in Too Many Cooks and to dine with the Ten for Aristology (a group of epicures) in "Poison à la Carte". Wolfe does not, however, enjoy visiting restaurants (with the occasional exception of Rusterman's, owned for a time by Wolfe's best friend, Marco Vukcic). In The Red Box (chapter 11), Wolfe states that "I know nothing of restaurants; short of compulsion, I would not eat in one were Vatel himself the chef.
Wolfe appears to know his way around the kitchen; in Too Many Cooks (chapter 17), he tells Jerome Berin, "I spend quite a little time in the kitchen myself." In The Doorbell Rang, he offers to cook Yorkshire Buck for the 'teers, and in "Immune to Murder", the State Department asks him to prepare trout Montbarry for a visiting dignitary. In The Black Mountain, Wolfe and Goodwin stay briefly in an unoccupied house in Italy on their way to Montenegro; Wolfe prepares a pasta dish using Romano cheese that, from "his memory of local custom," he finds in a hole in the ground. During the short story "Murder Is Corny", he lectures Inspector Cramer on the right and wrong ways to cook corn on the cob, insisting that it must be roasted rather than boiled in order to achieve the best flavor. (The 1940 story "Bitter End" suggests the contrary view that Wolfe was unable to prepare his own meals; Fritz's illness with the flu causes a household crisis and forces Wolfe to resort to canned liver pâté for his lunch.)
Wolfe's meals generally include an appetizer, a main course, a salad served after the entrée (with the salad dressing mixed at tableside and used immediately), and a dessert course with coffee.
Many of the dishes referred to in the various Nero Wolfe stories and novels were collected and published, complete with recipes, as The Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout and the Editors of the Viking Press, published in 1973. All recipes are prefaced with a brief excerpt from the book or story that made reference to that particular dish.
[edit] | Tags: Beer | 3>
Gold plated beer bottle opener from the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery
“
[Fritz] served Wolfe’s beer first, the bottle unopened because that's a rule, and Wolfe got his opener from the drawer, a gold one Marko Vukcic had given him that didn’t work very well.
”
— Archie Goodwin in The Father Hunt (1968), chapter 5
Nero Wolfe's first recorded words are, "Where's the beer?"
The first novel, Fer-de-Lance, introduces Wolfe as he prepares to change his habits: with Prohibition at an end, he can stop buying kegs of bootleg beer and purchase it legally in bottles. Fritz brings in samples of 49 different brands for him to evaluate, from which he ultimately selects Remmers as his favorite. Several times during the story, Wolfe announces his intention to reduce his beer intake from six quarts a day to five. "I grinned at that, for I didn't believe it," Archie Goodwin writes.[19]
Like most other things in Wolfe's life, his beer drinking is bound by ritual. Seated at his desk, Wolfe presses the button twice to ring for beer, and Fritz delivers the bottles unopened. Wolfe uncaps the bottles himself, using an 18-carat gold bottle opener given to him by a satisfied client.[20] He never drinks directly from the bottle, but instead pours the beer into a glass and lets the foam settle to an appropriate level before drinking. He keeps the gold opener in the center drawer of his desk, where he also keeps the bottlecaps as a means of tracking his daily/weekly consumption.
In Plot It Yourself (chapter 13), Wolfe makes an unprecedented vow after Archie tells him the killer they seek has killed again. Wolfe hits the desk with his fist, bellows in a language Archie doesn't understand, then coldly orders Fritz away when he enters with the beer: "Take it back. I shall drink no beer until I get my fingers around that creature's throat."
[edit] | Tags: Orchids | 3>
Phalaenopsis hybrid
“
Wolfe had once remarked to me that the orchids were his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic and temperamental. He brought them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the limits of their perfection, and then gave them away; he had never sold one.
”
— Archie Goodwin in The League of Frightened Men (1935), chapter 2
Known for rigidly maintaining his personal schedule, Nero Wolfe is most inflexible when it comes to his routine in the rooftop plant rooms.
"Wolfe spends four hours a day with his orchids. Clients must accommodate themselves to this schedule," wrote Rex Stout's biographer John J. McAleer. "Rex does not use the orchid schedule to gloss over gummy plotting. Like the disciplines the sonneteer is bound by, the schedule is part of the framework he is committed to work within. The orchids and the orchid rooms sometimes are focal points in the stories. They are never irrelevant. In forty years Wolfe has scarcely ever shortened an orchid schedule."[21]
"A dilly it was, this greenhouse," wrote Dr. John H. Vandermeulen in the February 1985 issue of the American Orchid Society Bulletin.
Entering from the stairs via a vestibule, there were three main rooms — one for cattleyas, laelias, and hybrids; one for odontoglossums, oncidiums, miltonias, and their hybrids; and a tropical room (according to Fer-de-Lance). It must have been quite a sight with the angle-iron staging gleaming in its silver paint and on the concrete benches and shelves 10,000 pots of orchids in glorious, exultant bloom.[22]
"If Wolfe had a favorite orchid, it would be the genus Phalaenopsis," Robert M. Hamilton wrote in his article, "The Orchidology of Nero Wolfe", first printed in The Gazette: Journal of the Wolfe Pack (Volume 1, Spring 1979). "Archie notes them in eleven adventures. … Phalaenopsis Aphrodite is mentioned in seven different adventures by Archie, more than any other species. This may have been Wolfe's favorite."[23] Wolfe personally cuts his most treasured Phalaenopsis Aphrodite for the centerpiece at the dinner for the Ten for Aristology in "Poison a la Carte". In The Father Hunt, after Dorothy Sebor provides the information that solves the case, Wolfe tells Archie, "We'll send her some sprays of Phalaenopsis Aphrodite. They have never been finer."[24]
Wolfe rarely sells his orchids[25] — but he does give them away. Four or five dozen are used to advance the investigation in Murder by the Book, and Wolfe refuses to let Archie bill the client for them. In The Final Deduction, Laelia purpurata and Dendrobium chrysotoxum are sent to Dr. Vollmer and his assistant, who shelter Wolfe and Archie when they have to flee the brownstone to avoid the police.[26]
In The Second Confession, the orchid rooms are torn apart by gunfire from across the street. The shooters are in the employ of crime boss Arnold Zeck, who wants Wolfe to drop a case that could lead back to him. Wolfe and Archie call men to take care of the plants and repair the windows before notifying the police.[27]
[edit] | Tags: Eccentricities | 3>
“
I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.
”
— Nero Wolfe in Fer-de-Lance (1934), chapter 5
Wolfe has pronounced eccentricities, as well as strict rules concerning his way of life, and their occasional violation adds spice to many of the stories:
Wolfe does not invite people to use his first name and addresses them by honorific and surname. Aside from his employees, one of the only two men whom Wolfe addresses by their first names is his oldest friend, Marko Vukčić; Marko calls him Nero.[28] In Death of a Doxy Julie Jaquette refers to Wolfe as Nero in a letter to Archie; and Lily Rowan has addressed Wolfe using an assumed first name. But these are exceptions. In "The Rodeo Murder" Wolfe finds it objectionable when Wade Eisler addresses him as Nero; and in "Door to Death" Sybil Pitcairn's disdainful use of his first name makes Wolfe decide to solve the case. Men nearly always address him as Wolfe, and women as Mr. Wolfe.
He restricts his visible reactions: as Archie puts it, "He shook his head, moving it a full half-inch right and left, which was for him a frenzy of negation."[29]
He is extremely fastidious about his clothing and hates to wear, even in private, anything that has been soiled. The short story "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" opens with an example of this habit, in which Wolfe removes his necktie and leaves it on his desk after dropping a bit of sauce on it during lunch. The tie is later used to commit a murder in his office. Beyond that, Wolfe has a marked preference for the color yellow, habitually wearing shirts and silk pajamas in this color and sleeping on yellow bedsheets.
Wolfe states that "all music is a vestige of barbarism"[30] and denies that music can have any intellectual content.[31] He takes a dim view of television; but TV sets did find their way into the brownstone in the later stories. Archie notes in Before Midnight, "It was Sunday evening, when he especially enjoyed turning the television off." Wolfe's attitude toward television notwithstanding, the TV set in Fritz's basement quarters proved handy in The Doorbell Rang, when the volume was turned up to foil potential eavesdroppers.[32]
Despite Wolfe's rule never to leave the brownstone on business, the stories find him leaving his home on several occasions. At times, Wolfe and Archie are on a personal errand when a murder occurs, and legal authorities require that they remain in the vicinity (Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, "Too Many Detectives" and "Immune to Murder", for example). In other instances, the requirements of the case force Wolfe from his house (In the Best Families, The Second Confession, The Doorbell Rang, Plot It Yourself, The Silent Speaker, Death of a Dude). Although he occasionally ventures by car into the suburbs of New York City, he is loath to travel, and clutches the safety strap continually on the occasions that Archie drives him somewhere. As Archie says in The Doorbell Rang, "(Wolfe) distrusted all machines more complicated than a wheelbarrow."[33]
Wolfe maintains a rigid schedule in the brownstone. He has breakfast in his bedroom while wearing yellow silk pajamas; he hates to discuss work during breakfast, and if forced to do so insists upon not uttering a word until he has finished his glass of orange juice (Murder by the Book). Afterwards, he is with Horstmann in the plant rooms from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Lunch is usually at 1:15 p.m. He returns to the plant rooms from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Dinner is generally at 7:15 or 7:30 p.m. (although in one book, Wolfe tells a guest that lunch is served at 1 o'clock and dinner at 8). The remaining hours, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., and after dinner, are available for business, or for reading if there is no pressing business (even if, by Archie's lights, there is). Sunday's schedule is more relaxed; Theodore, the orchid-keeper, usually goes out.
Wolfe displays a pronounced, almost pathological, dislike for the company of women. Although some readers interpret this attitude as simple misogyny, various details in the stories, particularly the early ones, suggest it has more to do with an unfortunate encounter in early life with a femme fatale. It is not women themselves that he dislikes: rather, it is what he perceives as their frailties, especially a tendency to hysterics — to which he thinks every woman is prone. "In the all-male Wolfe household that is an apparent bulwark of men's-club solidarity, Wolfe's misogyny is part pose, part protection, but above all, a shrewd tool of detective strategy," wrote critic Molly Haskell. "Archie does the romancing while Wolfe prods and offends, winnowing out the traitorous and brattish women and allowing the cream, the really great women, to rise to the top. ... We deduce from the glow of those special women who do earn the detective's good will just how discriminating and interested an observer of womankind the author is."[34] These women include Clara Fox (The Rubber Band), Lily Rowan (introduced in Some Buried Caesar), Phoebe Gunther (The Silent Speaker) and Julie Jaquette (Death of a Doxy).
That Wolfe disapproves of women is well established, but Archie claims that there are nuances: “The basic fact about a woman that seemed to irritate him was that she was a woman; the long record showed not a single exception; but from there on the documentation was cockeyed. If woman as woman grated on him you would suppose that the most womanly details would be the worst for him, but time and again I have known him to have a chair placed for a female so that his desk would not obstruct his view of her legs, and the answer can’t be that his interest is professional and he reads character from legs, because the older and dumpier she is the less he cares where she sits. It is a very complex question and some day I’m going to take a whole chapter for it.” (The Silent Speaker, chapter 30.)
Wolfe has an aversion to physical contact, even shaking hands. Early in the first novel Archie explains why there is a gong under his bed that will ring upon any intrusion into or near Wolfe's own bedroom: "Wolfe told me once ... that he really had no cowardice in him, he only had an intense distaste for being touched by anyone ..."[35][36] When Jerome Berin, creator of saucisse minuit, repeatedly taps Wolfe on the knee, Archie grins at "Wolfe, who didn't like being touched, concealing his squirm for the sake of sausages."[37] In Prisoner's Base, Wolfe speaks coldly as he tells the DA and Cramer that the despised Lieutenant Rowcliff "put a hand on me. ... I will not have a hand put on me, gentlemen. I like no man's hand on me, and one such as Mr. Rowcliff's, unmerited, I will not have."[38] Wolfe's prejudices make it all the more surprising when, in "Cordially Invited to Meet Death," Archie finds Wolfe in the kitchen with a woman who has solved the problem of preparing corned beef: "Standing beside him, closer to him than I had ever seen any woman or girl of any age tolerated, with her hand slipped between his arm and his bulk, was Maryella."[39]
As noted in Murder by the Book, Wolfe likes to solve the crossword puzzle of The Times, in preference to those of American papers, and hates to be interrupted while so engaged.
In nearly every story, Wolfe solves the mystery by considering the facts brought to him by Archie and others, and the replies to questions he himself asks of suspects. Wolfe ponders with his eyes closed, leaning back in his chair, breathing deeply and steadily, and pushing his lips in and out. Archie says that during these trances Wolfe reacts to nothing that is going on around him. Archie seldom interrupts Wolfe's thought processes, he says, largely because it is the only time that he can be sure that Wolfe is working.
[edit] | Tags: Narrator | 2>
Born in Ohio. Public high school, pretty good at geometry and football, graduated with honor but no honors. Went to college two weeks, decided it was childish, came to New York and got a job guarding a pier, shot and killed two men and was fired, was recommended to Nero Wolfe for a chore he wanted done, did it, was offered a full-time job by Mr. Wolfe, took it, still have it.
— Archie Goodwin addressing the suspects in "Fourth of July Picnic" (1957)
Main article: Archie Goodwin (fictional detective)
Archie Goodwin is the narrator of all the Nero Wolfe stories and a central character in them. He is occasionally referred to by the New York newspapers as "Nero Wolfe's legman". Like Wolfe, Archie is a licensed private detective and handles all investigation that takes place outside the brownstone. He also takes care of routine tasks such as sorting the mail, taking dictation and answering the phone. At the time of the first novel, Fer-de-Lance, Archie had been working for Wolfe for seven years[40] and had by then been trained by Wolfe in his preferred methods of investigation. Like Wolfe, he has developed an extraordinary memory and can recite verbatim conversations that go on for hours. But perhaps his most useful attribute is his ability to bring reluctant people to Wolfe for interrogation.
Archie has his own bedroom one floor above Wolfe's[41] and lives at the brownstone rent-free. On several occasions he makes it a point to note that he owns his bedroom furniture. Except for breakfast (which chef Fritz Brenner generally serves him in the kitchen) Archie takes his meals at Wolfe's table, and has learned much about haute cuisine by listening to Wolfe and Fritz discuss food. While Archie has a cocktail on occasion, his beverage of choice is milk.
Archie's initial rough edges become smoother across the decades, much as American norms evolved over the years. Noting Archie's colloquialisms in the first two Nero Wolfe novels, Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald wrote, "The crudeness of these references makes me suspect that Stout uses them in Archie to show their ugliness because he uses them unapologetically."[42] In the first Wolfe novel, Archie uses a racially offensive term, for which Wolfe chides him,[43] but by the time that A Right to Die was published in 1964, racial epithets were used only by Stout's criminals, or as evidence of mental defect.
“
If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature. For surely Archie is one of the folk heroes in which the modern American temper can see itself transfigured. Archie is the lineal descendant of Huck Finn ... Archie is spiritually larger than life. That is why his employer and companion had to be made corpulent to match.
”
— Jacques Barzun, A Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout (The Viking Press, 1965)[44]
Many reviewers and critics regard Archie as the stories' true protagonist. Compared to Wolfe, Goodwin is the man of action, tough and street smart. His narrative style is breezy and vivid. Some commentators saw this as a conscious device by Stout to fuse the hard school of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade with the urbanity of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.[45] But there is no doubt that Goodwin was an important addition to the genre of detective fiction. Previously, foils such as Watson or Hastings were employed as confidants and narrators, but none had such a fully developed personality or was such an integral part of the plot as Archie.
[edit] | Tags: Household | 3>
Fritz Brenner — exceptionally talented Swiss[46] cook who prepares and serves all of Wolfe's meals except those that Wolfe occasionally takes at Rusterman's Restaurant. Fritz also acts as the household's majordomo and butler.
Theodore Horstmann — orchid expert who assists Wolfe in the plant rooms.
[edit] | Tags: The 'Teers | 3>
Saul Panzer — top-notch private detective who is frequently hired by Nero Wolfe either to assist Archie Goodwin, or to carry out assignments Wolfe prefers that Archie not know about. Archie often comments on Saul's exceptional memory.
Fred Durkin — blue-collar investigator who is often hired for mundane tasks like surveillance.
Orrie Cather — handsome, personable detective who thinks he would look just fine sitting at Archie's desk.
[edit] | Tags: Law enforcement officials | 3>
Inspector Cramer — head of Homicide in Manhattan. In some of the stories it is implied that his authority extends to other NYC boroughs.
Sergeant Purley Stebbins — assistant to Cramer.
Lieutenant George Rowcliff — obnoxious police lieutenant (who has been known to stutter when frustrated by Goodwin). Plays an integral part in Please Pass the Guilt.
Hombert — in some of the novels the New York police commissioner[47]
Skinner — New York County Manhattan District Attorney
Mandelbaum (aka Mandel) — Manhattan Assistant District Attorney.
Cleveland Archer — Westchester County district attorney
Ben Dykes — head of Westchester County detectives
Con Noonan — lieutenant with the New York State Police. He dislikes Wolfe and Goodwin and would lock them up under the feeblest excuse (see the novella "Door To Death").
[edit] | Tags: Friends | 3>
Lon Cohen — of the New York Gazette, Archie's pipeline to breaking crime news. Archie frequently asks Lon for background information on current or prospective clients. Lon is also one of Archie's poker-playing pals.
Lily Rowan — heiress and socialite, often appears as Archie's romantic companion, although both Lily and Archie are fiercely independent and have no intention of getting engaged or settling down. Lily was introduced in Some Buried Caesar, appears in several stories, and assists in a couple of cases.
Marko Vukčić — A fellow Montenegrin whom Wolfe has known since childhood, possibly a blood relative (since "vuk" means "wolf"). Vukčić owns the high-class Rusterman's Restaurant in Manhattan. According to In the Best Families (in which Wolfe gives him power of attorney), he is the only man in New York who calls Wolfe by his first name. When Vukčić is killed in The Black Mountain, Wolfe is executor of Vukčić's will and runs Rusterman's as a trustee for several years.
Lewis Hewitt — well-heeled orchid fancier, for whom Wolfe did a favor (as told in "Black Orchids"). During a prolonged absence (In the Best Families), Wolfe sends his orchids to Hewitt for care. Wolfe occasionally asks professional favors of Hewitt (as in The Doorbell Rang), and Hewitt has sent at least one friend, Millard Bynoe, to ask Wolfe's assistance (Easter Parade).
Nathaniel Parker — Wolfe's lawyer (or occasionally as a client's lawyer, on Wolfe's recommendation) when only a lawyer will do. The character name evolved from "Henry H. Barber"; in Prisoner's Base (1952) the lawyer's name is Nathaniel Parker, but in The Golden Spiders (1953) it's Henry Parker, and then reverts to Nathaniel Parker for the rest of the series. Parker is an old friend, and shares some of Wolfe's abilities, e.g., Parker converses with Wolfe in French during the story "Immune to Murder."
Doctor Vollmer — a medical doctor who is Wolfe's neighbor and friend. Wolfe calls upon Vollmer whenever a dead body is discovered (which happens often). In the novel The Silent Speaker, Vollmer contrives an illness severe enough that Wolfe cannot be bothered by anyone. Vollmer's motivation, aside from friendship, is that Wolfe helped him out with a would-be blackmailer years ago.
Carla Lovchen — Wolfe's adopted daughter, who appears in only two stories, Over My Dead Body and The Black Mountain.[48]
[edit] | Tags: Other associates | 3>
Bill Gore — freelance operative occasionally called in when Wolfe requires additional help in the field.
Johnny Keems — freelance operative occasionally called in by Wolfe. He makes his last appearance in the novel Might as Well Be Dead.
Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner and Sally Corbett (aka Sally Colt)[49] — female operatives whom Wolfe employs at need. They also play a major role in the novella "Too Many Detectives". Dol Bonner is the principal character in the novel The Hand in the Glove, which is an early example of a woman private detective as the protagonist of a mystery novel. Dol Bonner and her agency operatives appear in a few Wolfe mysteries in places where female operatives are required, such as The Mother Hunt[50]
Del Bascom — independent investigator who runs a large conventional detective agency in Manhattan. Wolfe sometimes subcontracts to Bascom when he needs a lot of men for something (as in The Silent Speaker).
Herb Aronson and Al Goller — friendly cabbies who make themselves available to Archie for mobile surveillance jobs.
Geoffrey Hitchcock - Wolfe's contact in London who handles enquiries to be made in Europe.
[edit] | Tags: Bibliography | 2>
He passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.
— P.G. Wodehouse[51]
[edit] | Tags: Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout | 3>
Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books are listed below in order of publication. Years link to year-in-literature articles. Novels can be browsed alphabetically by title at the Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout page. Titles of the novella collections are listed alphabetically on the Nero Wolfe short story collections page.
1934: Fer-de-Lance
1935: The League of Frightened Men
1936: The Rubber Band
1937: The Red Box
1938: Too Many Cooks
1939: Some Buried Caesar
1940: Over My Dead Body
1940: Where There's a Will
1942: Black Orchids
1944: Not Quite Dead Enough
1946: The Silent Speaker
1947: Too Many Women
1948: And Be a Villain (British title More Deaths Than One)
1949: Trouble in Triplicate
1949: The Second Confession
1950: Three Doors to Death
1950: In the Best Families (British title Even in the Best Families)
1951: Curtains for Three
1951: Murder by the Book
1952: Triple Jeopardy
1952: Prisoner's Base (British title Out Goes She)
1953: The Golden Spiders
1954: Three Men Out
1954: The Black Mountain
1955: Before Midnight
1956: Three Witnesses
1956: Might as Well Be Dead
1957: Three for the Chair
1957: If Death Ever Slept
1958: And Four to Go
1958: Champagne for One
1959: Plot It Yourself (British title Murder in Style)
1960: Three at Wolfe's Door
1960: Too Many Clients
1961: The Final Deduction
1962: Homicide Trinity
1962: Gambit
1963: The Mother Hunt
1964: Trio for Blunt Instruments
1964: A Right to Die
1965: The Doorbell Rang
1966: Death of a Doxy
1968: The Father Hunt
1969: Death of a Dude
1973: Please Pass the Guilt
1975: A Family Affair
1985: Death Times Three (posthumous)
[edit] | Tags: Nero Wolfe novellas by Rex Stout | 3>
Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novellas are listed below in order of first appearance. Years link to year-in-literature articles.
1940: "Bitter End"
1941: "Black Orchids"
1942: "Cordially Invited to Meet Death"
1942: "Not Quite Dead Enough"
1944: "Booby Trap"
1945: "Help Wanted, Male"
1946: "Instead of Evidence"
1947: "Before I Die"
1947: "Man Alive"
1948: "Bullet for One"
1948: "Omit Flowers"
1949: "Door to Death"
1949: "The Gun with Wings"
1950: "Disguise for Murder"
1951: "The Cop-Killer"
1951: "The Squirt and the Monkey"
1952: "Home to Roost"
1952: "This Won't Kill You"
1953: "Invitation to Murder"
1953: "The Zero Clue"
1954: "When a Man Murders..."
1954: "Die Like a Dog"
1955: "The Next Witness"
1955: "Immune to Murder"
1956: "A Window for Death"
1956: "Too Many Detectives"
1957: "Christmas Party"
1957: "Easter Parade"
1957: "Fourth of July Picnic"
1958: "Murder Is No Joke" (expanded as "Frame-Up for Murder")
1960: "Method Three for Murder"
1960: "Poison à la Carte"
1960: "The Rodeo Murder"
1961: "Counterfeit for Murder"
1961: "Death of a Demon"
1961: "Kill Now — Pay Later"
1962: "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo"
1963: "Blood Will Tell"
1964: "Murder Is Corny"
1985: "Assault on a Brownstone" (1959, posthumous)
[edit] | Tags: Other Nero Wolfe works by Rex Stout | 3>
The Nero Wolfe Cookbook, with the editors of Viking Press (1973) — The cuisine and world of Nero Wolfe are brought to life in 237 recipes and a wealth of pertinent quotes from the corpus, illustrated by vintage New York City photographs by John Muller, Andreas Feininger and others. Many of the recipes would be regarded today as too heavy: for example, the ingredients listed for il pesto include pig liver and butter. Chapters include "Breakfast in the Old Brownstone"; "Luncheon in the Dining Room"; "Warm-Weather Dinners"; "Cold-Weather Dinners"; "Desserts"; "The Perfect Dinner for the Perfect Detective"; "The Relapse"; "Snacks"; "Guests, Male and Female"; "Associates for Dinner"; "Fritz Brenner"; "Dishes Cooked by Others"; "Rusterman's Restaurant"; "Nero Wolfe Cooks"; and "The Kanawha Spa Dinner". Hardcover ISBN 0-670-50599-4 / Paperback ISBN 1-888952-24-5
"Why Nero Wolfe Likes Orchids", Life (April 19, 1963) — Concluding a feature story titled "The Orchid" that was photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Archie Goodwin "investigates and explains the deep satisfactions of his boss's orchid-fixation." Archie reports that Wolfe's fascination with orchids began when he was given a specimen plant "by the wife of a man he had cleared on a murder rap. He kept it in the office and it petered out. He got mad, built a little shed on the roof and bought 20 plants." A detailed description of the dimensions and activities of the rooftop plant rooms follows. Archie notes that he often hears Wolfe talking to the orchids and gives examples of what he says. The main reason his boss grows orchids, he writes, is for the color:
He says you don't look at color, you feel it, and apparently he thinks that really means something. It doesn't to me, but maybe it does to you and you know exactly how he feels as he opens the door to the plant rooms and walks in on the big show. I have never known a day when less than a hundred plants were in bloom, and sometimes there are a thousand...
"The Case of the Spies Who Weren't", Ramparts (January 1966) — Archie Goodwin reports that the previous evening Nero Wolfe and "Rex Stout, my literary agent" filled 27 pages in his notebook with their discussion of Invitation to an Inquest by Walter and Miriam Schneir, a recently published book that they are reviewing for Ramparts magazine. Since their review must be fewer than 3, | Tags: Nero Wolfe (disambiguation),Bitter End,Websites related to: Brandy Robbins |