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Nero Wolfe

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Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective created by American author Rex Stout in the 1930s and was featured in dozens of novels and novellas for more than 40 years.

In the stories, Wolfe is one of the most famous private detectives in the United States. He weighs "a seventh of a ton" (about 286 pounds or 130 kg) At the time (1934), this was intended to indicate extreme obesity, especially by the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In the 1953 book In the Best Families, Wolfe temporarily returns to "normal" body weight, using the description in that book, by losing about 50 pounds., in Archie Goodwin's words, and is 5'11" tall. He raises orchids in a roof-top greenhouse in his New York City brownstone on West 35th Street near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, helped by his gardener, Theodore Horstmann. Wolfe drinks beer throughout the day and is a gourmand. He employs a Swiss French live-in chef, Fritz Brenner, with whom he confers frequently about up-coming meals. He is multilingual and brilliant, though apparently self-educated, with reading being his third passion after food and orchids. He works from his book-lined office on the ground floor of his brownstone and almost never leaves home, even to pursue the detective work that finances his expensive lifestyleHis orchid raising could also be a business, considering that several stories in the books attach great cost to repairing just the damage to a few of them, but Wolfe steadfastly refuses to sell orchids, although he is not averse to Archie using them to gain the cooperation of women in their investigations, a technique used to great effect in the early Wolfe book The Red Box and much later in Murder by the Book. The orchids are also much admired by Archie's "companion" (the books never quite specify their relationship) Lily Rowan, a fact that Nero Wolfe uses in the story Not Quite Dead Enough when Lily and Goodwin are having a tiff to calm the situation because in that particular situation Lily, as in a few other stories, is central to the mystery itself . Instead, his leg work is done by another live-in employee, Archie Goodwin, who is also the first-person narrator of the Wolfe adventures. While both Wolfe and Goodwin are licensed detectives, Goodwin is more of the classic fictional gumshoe, tough, wise-cracking, and skirt-chasing.Archie's rough edges become less and less evident over the years. In a heated exchange with Wolfe near the beginning of one of the early novels, he pointedly insists on his right to use a very long list of racially charged words such as "kike" and "wop". By the time that A Right to Die was published in the mid-1960s, all that has disappeared from his language, along with colloquial slang. Archie's literary style (in which the books are written) has markedly improved, even occasionally using rather than disdaining some of the longer words that his boss likes. He tells the stories in a breezy semi-hard-boiled styleSome commentators saw this as a conscious device by Stout to fuse the hard-school of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade (1930) with the urbanity of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot (1920). In fact, sole operative Tecumseh Fox, who is perhaps a fusion of the best qualities Wolfe and Goodwin into a real person without Wolfe's collection of idiosyncracies, is arguably a better and more effective fictional character, as evidenced in the novel The Broken Vase, but that was never translated into commercial success, and only 3 books with this character were written, one of which was later adapted in a Wolfe story at the urging of Stout's publisher..

Wolfe was born in 1892 or 1893 in MontenegroThis is inferred from assorted information in the earlier stories but never stated. In point of fact, as the years went by, Stout pointedly allowed Wolfe and Archie's ages to advance much less than real time, if at all, except as in the case of the books A Right To Die or The Black Mountain, the books are sequels to books written many years before.. He is reticent about his youth, but clearly was slim, fit, and daring. Before World War I, he spied for the Austrian Empire, but had a change of heart when the war began. He joined the Montenegrin army and fought the Austrians and Germans in some of the grimmest combat of the war. After time in Europe and North Africa, he came to the United States.

In 1956, John D. Clark put forth a theory 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, 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. Some commentators, noting both physical and psychological resemblances, suggest Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes as a more likely father for Wolfe. There is a curious coincidence: in the names "Sherlock Holmes" and "Nero Wolfe", the same vowels appear in the same order.

In the course of the stories, Wolfe displays a pronounced, even pathological, dislike for the company of women. Although some readers interpret this attitude as 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. He avoids not so much women as their perceived frailties, especially a woman having hysterics. In an early Wolfe novel Over My Dead Body, we learn that he has a daughter, albeit adopted, who plays an important part in the 1954 novel The Black Mountain.

Contents

Bibliography

Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout

The Nero Wolfe stories are browsable by title on the page, and most of the individual Nero Wolfe titles are part of the page (except those written by Robert Goldsborough).

Nero Wolfe novellas or novelettes by Rex Stout

Nero Wolfe books by
  • Murder in E-Minor (1986) — 1st Nero Wolfe novel by Robert Goldsborough. Wolfe is brought out of de facto retirement by the death of a man who saved his life 50 years before in Montenegro — against a background of politics at a major symphony orchestra.
  • Death on Deadline (1987) — A deadly fight for control of the narrowly held stock of the New York Gazette, publicizer of many of Wolfe's earlier cases.
  • The Bloodied Ivy (1988) — A novel about academic intrigue combined with the attractions and pitfalls of having dedicated groupies as graduate students.
  • The Last Coincidence (1989) — A novel concerning the fallout of the (alleged) date rape of the niece of Lily Rowan, Archie's girlfriend.
  • Fade to Black (1990) — The second of two Wolfe books about the world of advertising.The first was Rex Stout's Before Midnight.Fade to Black has, among other things, material about the Cherokee Trail of Tears and a realistic opportunity for the reader to zero in on the likely culprit without any extra info supplied later by Wolfe.
  • Silver Spire (1992) — A novel concerning the politics of a successful televangelism ministry based in Staten Island.
  • The Missing Chapter (1994) — In retrospect, an explicit farewell to Nero Wolfe by Goldsborough: this novel concerns the murder of a mediocre (at best) continuator of a popular detective series.

Nero Wolfe books by While not mentioning Wolfe by name, it is strongly hinted in these books that the main character Auguste Lupa (the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler) later becomes Nero Wolfe.

Books about Nero Wolfe

Biographies of Rex Stout

No. 1 - Autumn, 1984 No. 2 - Spring, 1985 No. 3 - Autumn, 1985 No. 3 - Spring, 1986

Nero Wolfe Commentaries

The following works may be said to represent Mr. Wolfe's biographies and assessments of his career. They also contain insight into Stout's career.

Wolfe in other media

Cinema

The Nero Wolfe mysteries inspired two feature films in the 1930s. Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) was an adaptation of the first Wolfe novel, "Fer-de-Lance," and starred Edward Arnold as Wolfe and Lionel Stander as Archie Goodwin. The League of Frightened Men (1937), an adaptation of the second Wolfe novel, starred Walter Connolly as Wolfe, with Stander repeating his role as Goodwin. Reviews of these two movies were generally lukewarm, and Rex Stout disliked the way his characters were portrayed. For the rest of his life, he declined to authorize any more Hollywood adaptations.

Radio

A number of radio series have been made based on the Nero Wolfe stories:

Television

Rex Stout, disappointed in the Nero Wolfe movies of the 1930s and unimpressed with television in general, vetoed Nero Wolfe film and TV projects in America until his death in 1975. In 1977, Thayer David, Tom Mason, and Brooke Adams starred in a telemovie based on "The Doorbell Rang." Intended as the pilot episode for a television series that did not eventuate, it was held back for release until 1979 due to the death of Thayer David shortly after filming.

In 1981, William Conrad played Wolfe and Lee Horsley played Goodwin in a short-lived television series.

In 2001, Maury Chaykin (as Wolfe) and Timothy Hutton (as Archie) starred in The Golden Spiders, an A&E telemovie adaptation of the 1953 story of the same name. This led to a series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery, which played for two seasons before being canceled. Both seasons are available on DVD as two boxed sets (the telemovie bundled with the second).

Hutton had a strong creative hand in the A&E series, producing and directing some episodes. Many fans consider the series the most accurate adaptation of the Wolfe stories ever seen on American television. The episodes followed the plots of the stories closely, but unlike previous Wolfe shows, they were not updated to contemporary times. They were colorful period pieces, set in a somewhat vague past (the 1940s to the early '60s). Whether Rex Stout would have liked this approach or not, the production values were high. Media critics and fans of the books generally had good things to say about the show. But people who had not read the books, especially viewers who knew Wolfe only through the William Conrad series, responded less favorably.

One distinguishing feature of the series was the use of an ensemble cast to play non-recurring characters. The same actor who played the murder victim in one episode might play the murderer in another. Sometimes an actor, using a wig or other such disguise, would play two characters in one episode. Kari Matchett had a recurring role as Archie Goodwin's sometime girlfriend Lily Rowan while frequently playing other characters as well. This was intended to mimic the experience of watching a play put on by a repertory company, as might have been done in the early 20th century.

Between 1969 and 1971, the Italian network RAI broadcast a successful series of black and white telemovies starring Tino Buazzelli (Nero Wolfe), Paolo Ferrari (Archie Goodwin), Pupo De Luca (Fritz Brenner) and Renzo Palmer (Inspector Cramer). Ten episodes of this series are currently (2004) available on DVD.

The German-made mini-series of Too Many Cooks (Zu viele Köche, 1961) has some information available on the Internet Movie database: [link]. Heinz Klevenow starred as Nero Wolfe and Joachim Fuchsberger as Archie Goodwin.

The Russian Wolfe TV movies were made in 2001-2002. The teleplay for the series was written by Vladimir Valutskiy who had previously written the Russian Sherlock Holmes TV series (around 1980). The IMDb link for more information: [link]. Nero Wolfe is played by Donatas Banionis and Archie Goodwin by Sergei Zhigunov.

Notes

External links

 

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