Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
WITH
CEIL
BARING-GOULD
Nero Wolfe of
West Thirty-fifth
The Life and Times of
America's Largest Private Detective
by William S. Baring-Gould
New York / The Viking Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Baker Street Journal (New Series, Volume VI, Number 1, January 1956):
"Some Notes Relating to a Preliminary Investigation into the Paternity of
Nero Wolfe" by John D. Clark.
Harper & Row, Publishers: 14 definitions from Orchids: Their Botany and
Culture by Alex D. Hawkes, Copyright 1961 by Alex D. Hawkes. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.
Harper's Magazine (July 1954): "Alias Nero Wolfe" by Bernard DeVoto,
by permission of Mrs. Bernard DeVoto, owner of copyright.
Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.: from Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William
S. Baring-Gould, Copyright 1962 by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Used by
permission.
The Viking Press, Inc.: Biographical text based on "Rex Stout: A Biographical Note" by J.I.C., Copyright 1965 by The Viking Press, Inc.
No part of this book, including quotations from Rex Stout's books, may be
reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Foreword
"If I'm not having fun writing a book
no one's going to have any fun reading it."
Rex Stout
viii /
Foreword
Foreword
ix
x / "Foreword
are formidable antagonists in verbal battle; both often stoop
to irregular means to prove a point. Then, too, Nero's hobbies resemble Stout's. Nero is obsessed by orchids; Stout has
won blue ribbons at country fairs for his mammoth pumpkins
and strawberries. His garden abounds with fruit, vegetables,
and flowers (one year five thousand of his tulips were consumed by deer); his home contains three hundred plants, and
from the ceiling of his garage hang countless gourds.
"I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated
arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and
children," the author of the Nero Wolfe detective stories has
said, and added, "I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed
minds, movies and television, loud noises, and oiliness."
It is often asked why Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin do
not appear more often in motion pictures and have never, to
date, appeared on television. The answer is simply that Rex
Stout cherishes the characters he has created: he himself is
much too busy, or too disinclined, to write the screenplays
or the television scripts himself, and he will not allow anyone
else to "adapt" his work, much less to "write" new adventures
of Wolfe and Archie for the visual media. Add to this the fact
that he has not always been one hundred per cent enraptured
by those who have portrayed Wolfe and Archie in motion
pictures (Lionel Stander, a fine actor, was a flagrant bit of
miscasting as Archie Goodwin).
Rex Todhunter Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, on
the first day of December in the year 1886.1 He was one of
nine children. A child prodigy, he had read through the Bible
twice by the age of three and before he was ten had read some
twelve hundred other volumes of biography, history, fiction,
1
Much of what follows, indeed, much of what has gone before, has been
based, with permission, on "Rex Stout: A Biographical Note" by J.I.C., first
published in A Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout (New York: The Viking
Press, 1965).
Foreword
xi
xii /
Foreword
Foreword
xiii
century, Alice in Wonderland." A close second is T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (you will notice, in our
text, that Wolfe himself has read it three times).
When it comes to crime-mystery-detective fiction, Stout
thinks Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is "the best
detective story . . . written in this century." When it comes
to the spy thriller, he likes a couple of Graham Greene's. And
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold "and at least half a
dozen other spy stories are just about as good storytelling as
you'll find anywhere. But they aren't detective stories."
Stout considers the late Ian Fleming to have been a good
storyteller too, but he turned down Fleming's suggestion that
M, James Bond, Nero Wolfe, and Archie Goodwin should
all appear together in the same novel. "Bond would have
gotten all the girls," Stout admits ruefully.
Of course, as is well known, Stout has a boundless admiration for the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is a long-time
member of the Baker Street Irregulars, that curious but thoroughly delightful group of Holmes enthusiasts. He has been
toastmaster at most of their annual dinners for more years
than most members can remember, and he is the author of
the all-time high in Holmesian spoofery, a "slight monograph" called "Watson Was a Woman." In this he used an
acrostic, made up from the initial letters of eleven of the adventures, to spell out IRENE WATSON. (Irene Adler was always,
to Sherlock Holmes, the woman.) It was Stout's contention
that she became Mrs. Sherlock Holmes, also known as the entirely fictitious "John Hamish Watson, M.D." The following
year, at the annual dinner of the BSI, Dr. Julian Wolff, no
relation to Nero except in bulk, but the closest thing the BSI
has to a president, submitted his paper, "That Was No Lady,"
in which he too developed an acrostic, which read: NUTS TO
REX STOUT.
xiv /
Foreword
Not a Nero Wolfe but a Tecumseh Fox adventure. Others in this series:
The Broken Vase, Bad for Business. Stout is also the creator of Alphabet
Hicks (book of that name) and Dol Bonner (The Hand in the Glove), whom
we will meet also in these pages.
Foreword
xv
xvi
Foreword
Stonycroft
East Woods Road
Pound Ridge, New York
January 22, 1967
Contents
vii
FOREWORD
P A R T O N E : Cast of Characters
1. The Private Detective
2. The Man of Action
3. An Old Brownstone House on West Thirtyfifth Street
4. The Major Domo
5. The Oldest and Best Friend Wolfe Ever Had
6. The Man of Mystery
7. Homicide Squad
8. And the West Thirty-fifth Street Irregulars
PART TWO:
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
3
25
39
52
56
59
62
70
83
92
99
104
108
111
xvii
xviii
Contents
165
171
176
183
189
CHRONOLOGY
APOLOGIA
OF NERO WOLFE
AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
192
193
203
Part One:
Cast of
Characters
"Nero Wolfe is putting on a show and we're in the cast."
Archie Goodwin to Clara Fox, The Rubber Band
1
The Private Detective
"I am not a policeman. I am a private detective. I entrap
criminals, and find evidence to imprison or kill them, for hire."
Nero Wolfe to Jerome Berin, Too Many Cooks
1O
Gullery
Intrigante
Obreptitious
Plerophory
Puerile
Quibble (a particular pet)
Quixotic
Rodomontade
Springe
Subdolous
Twaddle
Usufructs
Witling
Still another of Wolfe's favorite words is "satisfactory";
when he is pleased with the way Archie has concluded an
assignment or Fritz Brenner, his chef and factotum, has
handled a difficult dish, this is almost his highest praise.
"Most satisfactory" is for Wolfe positively lavish.
Wolfe is also fond of saying to Archie in moments of stress,
"You badger me" or "You rile me," "You bully me" or "You
pester me" or "I will not be hounded" (but that is what
Archie is being paid for).
One of Wolfe's favorite sayings or proverbs is "Any spoke
will lead an ant to the hub," but he employs many others,
among them:
"The corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime has
rolled to."
"Frogs can't fly."
"We're combing a meadow for a mustard seed."
"The devil will have his horns on your pillow."
"We don't usually hang our linen on the line till it is
washed."
"We're fishing in a big stream."
"A hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating."
"One man's flower is another man's weed."
11
"A tiger's eyes can't make light, they can only reflect it."
"Once the fabric is woven it may be embellished at will."
"You can't pick plums in a desert."
Occasionally Wolfe curses; he justifies his use of bad language by calling it "a considered expression of a profound
desire." "Egad," he exclaims in milder moments. "Great
hounds and Cerberusl"rarely. "Bah," "Confound it"
more often.
By all odds, however, his favorite ejaculation is "Pfui!"
(closely followed by "Pah!"). But he does not overwork this
speech mannerism; he uses the exclamation first in Fer-deLance, his first recorded case, but once and only once in that
adventure.
In addition to his fluent English, Wolfe speaks seven
languages. One is excellent French (to Mme. Mondor in
Too Many Cooks, for one, and to Nathaniel Parker, his
lawyer, for security reasons, for another). "You talk French,"
Inspector Cramer states in Over My Dead Body. As early
as Fer-de-Lance, Wolfe cautions Archie, "To pronounce
French you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to
say scorn, for some of the most sacred Anglo-Saxon prejudices." (Archie has had three lessons in French, one from
Fritz Brenner, two from a girl he met once when he and
Wolfe were working on a forgery case.) Wolfe speaks Spanish
to the Perez couple in Too Many Clients. He also speaks
Serbo-Croat so well that he must have learned it young. He
recites poetry in Hungarian to Clara Fox in The Rubber
Band. He takes an overseas telephone call from Paolo Telesio
in Bari and speaks with him in Italian; later in The Black
Mountain he demonstrates his familiarity with Albanian.
Wolfe also indicates that he knows Latin well. "Archie,
stop gibbering," he says in "Immune to Murder." " 'Lumbago' denotes locality. From the Latin lumbus, meaning
'loin.' " "Vultus est index animi" he says in "Death of a
Demon." "That's a Latin proverb. 'The face is the index of
12
13
seldom does for a woman. His customary routine is to explain, if he feels like taking the trouble, that he keeps to his
chair because getting out of it and back in again is a more
serious undertaking for him than for most people. "I am
not rude, merely unwieldy," he excuses himself. Or: "The
engineering considerations keep me in my chair." He did
rise for Evelyn Hibbard of The League of Frightened Men
"an extraordinary concession," wrote Archieand he has
done so since, under similar provocations.
Wolfe and women is a subject that fascinates Archie Goodwin. "I had made a close and prolonged study of Wolfe's
attitude toward women," Archie wrote in The Silent Speaker.
"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. Another little detail: he is much more
sensitive to women's noses than he is to men's. I have never
been able to detect that extremes or unorthodoxies in men's
noses have any effect on him, but in women's they do. Above
all he doesn't like a pug, or in fact a pronounced incurve
anywhere along the bridge."
It now becomes germane to ask: Has Nero Wolfe ever been
married? (We may pass lightly over Archie's whimsy in The
Rubber Band: "Wolfe has three wives and nineteen children
in Turkey.")
Instead, for the first but not for the last time, let us consult
that profound student of Archie's writings, the late Bernard
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l6
17
The upkeep of Wolfe's home, with its larder, cellar, library, and orchid rooms, and the staff to maintain them,
takes money and lots of it, and Wolfe, who despises work,
will labor only to get it in large quantities. Despite the fee
offered him, however, he will seldom, almost never, leave
his home on business; to do so on any other occasion he still
regards as a foolhardy venture. "My disinclination to leave
my home has a ponderable basis," he says.
"Wolfe could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an
Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out,"
Archie noted on one occasion. And again: "I would be
prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid
of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands in a swimming-suit, after what I
had just gone through." Very seldomas when Wolfe was
training to kill Germans during World War IIhas Archie
known him to abandon his elevator and mount the stairs.
"I doubt if he's been outdoors since I left, two months
ago," Archie said of Wolfe in March 1942. When Archie once
suggested that he step out to the sidewalk in front of his own
house, Wolfe regarded even this as a "sortie." "Out?" he
asked incredulously. "Out and down the stoop?"
To Wolfe, a twenty-block ride in a taxi is a "frantic dash."
"I will not ride in a taxicab, I will not ride in anything, even
my own car with Mr. Goodwin driving, except to meet my
personal contingencies," he once said. But even with Archie
driving, Wolfe clams up and sits on the edge of his seat, gripping the strap, set to jump for his life.
We note that Wolfe will leave his home to meet his "personal contingencies." Once a year, for example, he attends
the Metropolitan Orchid Show. And he left his house in
September 1934 "for the privilege of dining at the same
table with Albert Einstein."
Certainly it is impossible to imagine Wolfe as a commuter,
part-time, much less full-time, to New York. "No publication
l8
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2O
the hall to the office, and Wolfe gets his bulk deposited in
his favorite chair, behind his desk, and either opens his current book or, if Archie has no date and is staying in, starts a
conversation. The topic may be anything from women's shoes
to the importance of the new moon in Babylonian astrology.
Wolfe never goes to bed early, whether or not he has a
case.
That is the Monday-through-Saturday schedule.
The Sunday schedule at Wolfe's house has varied somewhat over the years. At one time Marko Vukcic, Wolfe's
oldest and best friend, talked him into installing a billiard
table in the basement. It was still routine for Wolfe to spend
Sunday morning in the kitchen with Fritz, preparing something special. Then, at 1:30, Marko would arrive to appreciate it, after which they would go down to the basement
for a five-hour session with the cues. Archie rarely took part
in the play in those days, even when he was around; it made
Wolfe grumpy when Archie got lucky and piled up a big
run. To Wolfe, billiards were not play, they were exercise.
Theodore Horstmann sometimes has Sundays off and goes
to visit his married sister in New Jersey, but Wolfe often has
a regular session in the plant rooms on Sunday morning.
He always goes up once or twice during the day to look
around and do whatever chores the situation and the weather
may require. Later, down in the office, he settles down with
The Week in Review section of The New York Times,
which he goes right through.
Sunday evenings Wolfe and Archie snack in the kitchen
with Fritz; Sunday nights, Wolfe sometimes enjoys turning
off TV.
Wolfe allows only one outside interest to interfere with
his personal routine of comfort, not to mention luxury. That
is Rusterman's restaurant. When its founder, Marko Vukcic,
died, leaving the restaurant to members of the staff and
making Wolfe executor of his estate, he also left a letter ask-
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23
24
2
The Man of Action
"I do nothing without Mr. Goodwin. . . . He is inquisitive,
impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful."
Nero Wolfe, "Before I Die," "Blood Will Tell"
25
26
27
28
29
go
31
32
33
Archie says in A Right to Die, "I wouldn't be caught dead in a white shirt
except when an evening requires the uniform."
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35
36
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the years he has consistently entertained, and been entertained by, one lovely lady, and her name is Lily Rowan.
Lily's head comes close to Archie's chin or above, she is a
blonde but not at all a faded one, she has dark blue eyes, and
she dances better than anyone else Archie knows.
Lily is lazy, very. And Lily is rich, very.
Lily's mother was a waitress, and her father was an immigrant from Ireland who made eight million dollars building
sewers for the city of New York. He was also a Tammany
Hall district leader for thirty years; Lily votes for Democrats
only.
She and Archie met in 1938, just outside the fence of an
upstate pasture. The episode started with Archie in the pasture with a bull named Caesar, and the situation was such
that when he reached the fence considerations of form and
dignity were minor matters. Somehow he got over the fence,
rolled ten yards, and scrambled to his feet, and a girl in a
yellow shirt and slacks clapped her hands sarcastically and
drawled at him, "Beautiful, Escamillo! Do it again!"
Lily has been calling Archie "Escamillo" ever since.
"One thing had led to another. Several others," as Archie
put it. The "others" included a trip to Norway together, after
Wolfe and Archie had finished up the Best Families case.
In 1942 Lily was living at the Ritz, "where she had her
own tower," but now she has a penthouse on the roof of a
ten-story building on East Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park Avenues. The penthouse has a Kashan carpet,
19 feet by 34 feet, in a garden pattern in seven colors, on the
living-room floor (it set Lily back $14,000). On the walls hang
paintings by Renoir, Monet, and CzanneArchie knows
about art from Lilyand there are an off-white piano and
glass doors to the terrace, banked with flowers in the summer
and with evergreens in the winter months. Lily also owns a
summer place near Katonah and a ranch in Montana, which
she and Archie occasionally visit.
38
3
An Old Brownstone House
on West Thirty-fifth Street
"You're over here by the river in a corner of your own."
John P. Barrett to Nero Wolfe, Over My Dead Body
39
4O
An
Old Brownstone
House
. . .
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42
table, a sofa with six velvet cushions on it, a piano and bench,
and a checkerboard, used by Johnny Keems and Fred Durkin
in The Rubber Band. It has a fireplace and three doors: one
to the hall, another to the bathroom between the front room
and the office, a third to the office itself.
The office is twice as big as any other room on the ground
floor. It is actually the living room too, and since Wolfe
spends most of his time there you have to allow him his rule
regarding furniture and accessories: nothing enters it or stays
in it that he doesn't enjoy looking at.
The office has a high ceiling, and steps have to be used for
all the upper shelves and the files and cabinets above them.
One of the upper cabinets contains a Veblex camera and a
Tollens, with accessories; one of the lower, a five-week file of
The New York Times; another, an assortment of tools, everything from keys to jimmies and rubber gloves; still another
contains brushes and powders, a complete fingerprint outfit.
There are eight different lights in the office: one in the ceiling above a big bowl of banded Oriental alabaster, which is
on the wall switch; one on the wall behind Wolfe's chair; one
on his desk; one on Archie's desk; one flooding the big globe;
and three for the bookshelves. The one on Wolfe's desk is
strictly for business, like crossword puzzles. The one on the
wall behind him is for reading. He likes all the lights turned
on.
Wolfe sits at a cherry desk with his back to the south wall
of the office and two windows at his right, with yellow drapes.
His desk has three drawers on the left, four on the right, and
a wide, shallow middle drawer, in which he keeps an 18-carat
gold bottle-opener, the gift of a satisfied client many years
ago, and into which he puts his beer-bottle caps when he has
finished opening the bottles. (This is Wolfe's way of keeping
track of his beer consumption.) In another drawer is an old
oilstone, on which Wolfe sharpens his pencils.
On top of Wolfe's desk are: a desk blotter; his paper-
An
Old B r o w n s t o n e H o u s e . . .
43
weights, a block of petrified wood which a man named Duggan had used as a murder weapon, and a hunk of carved ebony
that had once been used by a man named Mortimer to crack
his wife's skull; a vase, which may contain Cymbidium or
Laeliocattleya; Wolfe's bookmark, a counterfeit ten-dollar
bill autographed in red ink by a former Secretary of the
Treasury in appreciation of services rendered; his letteropener, a knife with a horn handle that was thrown at him
in 1954, in the cellar of an old border fort in Albania, by a
man named Bua; a pen-block; pencils; a scratch pad and a
calendar; a telephone; his desk light; a gadget for turning on
or off the radio and the television; and a buzzer with which
to summon Fritz (two shorts or two shorts and a long for beer,
one long ring for other matters).
A dictionary, a Webster's Unabridged, leatherbound, is on
a stand at Wolfe's right. It is the second editionWolfe once
burned the third edition, page by page, in the front-room
fireplace. Wolfe has worn out three second editions of Webster's Unabridged and is now working on his fourth.
There are many chairs in the house that have been made
to order for width and depthone in Wolfe's bedroom, one
in the dining room, one in the plant roomsbut the chair
behind Wolfe's desk is the one that suits him best of all the
chairs in the world. It is enormous, of Brazilian Mauro upholstered in brown leather, and it was specially constructed
for Wolfe by Meyer. It is warranted safe for a quarter of a
ton.
Archie's deskeight feet from Wolfe'sstands under the
windows. Archie has a typewriter, of course, and his desk is
one of those so constructed that the typewriter remains out of
sight when not in use; then it slides out of its drawer and
rests at the proper height on its support. The desk also has a
leaf on which Archie takes his notes. In one drawer is the
arsenal; in another there is an assortment of calling cards,
nine or ten different kinds, worded differently for different
44
An
Old B r o w n s t o n e House
. . .
/ 45
46
An
Old Brownstone
House
. . .
47
48
An
Old B r o w n s t o n e H o u s e . . .
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varying conditions of temperature and humidity are maintained by the vigilance of Horstmann. There is one room for
Cattleya, Laelia, and hybrids; one for Odontoglossum, Oncidium, and Miltonia; a tropical room with graduating flasks
and lath screens. There is Horstmann's den, where he sleeps.
There is also a potting room with its telephone and Wolfe's
special stool, which is more like a throne than a stool. Here
Theodore keeps his parakeets. This room can be flooded
with ciphogene by a valve outside, to turn it into a fumigating room. Suppliespots, sand, sphagnum, leafmold, loam,
osmundine, charcoal, crockare kept in an unheated and
unglazed cubby alongside the shaft where the outside elevator comes up.
Wolfe has ten thousand plants in hundreds of varieties
in the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street.
Many are very rare; many have won prizes. He buys them
from collectors all over the worldit is just routine for
Wolfe to spend $800 for one plant from Burmaand others
are given to him by friends who are fellow orchid-fanciers.
His Zygopetalum, for example, came from the hundred-foot
North Cove, Long Island, greenhouses of Lewis Hewitt, capitalist, socialite, orchid-fancier, and aristologist, who dines
with Wolfe twice a year. Even Inspector Cramer once gave
Wolfe an orchid. Wolfe's collection includes the famous
"black" orchids, the color of molasses on coal, according
to Archie (the labellum is large, the sepals are lanceolate,
the throat is tinged with orange). Cuyler Ditson once offered
Wolfe enough for one of them to buy an anti-aircraft gun.
Wolfe has remarked to Archie that orchids are his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic, and temperamental.
He brings them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the
limits of their perfection, then gives them away; he has never
been known to sell one.
His patience and ingenuity, supported by Horstmann's
fidelity, have produced remarkable results and gained for
An
Old B r o w n s t o n e H o u s e . . .
51
4
The Major Domo
"There are a few great cooks, a sprinkling of good ones,
and a pestiferous host of bad ones. I have
in my home a good one. Mr. Fritz Brenner."
Nero Wolfe to Jerome Berin, Too Many Cooks
Fritz Brenner has been with Wolfe even longer than Archie
Goodwin, and he is more than a good cook; he is the major
domo of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth
Street.
Fritz gets up at 6:30 in the morning, and he never goes to
bed until Wolfe does, at midnight or later. He sometimes
answers the doorbell after 11:00 in the morning, when Archie
is in the office with Wolfe, except between 6:00 and 8:00 in
the evening, when he is busy fixing dinner. It would be fair
to say that (when Archie is not around) Fritz protects Wolfe,
acting as his buffer against the world, from anything and
everything, taking his telephone calls, and generally guarding
the mansion.
Fritz also keeps the old brownstone neat; he is responsible
for the condition of the castle, with the exception of the
plant rooms (Theodore's responsibility), the office (Archie
insists on taking care of this himself), and Archie's bedroom
(again, Archie's personal responsibility).
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5
The Oldest and Best
Friend Wolfe Ever Had
"I am not a turtle in aspic, like you."
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he was not fat, like Wolfe, but he was huge, "like a lion
upright on its hind legs." He had magnificent white teeth, a
rather swarthy complexion, and a dense tangle of dark brown
hair that kept tumbling into his eyes so that he constantly
had to comb it back with his fingers in moments of agitation.
Does this sound a little like someone we already know?
Indeed it does.
6
The Man of Mystery
"I told you to forget that man's name, and I mean it.
The reason is simply that I don't want to hear his name
because he is the only man on earth that I'm afraid of.
I'm not afraid he'll hurt me; I'm afraid of what he may
someday force me to do to keep from hurting him."
Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, The Second Confession
"I want to tell you about a man," Nero Wolfe said to the
Sperling family in The Second Confession. "I know his
name but prefer not to pronounce it, so shall call him X. I
assure you he is no figment; I only wish he were. I have little
concrete knowledge of the immense properties he owns,
though I do know that one of them is a high and commanding hill not a hundred miles from here on which, some years
ago, he built a large and luxurious mansion. He has varied
and extensive sources of income. All of them are illegal and
some of them are morally repulsive. Narcotics, smuggling,
industrial and commercial rackets, gambling, waterfront
blackguardism, professional larceny, blackmailing, political
malfeasancethat by no means exhausts his curriculum, but
it sufficiently indicates his character. He has, up to now,
triumphantly kept himself invulnerable by having the perspicacity to see that a criminal practicing on a large scale over
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a wide area and a long period of time can get impunity only
by maintaining a gap between his person and his crimes
which cannot be bridged; and by having unexcelled talent,
a remorseless purpose, and a will that cannot be dented or
deflected."
Despite interruptions, Wolfe continued. "If you think I
am describing an extraordinary man, I am indeed. How, for
instance, does he maintain the gap? There are two ways to
catch a criminal: one, connect him with the crime itself; or
two, prove that he knowingly took a share of the spoils.
Neither is feasible with X. Take for illustration a typical
crimeanything from a triviality like pocket picking or bag
snatching up to a major raid on the public treasury. The
criminal or gang of criminals nearly always takes full responsibility for the operation itself, but in facing the problem of disposal of the loot, which always appears, and of protection against discovery and prosecutions, which is seldom
entirely absent, he cannot avoid dealing with others. He
may need a fence, a lawyer, a witness for an alibi, a channel
to police or political influenceno matter what; he will
almost inevitably need someone or something. He goes to
one he knows, or knows about, one named A. A, finding a
little difficulty, consults B. We are already, observe, somewhat removed from the crime, and B now takes us still
further away by enlisting the help of C. C, having trouble
with a stubborn knot in the thread, communicates with D.
Here we near the terminal. D knows X and how to get to
him.
"In and around New York there are many thousands of
crimes each month, from mean little thefts to the highest
reaches of fraud and thuggery. In a majority of them the
difficulties of the criminals are met, or are not met, either
by the criminals themselves or by A or B or C. But a large
number of them get up to D, and if they reach D they go to
X. I don't know how many D's there are, but certainly not
61
many, for they are selected by X after a long and hard scrutiny and the application of severe tests, since he knows that a
D once accepted by him must be backed with a fierce loyalty
at almost any cost. I would guess that there are very few of
them and even so, I would also guess that if a D were impelled, no matter how, to resort to treachery, he would find
that that too had been foreseen and provision had been
made.
"You see where X is. Few criminals, or A's and B's and C's,
even know he exists. Those few do not know his name. If a
fraction of them have guessed his name, it remains a guess.
Estimates of the annual dollar volume involved in criminal
operations in the metropolitan area vary from three hundred
million to half a billion. X has been in this business more
than twenty years now, and the share that finds its way
tortuously to him must be considerable, after deducting his
payments to appointed and elected persons and their staffs.
A million a year? Half that? I don't know. Some years ago a
man not far from the top of the New York Police Department did many favors for X, but I doubt if he was ever paid
a cent. Blackmailing is one of X's favorite fields, and that
man was susceptible."
''Inspector Drake," Jimmy Sperling blurted.
Wolfe shook his head. "I am not giving names, and anyway I said not far from the top."
Wolfe's eyes went from right to left and back again. "I
am obliged for your forbearance," he said. "These details
are necessary."
We shall meet this man of mystery again.
7
Homicide Squad
" I respect and admire Mr. Cramer
and would like to help him."
Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, "Man Alive"
When Inspector L. T. Cramer,1 head of the Homicide Bureau, calls on Nero Wolfe, he is usually sore and sour. He
stalks into the old brownstone house, tosses his coat and hat
at Archie, marches down the hall to the office, plunks himself
into the red leather chair, plants his feet flat on the floor,
slams his fist on the desk, and lets Wolfe have it: Wolfe is
lying to him; Wolfe is interfering with the proper workings
of the New York Police Department in general and with
those of the Homicide Squad in particular; Wolfe is withholding evidence; Wolfe is deliberately obstructing justice.
Wolfe is not intimidated, only exasperated.
On other, rarer, occasions, Cramer is all sweetness and
light. That is when he would welcome any information
Wolfe or Archie may have to give him. He may even drink
a glass of beer with Wolfe, but only when he wants it understood that he's only human and should be treated accordingly. When Wolfe offers refreshment and does not specify
beer, Cramer chooses a bourbon and water. Once in a great
1
Cramer's initials are given as "L.T.C." in The Silent Speaker. We are never
told what the "L." and the "T." stand for.
6*
Homicide Squad /
63
64
Homicide Squad /
65
66
gray eyebrows; they can twinkle when things are going well
or narrow when things are not so good for him. He also has
delicate little ears that stay close to his skull, a blunt nose, and
a wide determined mouth.
Cramer can look frank and friendly, he can be as amiable
as a guy stopping you on a lonely hill because he is out of
gas, but he may or may not mean it. With Wolfe he can
sometimes be tactful and adroit; he can even drip honey
when he wants to get something out of him.
He can also bluster and yap in his grittiest rasp, but he
usually knows when to drop it. Like Wolfe, he is a frequent
grunter and an occasional puffer. He has strong principles,
which he steadfastly adheres to when they do not interfere
with his work: he will say "Bellywash!" or even "Balls!" to
Wolfe and Archie, but he has old-fashioned ideas about using
such language in front of ladies.
Cramer is a cigar-chewer; he has seldom been known to
light one, at least in Wolfe's office. He must consume a good
many of them every day. "When I get into such shape that
I don't want a cigar, I'm in a hell of a fix."
No matter how hot the day, Cramer is never seen in public
without his coat and vest; he wears an old felt hat winter and
summer, rain or shine; he requires number twelve shoes;
occasionally he carries a briefcase.
Cramer has a trick of squeezing his eyes shut and opening
them again; once in a while he pulls at the lobe of his ear;
he sometimes lifts a forefinger to rub the side of his nose in
perplexity; but he has few other characteristic gestures.
Cramer spends most of his time at an old well-scarred desk
in his medium-sized office with three windows on the third
floor of the dingy old building of the Tenth Precinct at 230
West Twentieth Street, which includes the headquarters of
Homicide West (now Homicide South), reading poetry and
drawing horses and letting the cops earn his salary for him
when he is not personally on a case. But he is married and
Homicide Squad /
67
68
Homicide Squad /
69
He is a little plump and a little short, bald in front and bigeared. He isn't impressive to look at, but he is businesslike
and self-assured without being cocky, and Wolfe and Archie
can stand him a lot better than they can most of the city
officials with whom they come in contact.
When a case takes Wolfe and Archie to Westchester
County, as one rather often does, they come to grips with
another set of officials.
Originally, in White Plains there was Wolfe's old enemy,
Fletcher M. Anderson. In 1928 Anderson was an Assistant
District Attorney in New York City, but he moved to the
country in 1929, when he married money. Then he was
District Attorney of Westchester County, "a rich man with
professional ambitions, and no fool," in Wolfe's opinion.
Anderson's professional ambitions presumably paid off, because he is no longer District Attorney. That position is now
held by plump Cleveland Archer. His laugh is more a giggle than a guffaw, which suits him just right, and he has good
reason to remember the Fashalt case.
Ben Cook is the Chief of Police in White Plains, and Ben
Dykes is the head of the Westchester County detectives, but
Archie's bte noire in that part of the world is the Rowcliff
of the North, Lieutenant Con Noonan of the New York State
Police"a stinker from the start," Archie wrote in "Door
to Death." Wolfe called Noonan "a typical uniformed blackguard." In Archie's view, Noonan would have been very
much at home in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy, and
he has the meanest smile of anyone Archie knows, except
maybe Boris Karloff.
Wolfe does not hold lightly the ability of the New York
Police Department to put an army of men, in plainclothes
and in uniform, Inspector Cramer at their head, into the
field when murder strikes Manhattan. Far away from West
Thirty-fifth Street, at Kanawha Spa in West Virginia, Wolfe
said, sighing, "Inspector Cramer's indefatigable routine does
have its advantages. . . ."
8
And the West Thirty-fifth
Street Irregulars
"Who do you think will be best for it,
Saul or Fred or Orrie or Bill?"
Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, "Christmas Party"
It's hard to tell what Saul Panzer looks like, because you can't
see his face for his nose, but we know that it is "a. wrinkled
little mug," constantly in need of a shave, with flat ears and
rust-colored hair that won't stay in place. Saul has little deepset gray eyes through which he can get an everlasting blueprint of anybody with one quick glance. He is short5 feet
7 inchesand slight140 poundsand one of his shoulders
is half an inch higher than the other. He has a voice that is
always a little husky and a smile as tender as he is tough; it
helps to make him the best poker player Archie Goodwin
knows.
Saul customarily wears an old gray or brown suit, and the
pants are never pressed. He never wears an overcoat, but he
sports an old brown cap. All in all, he looks like a character
on relief, whereas he owns at least two houses in Brooklyn.
He likes to smoke slick brown cigars and Egyptian cigarettes, Pharaohs, that smell like something they scatter on
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
As noted earlier, Dol has a case of her own in The Hand in the Glove,
chronicled by Rex Stout.
77
78
79
Part Two:
The Case-Book of
Nero Wolfe
"Look at the record."
Archie Goodwin to Phoebe Gunther, The Silent Speaker
9
Alias Nero Wolfe
"I would say, Mr. Stahl, that my temperament would incline
me to resent and resist any attempt by any individual to inquire
into my personal history or affairs."
Nero Wolfe, Over My Dead Body
84
85
86
87
ant boy when she boarded the Bari steamer, since the sackcloth
costume worn by the peasantry could conceal not only her identity but her condition. Holmes could not accompany her for
some reasonpresumably because he remained behind to draw
off the pursuit of the retainers of her outraged protector.
Nero Wolfe was born in [Trenton, New Jersey] . . . late in
1892 or early 1893, some six months after his mother left Montenegro. . . .
The thought intrudes itself here: Did Irene Adler have
twins?
We do know that there was another child, sooner or later,
because Wolfe had a nephew or a niece (in our view, a
nephew) living in Belgrade in 1936. " 'Did you know that I
am an uncle, Archie?' He knew perfectly well that I knew it,
since I typed the monthly letters to Belgrade for him" {The
Red Box).
It is very tempting to identify the second of Irene's children
with Wolfe's oldest and closest friend, Marko Vukcic, although Wolfe, when Vukcic was shot down in 1954, claimed
that "Mr. Vukcic has no close relatives, and none at all in
this country." But under Vukcic's will, Wolfe was made
executor and trustee ad interim of Rusterman's restaurant,
Vukcic's only substantial asset.
"There can be [no] doubt," Dr. Clark concludes, "as to the
source from which [Nero Wolfe] inherited his remarkable
talents." (The "Montenegrin blood," if Wolfe really did have
any, and we think that he did, must have come from his
mother's side of the family.)
We believe there exists considerable evidence that buttresses the Clark Hypothesis. This evidence we have attempted
to tabulate elsewhere,1 and we repeat it here, considerably
expanded.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe is a professional de1
In Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting
Detective (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1962).
88
89
go
91
call attention to a matter on which we earlier reserved information: the portrait which hangs in Wolfe's office under
the wall clock, over Archie's desk, where Wolfe can see it at
all times.
It is the portrait of a man whose very person and appearance are such as to strike the attention of the most casual
observer. In height he is rather over six feet, and so exceedingly lean that he seems to be considerably taller. His gray
eyes are sharp and piercing, and his thin, hawklike nose gives
his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His
chin, too, has the prominence and squareness which mark the
man of determination.
It is a portrait of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.
It is significant to note that Rex Stout will neither confirm nor deny that Nero Wolfe's father was Sherlock Holmes.
As the literary agent of Archie Goodwin [he wrote on June
14, 1935, in a letter to the editor of The Baker Street Journal],
I am of course privy to many details of Nero Wolfe's past
which to the general public . . . must remain moot for some
time. If and when it becomes permissible for me to disclose any
of those details, your distinguished journal would be a most
appropriate medium for the disclosure. The constraint on my
loyalty to my client makes it impossible for me to say any more
now.
With my best respects, sincerely,
Rex Stout
10
Nero Wolfe, Secret Agent
"I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I've
got it in hand. I thought it romantic, when I was a boy, twentyfive years ago, to be a secret agent of the Austrian government."
Nero Wolfe, Over My Dead Body
93
or was released from jail soon enough to join the SerbianMontenegrin army before the battles of October and November which destroyed them.
"How he escaped the debacle is doubtful," Dr. Clark
writes, "but it seems likely that he was with refugees and was
eventually evacuated to Corfu and then transferred to
Salonika."
Here is Wolfe's own account of this period in his life, as
given to the G-man Stahl: "I then believed that all misguided
or cruel people should be shot, and I shot some. I starved
to death in 1916 when the Austrians came and we fought
machine guns with fingernails. Logically, I was dead: a man
can't live on dry grass. Actually I went on breathing."
Why did Wolfe desert the service of Austria for Montenegro?
Dr. Clark thinks that the desertion "may have been the
result of an emotional shock . . . conceivably the result of
an insulting remark made by an irritated officer about his
Montenegrin origin. Or he may have been involved in one
of the many minority independence movements that harassed
the Empire."
And here is the DeVoto Hypothesis:
At some time between 1913 and 1916 Wolfe was involved in
an episode of so desperate a nature, or involving such important international secrets, that connecting him with it must be
forever impossible and his true identity must be forever concealed. Some danger of exposure still existed when Archie
Goodwin went to work for him [in 1930]. Whatever the danger
consisted of, it came to involve Archie as well as Wolfe. It continued for several years [after 1930] and then relapsed but
something revived it briefly just after the end of World War
II. On the assumption that there was such an episode, the record could be read in either of two ways:
A. The episode occurred in Egypt in 1913 or shortly afterward, in which case it was in the service of Austria. Or, and
this is more likely:
94
95
96
97
In 1938, when these facts came out, she was twenty years
old. She had fine legs, Archie noted, and her face was rather
sullen but well arranged, and her eyes with their long lashes
were dark and beautiful. She spoke in a nice soft low voice,
with an accent that reminded Archie of that used by Lynn
Fontanne in Idiot's Delight.
When she came to America in 1938 she worked at the
dance studios and fencing salon of Nikola Miltan on Fortyeighth Street; the great Corsini of Zagreb himself had passed
her with foils, epe, and saber. At the end of the case in
which she was involved (Over My Dead Body) Wolfe suggested that she call herself Carla Wolfe. It was then her intention to remain in the United States. True, she had only a
visitor's visa, but Wolfe's State Department connections
would have enabled him to get her admitted permanently.
She seems to have occupied the spacious South Room on
the third floor for a time, but certainly not for long. She got
a job with a Fifth Avenue travel agency, and within a year
she had married its owner, William F. Britton. She then
moved into an apartment at 984 Park Avenue (her telephone
number was POplar 3-3043).
No friction developed between Mr. and Mrs. William Britton and Nero Wolfe, because for friction you must have contact, and there was none. Twice a year, on her birthday and
on New Year's Day, Wolfe sent her a bushel of orchids from
his choicest plants, but that was all, except that he went to
the funeral when Britton died of a heart attack in 1950.
And now let us return to Irene Adler. It is clear that she
did not remain long with her parents in Trenton, New Jersey, having outworn her welcome as a repentant and widowed 1 daughter, but returned with her child or children to
Europe, either in order to resume her often-interrupted op1
Irene, before her liaison with Holmes in Montenegro, had been married to
Godfrey Norton, a London barrister; see "A Scandal in Bohemia" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
98
11
Portrait of Archie
as a Young Man
LILY ROWAN: " I S any of this straight?"
ARCHIE GOODWIN: "NO, it's
firecrackers."
1OO
ther was named James Arner Goodwin and was still alive,
and that he had two brothers and two sisters.
But this would require him to have begun working for
Wolfe at the age of sixteen, which is enough of an absurdity
in itself to discredit the entire report.
A remark of his own, in Some Buried Caesar, would seem
to indicate that Archie was born in 1910 or 1911.
In March 1947 (Too Many Women), however, he claimed
to be thirty-three, which would place his birthday in 1913
(if his birth month was indeed October).
Again, in Over My Dead Body (1938), Archie says, "I'll
count up to twenty-nine, one for each year of my life and one
to grow on and one to get married on"and this would seem
to register another vote for 1911 as the year of Archie's birth.
Our own view is that Archie was born in October of 1912
and that he went to work for Wolfe about eighteen years
later, in the autumn of 1930.
Once (in The Silent Speaker) Archie intimates that he was
born in Zanesville, and at another time that the place of his
birth was in or near Chillicothe (in The Final Deduction).
Archie early tells us that his father and mother both died
when he was "just a kid." Later he says, "I've got a mother
and three aunts." One was an Aunt Anna who made wonderful chicken pie.
In Some Buried Caesar he suggests that his father's name
was Titus Goodwinbut this is followed by his remark to
Lily Rowan about "firecrackers."
There are a few items about his high-school years: he lived
across the street from a character called Widow Rowley, and
his ambition then was to become a second baseman for a
major-league team. He was pretty good at football also, and
he graduated from high school "with honor but no honors."
Archie says in The Final Deduction that his mother was a
born female tyrant. "There wasn't a single goddam thing, big
or little, that I could decide on my own." So Archie, at the age
101
102
103
ble, but until the record is set straight once and for all, we
for one will go on believing that Nero Wolfe and Archie
Goodwin are uncle and nephew.
How sly, how in character, then, becomes Wolfe's remark
to Archie in The Red Box: "Did you know that I am an uncle, Archie?"
12
A Fer-de-Lance and
Some Frightened Men
"My God. You are my only hope.
I didn't realize it, but you are."
Andrew Hibbard to Nero Wolfe, The League of Frightened Men
105
107
This was followed by the highly dramatic, not to say fantastic, affair of The League of Frightened Men, Wolfe's second recorded case.
For Wolfe and Archie, the affair began on the afternoon of
Friday, November 2, 1934 (it came to its startling conclusion
on Monday, November 12), but actually it had begun in
1909, when Paul Chapin, the novelist, had been permanently
crippled as the result of "a boyish prank" played on him by
his Harvard classmates. The classmates formed a "League of
Atonement" to help Paul, and all seemed to be going as well
as possible under the circumstances until June 1934, when a
crowd of them assembled at Fillmore Collard's place near
Marblehead, Massachusetts. Judge Harrison had come East
from Indiana for the commencement exercises at his son's
graduation. They missed him that night, and the next morning they found his body at the foot of the cliff, beaten about
among the rocks by the surf. To tragedy was added terror:
soon thereafter each surviving member of the league had received a set of verses boasting of the judge's murder. These
verses could have been written by only one man: Paul
Chapin.
Then Eugene Dryer, the art dealer, was poisoned, and
Andrew Hibbard, the psychologist, disappeared. And in each
case there was another set of taunting verses. . . .
13
A Rubber Band, a Red Box,
Too Many Cooks, and a Buried Caesar
"I never knew a plaguier case. We have all the knowledge
we need and not a shred of presentable evidence."
Nero Wolfe, The Red Box
A Rubber
Band
. . .
/ 109
Then Molly Lauck was poisoned (hydrocyanic) on Monday, March 23, 1936, at the offices of Boyden McNair, Incorporated, on Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue. A week
later, on Monday, March 30, the theatrical producer Llewellyn Frost brought Wolfe into the case. It was one in which
Archie rather enjoyed himselfthe fashion models Boyden
McNair employed were all very attractive girlsbut Wolfe
was miserable. Circumstances forced him to visit the scene of
the crime, and none of the chairs at Boyden McNair fitted
him; what's more, he despised the brand of beer sold at the
nearest delicatessen. Perhaps because of his physical discomfort, Wolfe solved the case in close-to-record timeon Saturday, April 4.
It was in April 1937 that Wolfe was to be the guest of
honor at a dinner of the Fifteen Masters. The great chefs of
the world met every five years on the home grounds of the
oldest of their number, and that year their election of new
members to replace those who had died during the past five
years, held among a lot of cooking and eating and drinking,
was to be at Kanawha Spa in West Virginia. Each Master
Chef was allowed to bring one guest, and Wolfe was to be the
guest of Louis Servan, in charge of cuisine at Kanawha Spa
and oldestover seventyof the Fifteen Masters, an old
friend of Wolfe's, who called Servan "gentle, generous, sentimental, and an artistand also Latin." Wolfe could hardly
refuse the invitation, even if it meant a taxing overnight trip
by train, nor did he want to refuse it. He got Marko Vukcic,
also one of the Fifteen Masters, to invite Archie as his guest,
and the great expedition got under way.
But Wolfe would probably never have accepted Servan's
invitation if he had known in advance that he would have to
exercise his brain, blow money on long-distance telephone
calls and drinks for fourteen dark-skinned men, lose two
nights' sleep, and get shot in the cheekwith nothing to
HO
14
Bodies, Wills, Black Orchids,
and a Cordial Invitation
to Meet Death
"I have never known a more objectionable way
of committing murder, nor of an easier or simpler one."
Nero Wolfe, "Cordially Invited to Meet Death"
Two months after the return from Crowfieldin mid-November 1938Wolfe and Archie tidied up the ComptonGore case.
Then Wolfe refused nine cases in three weeks' timenot
counting that of the poor little immigrant girl with a friend
who liked diamonds. But then, he had recently raked in two
fat fees and the bank account was bloated. It would take a
great deal to get Nero Wolfe to go back to work, but the
"great deal" was forthcomingthe case Archie called Over
My Dead Body, which reunited Wolfe with his long-missing
adopted daughter, Anna.
Under another name, Anna was working as a dance and
fencing instructor at a Manhattan salon operated by an extraordinary couple named Miltan. When one of the students
there was run through the heart with a fencing foil, strangely
tipped, Wolfe dispatched Archie; he raced back to West
B o d i e s , Wills,
Black Orchids . . .
113
15
Wolfe and Archie Go to War
"I am going to kill some Germans. I didn't
kill enough of them in 1918."
Nero Wolfe, Not Quite Dead Enough
115
Il6
16
Help Wanted (Male), Something
Instead of Evidence, a Bullet
for One, a Silent Speaker,
Too Many Women, and a Man Alive
"It was merely a job," Wolfe murmured,
as if he knew what modesty was.
"Help Wanted, Male"
Il8
H e l p Wanted
(Male)
. . .
119
12O
Help
Wanted
(Male)
. . .
121
joyable in which he ever took part. Naylor-Kerr was a corporation where there was a strong preference for females who
were easy to look at, and its troubles involved Archie, as
"Peter Truett," in going to work there as a "personnel expert."
The case was notable in another way: Archie and Wolfe
suffered "the longest dry spell we have ever had on a murder
case."
In June of that same year, in the "Man Alive" case, Wolfe
outsmarted himself. Not far from the top of the list of things
he abhors is being a witness at a trial, and ordinarily he takes
good care to handle things so that he won't get a subpoena.
But Archie had the pleasure of sitting in the courtroom and
watching himand listening to himin the witness chair.
The District Attorney wasn't any too sure of his case, and
on this one Wolfe couldn't shake him loose. It was a good
thing for Cynthia Nieder that Wolfe didn't know what
would happen at the time he and Archie sent her a bill, or
she might have had to hock her half of the business to pay it.
Wolfe got sore about it all over again when the papers
informed him that the jury had stayed out only two hours
and forty minutes before bringing in a first-degree verdict.
That proved, he claimed, that his testimony hadn't been
needed.
The owners of Daumery and Nieder told Archie not only
that he would be welcome at any of their fashion shows,
front row seat, but that any number he wanted to pick
out would be sent with their compliments to any name and
address on his list.
17
Nero Wolfe versus Arnold Zeck
"I have told you that I know X's name,
but I have never seen him."
Nero Wolfe, The Second Concession
123
124
125
126
127
128
18
Backtrack: Omit Flowers,
a Door to Death, a Gun
with Wings, and a
Disguise for Murder
"That won't do. He's in jail, charged with murder.
Danger is breathing down the back of his neck
and he's nearly dead with fear."
Marko Vukcic to Nero Wolfe, "Omit Flowers"
130
Backtrack . . .
/ 131
19
Into the Fifties with
Murders by the Books
"I haven't the slightest notion who it is. But I am
prepared to make an attack that will expose himor herand if it doesn't, I'll have no opinion of
myself at all. Confound it, don't you know me well enough
to realize when I'm ready to strike?"
Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, "The Zero Clue"
The first half of January and February 1951 had been slow
for Wolfe and Archie, except for routine jobs where all they
had to do was superintend Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin
and Orrie Cather, and for a little mix-up with a gang of hijackers during which Archie and Fred got shot at.
Then a man named John R. Wellman phoned. His daughter Joan had been run over by a car in Van Cortlandt Park
seventeen days ago. Wolfe asked him for a retainer of $5000
to find out who did it.
At just about the same time Inspector Cramer came to
Wolfe with a little point about a homicide. Leonard Dykes,
forty-one, had been found banging up against a pile in the
East River off Ninetieth Street on New Year's Day. For
eight years he had been a clerk, not a member of the firm,
in the law offices of Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin, and Briggs.
132
133
Dykes had been unmarried, sober, trustworthy, and competent. No one discoverable had hated him or feared him or
wished him ill.
Who had killed Joan Wellman?
Who had killed Leonard Dykes?
And was there any connection between the two killings?
That was the affair Archie called Murder by the Book.
It was a crowded summer, that summer of 1951. Archie
had just deposited a check from a big client named Pendexter, for polishing off a complicated infringement case, when
a barber and his manicurist wife at the shop where Wolfe
and Archie got their hair trimmed precipitated them into a
case involving the killing of a cop.
The little affair of the Squirt and the Monkey involved
both Wolfe and Archie in the winter of 1951-1952. By the
following June, however, Wolfe's bank account was at its
lowest point in years, and he had still seen fit to turn down
four offers of jobs in a row.
Then Perry Helmar offered $5000 plus expenses if Wolfe
would find a certain young womandouble that if he produced her alive and well in New York by the morning of
June 30. The caseArchie called his account of it Prisoner's
Baseoffered several surprises: the wanted young woman
was already sleeping in Wolfe's South Room, and before too
long Archie Goodwin himself was Wolfe's client.
In this period also (1952-1953) we must place the case of
Archie's "Invitation to Murder," which opened when Mr.
Herman Lewent of New York, Paris, Toulouse, and Rome
called on Wolfe one Friday to offer him $1000 in cash. A
few months before, Mr. Lewent explained, he had had three
mistresses, and one of them had tried to poison him (Archie
didn't believe he had it in himthe three mistresses, that
is, not the poison).
But that wasn't what was bugging Mr. Lewent. What was
134
bugging him was that his sister Beryl had inherited all their
father's money, and she was supposed to take care of him,
and then she had gone and married Theodore Huck, and
then she had gone and died and left all her money to her
husband.
What Lewent wanted to know was simply this: Which of
three women, Huck's housekeeper, his nurse, or his so-called
secretary, was hooking Huck?
The situation in "This Won't Kill You" was complex and
will have to be explained in some detail.
It was a mess even before that World Series game between
the New York Giants and the Boston Red Sox started. Pierre
Mondor, owner of the famous Mondor's Restaurant in Paris,
was visiting New York and was a house guest at the old
brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street. He got the notion,
God knows how or why, that Wolfe had to take him to a
baseball game, and Wolfe's conception of the obligations of a
host wouldn't let him use his power of veto. Tickets were no
problem, since Emil Chisholm, oil millionaire and part
owner of the Giants, considered himself deeply in Wolfe's
debt on account of a case Wolfe and Archie had handled for
him a few years back.
So that October afternoon, a Wednesday, Archie got the
pair of them, the noted private detective and the noted chef,
up to the Polo Grounds in a taxi, steered them through the
mob into the entrance, along the concrete ramps, and down
the aisle to their box. It wasn't long after the game started
that Wolfe and Archie were called to the clubhouse (an
enthusiastic baseball-Wolfe fan shouted, "Go get 'em, Nero!
Sick 'em!" as they left). There Archie opened the door to a
closet and found Nick Ferrone, in uniform, on the floor with
a baseball bat alongside of him and his head smashed in.
The next caller was young Pete Drossos, one of the neighborhood boys. Pete was a client, he said: a woman with a
135
20
The Black Mountain
and Beyond
Maybe I shouldn't have tried to tell
it at all, but I hated to skip it.
Archie Goodwin, The Black Mountain
Nero Wolfe knew that his oldest and best friend, Marko
Vukcic, was deeply interested and deeply involved in an
underground Montenegrin nationalist movement, the Spirit
of the Black Mountain. He knew, too, that Carla Britton,
his adopted, now widowed daughter, shared Marko's interest and involvement. But that was their business.
Wolfe had his own affairs to attend tountil Marko was
shot down by an unknown hand and word came from Paolo
Telesio in Bari that the murderer had returned to Montenegro. More, Carla had followed him there, and somewhere
in that wild and mountainous country she too had been
killed, murdered.
Doubly motivated, Nero Wolfe moved. ("It's quite a
shock to see a statue turn into a dynamo without warning,"
Archie complained.) Saul was signed up to hold down the
office and sleep in the South Room; Nathaniel Parker was
empowered to cash checks; Fritz was given authority to take
charge at Rusterman's; Theodore was given bales of instruc136
137
I38
two pairs of knees to the aisle, and headed for the rear of the
courtroom. Wolfe was off to solve the murder and get the
agony over with.
Later that yearor perhaps it was early in the spring of
1955came the "Die like a Dog" case, in which a big black
Labrador retriever named Bootsy led Wolfe and Archie on
the blood-spattered trail of an artist's missing model.
Then came the extraordinary case Archie called, with good
139
night April 4. It came out a quintuple tie. Five people correctly identified the five new women, and Dahlman telephoned them and arranged for them to come to New York.
They would land the first three prizes, the big three, and
also two of the $10,000 prizes. They came, and Dahlman
had them to dinner in a private room of the Churchill. Talbott Heery of Heery Products was there, and so were Vernon
Assa and Patrick O'Garro of LBA. Dahlman was going to
give them five more verses, with a week to solve them, but a
woman who lived in Los Angeles objected that she wanted
to work at home and would have to take part of the week
getting there, so it was arranged to stagger the deadlines for
the postmarks according to how long it would take each one
to get home. The meeting ended shortly before 11:00, and
the contestants left and separated. Four of them, from out
of town, had rooms at the Churchill. One, who lived in
New York, presumably went home.
Dahlman also presumably went home (he was a bachelor
and lived alone in an apartment on Perry Street). A woman
came at 7:00 in the morning to get his breakfast, and when
she got there he was on the floor of the living room, dead,
shot through the heart, from the back, by someone who had
used a cushion from a divan to muffle the sound.
No one knew the answers in that contest but Louis Dahlman. He had written all the verses himself, and he himself
had checked the answers of the seventy-two who were in the
first tie. With the third group, the five in the second tie, he
guarded the verses themselves almost as strictly as he guarded
the answers. There was supposed to be only one copy of
those answers in existence, which Dahlman carried in his
wallet. When Dahlman's body was found he was fully dressed
and everything was in his pockets. Everything except one
thinghis wallet.
"Lippert, Buff, and Assa want you to find out which one
of those five people took it," Rudolph Hansen, the attorneyat-law, told Nero Wolfe, "and before midnight April 20. . . ."
21
A Window for Death,
Immune to Murder,
and Too Many Detectives
"The setup is marvelous and very democratic. You're just
here as a cook, and look at this room you've got.
Not a hardship in sight. Private bath. Mine is
somewhat smaller, but I'm only the cook's assistant.
I suppose I might call it culinary attach."
Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe, "Immune to Murder"
A Window
for Death
. . .
/ 141
Wolfe was plenty annoyed, when a phone call came from the
State Department. A new ambassador from a foreign country
with which the United States wanted to make a deal had
been asked if he had any special personal desires, and he had
said yes, he wanted to catch an American brook trout, and,
what was more, he wanted it cooked fresh from the brook by
Nero Wolfe. Would Wolfe be willing to oblige? Arrangements had been made for the ambassador and a small party
to spend a week at River Bend, the sixteen-room mountain
lodge belonging to O. V. Bragan, the oil tycoon, with three
miles of private trout water on the Crooked River. If a week
was too much for Wolfe, two days would do, or even one, or
in a pinch just long enough to cook some trout.
Wolfe asked Archie what he thought. Archie said they had
to stay on the Lamb and McCullough job. Wolfe said his
country wanted that ambassador softened up and he must
answer his country's call to duty. Archie said nuts: if Wolfe
wanted to cook for his country he could enlist in the army
and work his way up to mess sergeant, but he would admit
that the Lamb and McCullough thing was probably too
tough for Wolfe. Days passed. It got tougher. The outcome
was that they left the old brownstone house at 11:14 one
morning and drove 328 miles in a little under seven hours,
and there they were at River Bend.
The next day the trout were striking, and so was a
murderer.
Wolfe made another pilgrimage from West Thirty-fifth
Street in his next recorded case, the "Too Many Detectives"
affair.
It was shortly after New Year's Day, 1956, when the wiretapping scandals had called attention to various detectives,
to wit, that there were 590 of them licensed by the Secretary
of the State of New York; that 482 of the 590 were in New
York City; that applicants for licenses took no written exami-
142
nation and no formal inquiry was made into their backgrounds; that the State Department had no idea how many
operatives were employed by the licensed detectives, since
the employees weren't licensed at all; and a lot of so on and
so forth.
So the Secretary of State decided to inquire, and all of the
590 were summoned to appear for questioning. Wolfe and
Archie both had licenses, of course, and were therefore summoned, and that was a nuisance to Nero Wolfe. But since
the investigation was being shared by the other 588 he might
have kept his reactions down to growls and grumbles if it
hadn't been for two things: first, the inquiry was being held
partly in New York and partly in Albany, and he and Archie
had been summoned to Albany, and his request for a change
had been ignored; and second, the only wiretapping operation he had ever had a hand in had added nothing to his
glory and damn little to his bank account, and he didn't want
to be reminded of it.
That operation had begun on April 5, 1955, when a man
called on Wolfe at his office and gave his name as Otis Ross
and said he wanted to have his home telephone tapped. Wolfe
told him he never dealt with marital difficulties. Ross said
that his difficulty wasn't marital, that he was a widower, that
he had diversified business and financial interests and handled
them from his home, that he was away frequently for a day
or two at a time, that he wanted to find out whether his
suspicions of his secretary were warranted, and to that end
he wanted his phone tapped.
Wolfe and Archie accepted the assignmentand Wolfe, by
his own admission, was "utterly flummoxed." The man who
called himself "Otis Ross" was neither the real Otis Ross nor
Otis Ross's secretary. In fact, Wolfe didn't find out who he
really was until he was ordered to Albany, and "Otis Ross"
got himself strangled with his own necktie. It was the first
time Nero Wolfe had ever been jailed in the United States.
That was how the case Archie called Might as Well Be Dead
startedjust an innocent search for a missing person. Wolfe
and Archie found him all right, in the death cell of a city
prison, accused of murder. P.H. suspected his girl. She suspected him. He wouldn't even give his real name. Everybody
was protecting someone, but, unwittingly, all of them were
protecting the real murderer, who was walking the streets,
ready to kill again.
Archie called it "the screwiest case I'd ever worked on.
Surprise is not an expression I expect from Nero Wolfe, but
this time you could have knocked him over with a baby
orchid."
The following July Nero Wolfe went on a picnic, unlikely
as that may seem.
143
144
145
146
23
Eeny Meeny Murder Mo
We know that one of three men had committed
murder, and how and when. Okay, which one?
Archie Goodwin, "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo"
148
149
15O
24
The Many Clients of 1960
"Some day you're going to fall off and get hurt,
and this could be it. If and when you find it gets too
hot to hang onto any longer, and you turn loose, and you have
obstructed justice by not telling me now, I'll get your hide.
Nothing and no one will stop me."
Inspector Cramer to Nero Wolfe, "Death of a Demon"
153
54
and she was attractive and she had a story to tell that was both
a lulu and a loony.
To win a bet she had borrowed a taxicab from a friend
who was one of the ninety-three women drivers then operating in New York City. And she had simply no idea how that
dead woman had gotten into the back of the cab.
Archie took the case, for a retainer of $50.
"Give me half that fifty," Wolfe snapped.
Archie raised a brow. "For what?"
"To pay me. You have helped me with many problems;
surely I can help you with one. I have never tried to do a
job without your help; why should you try to do one without
mine?"
Archie Goodwin wanted to grin, but Wolfe might have
misunderstood him.
Three days a weekMondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
around noon, when Pete Vassos had finished his rounds in
an office building on Eighth Avenue, he used to trudge up the
seven steps to the stoop of the old brownstone house on West
Thirty-fifth Street to give Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe
a shoeshine.
But that Monday morning in December 1960, when he
showed up an hour early, Pete didn't give Archie the usual
polite grin.
"Today you must excuse me," Pete said. "Why I came
early, something happened. I go in a man's room, Mr. Ashby,
a good customer, two bits every day. Room empty, nobody
there."
Mr. Ashby, it seemed, had hurled himself out of his office
window and landed on the pavement, ten stories down.
Then Cramer got rough with Pete's daughter, Elma, and
Wolfe sued everybody in sight with the help of Nathaniel
Parker, and established Elma in the South Room, and proceeded to solve another tangled case.
Gambits
"Is there anything you can't do? Aren't you a genius?
How did you get your reputation?"
Althea Vail to Nero Wolfe, The Final Deduction
She said her name was Hattie Annis, that she wanted to see
Nero Wolfe, and that she didn't have an appointment. She
certainly didn't look as if she could pay Wolfe anything, but
she claimed there would be a reward and that she'd split it
with him.
Archie wouldn't let her in until a quarter to elevenhe
was on his way to the bank and Wolfe was up in the plant
rooms for his two-hour morning session with the orchids
but he accepted the package she pushed at him.
There had been nothing doing for more than a week, since
Wolfe and Archie cleaned up the Brigham forgery case for
a fee of $7417.65, and then came the call from Hattie Annis,
the woman with the button off her coat.
When Archie got back from the bank, the second visitor
of the morning was waiting on the stoop. This one he let in;
unlike Miss Annis, she was exactly the kind of female Wolfe
expects to see when Archie takes one in to see him. Her name
was Tamiris (Tammy) Baxter, and she was an actress, or
wanted to be. And it turned out that Hattie Annis was her
155
I56
MR.
KNAPP
The woman whose property is now in your possession has engaged my services. She is now in my office. She has not told me
what you said to her on the phone Monday afternoon, and she
will not tell me. I know nothing of the instructions you gave
her, and I do not expect or care to know. She has hired me for
a specific job, to make sure that her property is returned to her
in good condition, and that is the purpose of this notice.
For she has hired me for another job should it become necessary. If her property is not returned to her, or if it is damaged
beyond repair, I have engaged to devote my time, energy, and
talent, for as long as it may be required, to ensure just and fitting requital; and she has determined to support me to the full
extent of her resources. If you do not know enough of me to be
aware of the significance of this engagement to your future, I
advise you to inform yourself regarding my competence and
my tenacity.
NERO WOLFE
Gambits /
157
And just about the same time the New York State Police
found a dead body, a woman, run over by her own car. She
was Althea Vail's secretary, Dinah Utley.
Wolfe netted $99,925 for solving the Vail case, after paying Archie's bail. Having reached that bracket by the first of
May, he relaxed and stayed relaxed. "If you offered him ten
thousand bucks to detect who swiped your hat at a cocktail
party yesterday he wouldn't even bother to glare at you,"
Archie complained.
Indeed, for all that Archie tells us of Wolfe's activities in
that summer of 1961, he seems to have stayed relaxed until
the corn-on-the-cob season.
By an arrangement with a farmer named Duncan McLeod
up in Putnam County, every Tuesday from late July to midOctober sixteen ears of just-picked corneight for Wolfe,
four for Archie, four for Fritzwere delivered at the old
brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street to be roasted
in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes,
shucked at the table, buttered, and salted.
But that Tuesday in October no corn arrived.
McLeod supplied corn to Rusterman's restaurant too. And
that day at a quarter past five the dead body of Kenneth
Faber, the young man who did the delivering, was found in
the alley back of the restaurant. He had been hit on the back
of the head with a piece of iron pipe.
Wolfe was at the front-room fireplace, burning his copy of
the third edition of Webster's New International Dictionary
in his opinion a "subversive and intolerably offensive"
bookand he was in no mood to listen to a woman.
But Sally Blount was in his office, and her father, Matthew
Blount, president of the Blount Textile Corporation, was in
prison, charged with the murder of Paul Jerin.
Two weeks before, on Tuesday evening, January 30, 1962,
Jerin had died after an exhibition at the Gambit, a chess
158
Was Richard Valdon the baby's father? And if so, who was
the baby's mother? She could have been any one of 148 women; Richard Valdon had really gotten around. And the one
person who knew for sure was dead.
Still, Nero Wolfe had a bizarre clue: four buttons from
the baby's Cherub-brand overalls, surely not mass-produced.
Were they homemade of white horsehair, perhaps? And by
whom?
It was addressed to Archiean elegant outsize creamcolored envelope with the return address engraved in dark
brown:
Gambits /
159
26
A Doorbell Rings, and a Doxy Dies
"I want you to do something that perhaps
no other man alive could do."
Rachel Bruner to Nero Wolfe, The Doorbell Rang
Part Three:
From the Files of
Archie Goodwin
"God knows you're full of material."
Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe, The Rubber Band
27
The Philosophy of
Nero Wolfe
"I am a philosopher."
Nero Wolfe, numerous occasions
On Competence:
"Competence is so rare that it is a temptation to cling to
it when we find it."
On Courtesy:
"Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life."
165
l66
On Culture:
"Culture is like money; it comes easiest to those who need
it least."
On Debts:
"All debts are preposterous. They are the envious past
clutching with its dead fingers at the throat of the present."
On Dignity:
"To assert dignity is to lose it."
"There is nothing in the world as indestructible as human
dignity."
On Elimination in Art:
"One of the deepest secrets of excellence is a discriminating elimination."
On Emotions and Desserts:
"I favor the Anglo-Saxon theory of the treatment of both:
freeze them and hide them in your belly."
On Employees:
"Anyone can be faithful to an employer; millions are,
daily, constantly; it is one of the dullest and most vulgar of
loyalties."
On Friendship:
"It is said that two sure ways to lose a friend are to lend
him money and to question the purity of a woman's gesture
to him."
On Freedom:
"Only men who are willing to die for it have any chance of
living for it."
167
On Gallantry:
"Gallantry is not always a lackey for lust."
On Hospitality:
"To me the relationship of host and guest is sacred. The
guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality. The
host is kingand should not condescend to a lesser role."
On Humanity:
"Few of us have enough wisdom for justice, or enough
leisure for humanity."
"By all means cling to any battered shreds of it that are
left to you; there are many of us in that respect quite unclothed."
On Impetuosity:
"Impetuosity is a virtue only when delay is dangerous."
On the Income Tax:
"A man condemning the income tax because of the annoyance it gives him or the expense it puts him to is merely a
dog baring its teeth, and he forfeits the privileges of civilized
discourse. But it is permissible to criticize it on other and
impersonal grounds. A government, like an individual, spends
money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to,
because it wants to, or simply because it has it to spend. The
last is much the shabbiest. It is arguable, if not manifest, that
a substantial portion of the great spring flood of billions
pouring into the Treasury will in effect get spent for that
last shabby reason."
On Inertia:
"It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia. It is the greatest force in the world."
l68
On Innocence:
"Innocence is negative and can never be established; you
can only establish guilt."
On the Law and Lawyers:
"The law is an envious monster. It can't tolerate a decent
and swift conclusion to a skirmish between an individual and
what it calls society, as long as it has it in its power to turn it
into a ghastly and prolonged struggle; the victim must struggle like a worm in its fingers, not for ten minutes, but for ten
months. I don't like the law. It was not I, but a great philosopher created by a novelist, who said the law is an ass."
"Bad blood is for lawyers what a bad tooth is for a dentist."
"Very few people like lawyers. I don't. They are inveterate
hedgers. They think everything has two sides, which is nonsense. They are insufferable word-stretchers."
On Learning:
"Only the man who knows too little knows too much."
On Life:
"There is no moment in any man's life too empty to be
dramatized."
"All life is a mad and futile ferment of substances meant
originally to occupy space without disturbing it. But alas,
here we are in the thick of the disturbance, and the only way
that has occurred to us to make it tolerable is to join in and
raise all the hell our ingenuity may suggest."
On Lightning:
"We cannot protect from lightning, we can only observe it
strike."
On Luck:
"We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits."
169
On Lying:
"No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to
recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes,
and knows how to renounce it gracefully."
On Millionaires:
"Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which
millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth."
On Nonsense:
"A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but
not from the arena of his impulses."
On the Obvious and the Subtle:
"Nothing is obvious in itself. Obviousness is subjective.
Three pursuers learn that a fugitive boarded a train for Philadelphia. To the first pursuer it's obvious that the fugitive
has gone to Philadelphia. To the second pursuer it's obvious
that he left the train at Newark and has gone somewhere else.
To the third pursuer, who knows how clever the fugitive is,
it's obvious that he didn't leave the train at Newark, because
that would be too obvious, but stayed on it and went to
Philadelphia. Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending
spiral and never quite catches it."
On Offending:
"Anyone has the pleasure of offending who is willing to
bear the odium."
On Poverty:
"To be broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe."
On Requests:
"The least offensive way of refusing a request is not to let
it be made."
17O
On Resentment:
"Personal resentment of a general statement is a barbarous
remnant of fetish-superstition."
On Sainthood:
"The essence of sainthood is expiation."
On Secrets:
"The only safe secrets are those you have yourself forgotten."
On Skepticism:
"Skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take
the leash off."
On Snobbery:
"When a man of a certain type is forced into drastic financial retrenchment, he first deserts his family, then goes naked,
and then gives up his club."
On Style:
"It is easier to recognize a style from a sentence than from
a single word."
On the Subconscious:
"The subconscious is not a grave; it is a cistern."
On Wills:
"Wills are noxious things. It is astonishing, the amount
of mischief a man's choler may do long after the brain-cells
which nourished that choler have rotted away."
28
The Library of Nero Wolfe
"Okay, so you've read ten thousand books."
Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe, Before Midnight
172
John Harington's Alicia; years ago, he said on another occasion, he had read Narboisin, but didn't keep his books. Some
will deplore his violent distaste for Browning.
"Which Wolfe loves most, food or words, is a tossup,"
Archie Goodwin told Sally Blount in Gambit. "I read a lot of
books," Wolfe himself remarked to Inspector Cramer in
Over My Dead Bodyand he does.
While Wolfe is not a fast reader, he is a consistent reader,
often reading three books at a time, taking turns with them,
reading twenty or thirty pages in each at a time. This always
annoys Archie because it seems to him ostentatious.
Given a book, Wolfe always rubs the cover caressingly with
his palm. He doesn't seem to mind marking a line or a paragraph, however, and he will even dog-ear the pages of books
he doesn't intend to keep. If they are to be retained on his
shelves, however, he holds his place with the thin gold bookmark given to him by a grateful client.
The bookshelves in Wolfe's office contain twelve hundred
or so books which he thinks highly enough of to keep. Five
versions of the Bible in four different languages stand on the
second shelf from the top near the left end. All twenty-four
volumes of the Britannica have a place on Wolfe's shelves,
and he frequently takes out a volume and reads an article at
random. He owns a superb set of Shakespeare. His copy of
Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar is dark blue, tooled,
bound "in this city by a Swedish boy who will probably
starve to death during the coming winter." "I have met Franz
Boas," Wolfe says in Too Many Cooks, "and have his books
autographed." There are bound copies of Lindenia. Wolfe has
a whole shelf of books on toxicology and at least one book on
prison reform. Here too is Henderson's United Yugoslavia.
Wolfe buys his books from Murger's, which supplied Paul
Chapin's novels in The League of Frightened Men and copies of Metropolitan Biographies"all years available"in
The Red Box.
173
174
175
29
Wining and Dining
with Nero Wolfe
"Of course I knew you made a living of detective work,
everybody knows that, but to me your glory is your
great contributions to cuisineyour sauce printemps,
your oyster pie, your artichauts drigants."
Paul Rago to Nero Wolfe, "Fourth of July Picnic"
Although Mr. Nero Wolfe keeps a full cellar for his guests
and his clients, he himself drinks only beer and wine.
"There is available," he once said, "a fair port, Solera,
Dublin stout, Madeira, and more especially a Hungarian vin
du pays which comes to me from the cellar of the vineyard."
He once served with lunch a '28 Marcobrunner; another
time, it was a Chteau Latour '29 ("It would soothe a tiger").
For women he recommends a Pasti Grey Riesling, although
he personally does not care for it.
Wolfe hates to have anybody, even a policeman, even a
woman, ask for something in his house that he hasn't got. In
Before Midnight, for example, he served to his guests and
clients: eight brands of whisky, two of gin, two of Cognac, a
decanter of port, cream sherry, Armagnac, and four fruit
brandies; plus a wide assortment of cordials and liqueurs.
176
177
178
and he counts them from time to time, making blistering remarks if there are too many.
Wolfe occasionally enjoys il pesto with his beer; his favorite recipe is Canestrato cheese mixed with anchovies, pig
liver, black walnuts, chives, sweet basil, garlic, and olive oil.
"The occasions have been rare when I have known the
pressure of business to cause Wolfe to accelerate the tempo
of a meal," Archie says. As for skipping a meal, "In the midst
of the most difficult and chaotic problems, I never missed a
meal," Wolfe himself told Lew Bennett in Some Buried Caesar. "A stomach too long empty," he added, "thins the blood
and disconcerts the brain."
Only two kinds of guests ever dine at Wolfe's table: (a)
men for whom Wolfe has personal feelingsthere are eight
altogether, and only two of them live in or near New York1
and (b) people who are involved in his current problem.
With both kinds he makes a point of steering the table talk
to subjects that he thinks the guests will be interested in.
These may be rock gardens or Tammany Hall, folk dances
or Egyptian tiles, dogs or Yugoslav politics, refrigerators or
Republicans, the Dead Sea Scrolls or the mechanism of
money, cosmetics or the game of polo, the use of a camel's
double lip or the theory that England's colonizing genius was
due to her repulsive climate.
The one topic Wolfe will not discuss at table is business,
his own or his client's; that is an inflexible rule.
When there is company Archie sometimes serves, but more
often there are just Wolfe and Archie, and then Fritz serves
and Wolfe and Archie help themselves from the serving
dishes.
There is very little in the way of food, properly prepared,
that Wolfe does not care for. "Unquestionably, Nero Wolfe
has to eat," Archie once said.
1
"The editor of the Gazette dines with me once a month," Wolfe said in
Where There's a Will.
179
Dumplings are one of the few dishes with which Archie can stay neck and
neck with Wolfe clear to the tape. Fritz makes them of chopped beef marrow
with breadcrumbs, parsley or chives, grated lemon rind, salt, and eggs; he
boils them four minutes in strong meat stock.
l8o
181
BAKED
PAN-BROILED
RICE
LIMA
CROQUETTES
BEANS
IN
PINEAPPLE
THE
SHELL
BEATEN
YOUNG
WITH
JELLY
SALLY
LUNN
TODHUNTER
SHERBET
DAIRY
BISCUITS
TURKEY
QUINCE
CREAM
AVOCADO
WISCONSIN
IN
MARYLAND
CHEESE
SPONGE
BLACK
CAKE
COFFEE
30
A Wolfean Guide to
the Orchidaceae
That day, in the cool room, long panicles of Ondontoglossums,
yellow, rose, white with spots, crowded the aisle on both sides;
in the tropical room, Miltonia hybrids and Phalaenopsis
splashed pinks and greens and browns clear to the glass
above; and in the intermediate room the Cattleyas were
grandstanding all over the place as always.
Archie Goodwin, Champagne for One
184
showy. The genus extends from Jamaica and Mexico to Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. Most species have cylindrical, stemlike pseudobulbs topped by solitary, also cylindrical, fleshy
leaf. These easy-to-grow orchids should form an integral part
of every collection.
Brassocattleya
A cross between Brassavola (above) and Cattleya (below).
These fine, spectacular forms are known horticulturally as
Brassocattleya but scientifically as Rhyncholaelia (rin-koelye-\ee-ah), commonly as Brassavola, in which genus they
were formerly included. In the wild, they usually inhabit
smallish trees in relatively dry regions in Mexico and Central
America. There are two known species, both of which have
been used to a tremendous extent in the production of hybrids.
Cattleya (kat-lee-yah):
To the public, Cattleyas are certainly the best known of
all orchidaceous plants, and, with their innumerable allied
genera and hybrid groups, are the ones most frequently encountered in collections. About sixty-five species comprise
the genus, which is distributed from Mexico to Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, with centers of development in the
Andes and Brazil. The flowers are among the most magnificent of any found in the family, and are so well known that
a description is superfluous here. They vary considerably in
coloroften within a single species or variantbut generally bear a tubular lip and spreading enlarged sepals and
petals, thus forming a blossom of startling beauty and often
huge dimensions.
Coelogyne (seh-/aw-ji-nee):
This is a genus of upward of 150 species, widespread in the
Asiatic tropics from China to New Guinea and the Fiji Is-
185
l86
187
Oncidium (on-sid-ee-um):
This genus contains an estimated 750 different kinds of
orchids, which are widespread in the Americas from south
Florida and Mexico to Argentina. A large number of these
plants are present in collections today, and are among the
most highly prized and showy orchids. Their flowersgenerally yellow and brown in colorare relatively similar in superficial appearance. The form and tremendous quantities of
these blossoms have earned the common names of "Dancing
Ladies" and "Golden Showers" for this genus.
Odontoglossum (oh-don-toe-g/o55-um) :
This is an extremely diversified genus of upwards of three
hundred species, extending from Mexico to Bolivia and Brazil, with the majority of the known entities in the high Andean regions of South America. These are justly popular
orchids. The inflorescences are produced from the base of the
often prominent pseudobulbs and bear from one to several
dozens of mostly rather large and spectacular flowers. These
blossoms vary in color from pure glittering white (often
spotted or blotched with other hues) through a series of yellow tones to chestnut-brown.
Paphiopedilum (paf-ee-oh-ped-i-lum):
This genus, with about fifty known species, is most remarkable for its many handsome and tremendously popular
hybrids. The genus is widespread over a large region extending from China to the Himalayas throughout Southeast Asia
and Indonesia to New Guinea. Its members are commonly
called "Lady's-Slippers"; as a result, they are confusingly
known by many orchidists under the name Cypripedium,
which applies to a totally distinct group of this alliance.
Many thousands of artificially induced hybrids have been
made in this genus, and these form an important part of the
smallest collection of orchids today.
l88
Phalaenopsis (fal-eye-wop-siss):
The fabulous "Moth Orchids"as members of this genus
are commonly calledare extremely popular both with hobbyists and with commercial growers. The number of hybrids
is astronomical, and many kinds are grown in great quantities
for the cut-flower trade, the white forms being especially
valued for wedding bouquets. About seventy species are
known, with a range extending from the Himalayas through
Malaysia to Indonesia, and from Formosa through the Philippines to New Guinea and Queensland. The genus has short
stems bearing only a few leathery leaves that are often huge.
The inflorescences, set with one to several dozen intricate,
spectacular flowers, mostly of long-lasting qualities, are sometimes abbreviated, sometimes elongate.
Van da (van-ah)\
More than seventy species of Vanda are known, andtogether with the thousands of magnificent hybrids made both
within this genus and with allied groupsthese form a most
important part of every present-day orchid collection. They
occur over a broad region extending from China and the
Himalayas throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia to New
Guinea and northern Australia. The Vandas are highly diverse in appearance, but most have large, abundant, longlasting blossoms.
Zygopetalum (zye-goe-p^/z-tah-lum):
This orchid genus contains about twenty-five species of
handsome plants ranging from Venezuela and the Guianas to
Brazil, where most of them occur. These plants produce extremely lovely and fragrant, vividly colored blossoms on erect
spikes from the base of the medium-sized pseudobulbs. The
flowers, often in shades of brilliant green, blue, or purple, are
excellently suited for corsages or cut material, and for this
reason one of the species, Z. intermedium, is rather widely
grown by commercial establishments.
31
The Fiscal Nero Wolfe
"You like money."
District Attorney James Colvin
to Nero Wolfe, "Immune to Murder"
191
Front
room
D
Dining room
D
Bath- W
room
D
D
D
Office
Elevator
AG's
desk
Stairs up
NW's
desk
Pantry-
Stairs down
Mill
JT_
Alcove
Kitchen
Dto garden
19*3
194 /
Chronology
eventually takes him to Algiers,
Egypt, and Arabia.
1914-1915
1916
1917-1918
1918-1920
1921
1922-1928
Chronology /
195
1930
1930-1933
1931
196 /
Chronology
February 1935
5-Friday,
The Red
book form
Too Many
book form
Box, published in
in 1937.
Cooks, published in
in 1938,
July 1937
November 1938
November 1938
Chronology
197
1940
Early 1943
Monday-Wednesday in early
March 1942
April 1946
Thursday and
March 1941
Friday
198 /
Chronology
Monday, June
June 10, 1947
9-Tuesday,
"The Gun With Wings," published in book form in Curtains for Three, 1950.
Monday-Wednesday in March
195O
"Disguise for Murder," published in book form in Curtains for Three, 1950.
Chronology /
199
Summer 1951
Monday-Wednesday in the
winter of 1951-1952
A Wednesday in October
1952
Tuesday-Wednesday in May
1954
Summer 1954
2oo /
Chronology
WednesdayThursday in late
1954 or early 1955
Autumn 1955
g-Monday,
Tuesday-Monday
spring of 1957
the
Monday-Tuesday
Monday, April
April 16, 1956
in
in
Chronology
Tuesday-Sunday in
201
March
Monday-Friday in December
i960
2O2 /
Chronology
(To be continued)
203