I decided to look up ciphogene, the name of the fumigant that Nero Wolfe uses in his orchid greenhouse. Search engines kept connecting me to listings for iPhone, the cloest they could get to it, I guess. This made me suspect that the name, like many of the brand names used in wolfe’s books (like the Heron sedan archie drives, or the Marley 0.38 he carries), is simply made up. It might just be one that’s so old (the story it’s in appeared in 1942) that it’s fallen out of use. But the internet seems to be pretty good at ferreting out old brands. I was leaning toward the “made up” explanation.
According to O. McBride’s Stout Fellow: A Guide Through Nero Wolfe’s World, p. 113
He gives no sort of evidence or reference, but it seems likely.You can find it here:
I was surprised, therefore, to find Ciphogene popping up elsewhere. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s classic SF novel The Mote in God’s Eye, Ciphogene is the name of the fumigant gas used to kill off unwanted lifeforms. It’s mentioned in the Battle with the Brownies, where canisters of the gas are used against them.
I suppose you could rationalize it as a fumigant named after a fictional one, but the point is that there’s only one source for the name. So Niven and Pournelle are apparently Nero wolfe fans. I didn’t know it when i first read the book, because hadn’t read any Rex Stout at that time. I wouldn’t have caught it now, if not for the internet search engines.
I was always somewhere between puzzled, irritated and amused at Stout’s use of bogus product names - I guess I have the sense that he should have had to use such side-steps in the era his writing began. I’m not surprised NivenPournelle were influenced and used it, for some reason.
There are other fictional poison/deadly chemicals that have jumped authors and universes. The “iocane power” from Princess Bride has shown up in a few other stories, and “polydichloric euthiminal” was originally a psychosis-inducing drug in the Sean Connery B flick Outland. Next time you’re watching T2, look closely at the yellow barrels of explosive that Dyson sets off… yep, PDE.
I remember once time the X-Men were fighting some foe, and the foe attacked them with ‘Cellectric Rays.’ I tried looking up ‘cellectric’ in the dictionary, but there wasn’t an entry at the time. (No that there is now, either.)
There’s also Asimov’s “thiotimoline”, a peculiar four-dimensional chemical compound he first described in a spoof paper he wrote as practice for his doctoral dissertation. It has, appropriately enough, made appearances elsewhere over time, in short stories by several other authors. In particular, in Spider Robinson’s “Mirror Mirror, Off the Wall”, the mirror-image stereoisomer of thiotimoline from a mirror universe apparently has chemical bonds that extend to other universes, rather than into the past and future.
Odd also in that Stout could be precisely on the nose about the smallest of details when he so chose.
In “Die Like a Dog” for example, Nero Wolfe spent one lunch arguing the case that the Basenji was an older breed of dog than the Afghan Hound, a conclusion modern science seems to back up, given that the genome of the Basenji appears to reach further back than that of the Afghan Hound.
