I’ve read about a dozen of the (40?) Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout, and three of the (5?) by Stout’s successor, Robert Goldsborough. I haven’t read them with regard to any sort of chronological order; rather, I’ve made by choices by what was available at the library. Most of the titles I’ve read were written in the 1950’s or 1960’s, though I’m aware that Stout wrote Nero Wolfe books from the 1930’s and into the 1970’s. I’ve read neither the first Nero Wolfe book, Fer-de-Lance nor the last one (by Rex Stout), The Last Something.
I’m hoping those who are familiar with the Nero Wolfe canon can help me understand Wolfe’s history and motivation. From what I’ve read so far, Wolfe was a freedom fighter in Montenegro in his youth and at one time went back to Yugoslavia to avenge someone’s murder. Interestingly, since Wolfe and co. never age, Wolfe’s youth would have been in the 1890’s at the time of the first Nero Wolfe book, and in the 1940’s at the time of the last one, but that’s neither here nor there.
Does Stout ever reveal how & why Wolfe wound up in America? What about Wolfe’s parents? How did he get into the private eye business, and how did he get so wealthy as to be able to buy a Manhattan brownstone and hire two live-in employees? Finally, does Stout ever reveal how Wolfe developed his fetishes for gourmet food and for orchids?
Finally, anyone besides me think the Nero Wolfe Mysteries on A&E kinda suck? Character development, anyone?
I read the Wolfe books so long ago that I can’t really remember enough of the details to answer your questions, although my memory is that most of them were never truly answered, merely hinted at.
[Hijack]Baring-Gould also edited/wrote The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. I recomend it. You’ll never look at Holmes the same way again. Nor will you wonder about Baring-Gould’s sanity. You’ll know.
[Hijack of Hijack]The S. in William S. Baring-Gould stands for Sabine. The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, father of William, was a true Victorian eccentric. He wrote over 100 books (popular then, though little read now) as well as the hymns “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Now The Day Is Over,” among others. His marriage (very happy) to a mill worker was the real-life inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalian” aka “My Fair Lady.” William was one of his 15 children, and compared to his father, was really rather normal.[/All Hijacks]
Yes. They’ve recently started screening them on Australian television, and even my mother, who’s an avid murder-mystery fan, has turned off them. It’s just so bland.
I’m a big fan of the series!
From memory, the story of Wolfe actually travelling to Europe to avenge his chef friend Marko is ‘The Black Mountain’.
I’ve read that Stout intended his characters to be ageless, so that readers always feel comfortable in an accustomed atmosphere.
I have never seen any of these details in the books (although he does charge large fees!)…
I’ve watched a couple of the A&E series, and their suckitude is high of the scale of vast sucking sounds. Good actors, good production values, crappy scripts with crappy dialogue and non-motivation. Nothing could rescue such awful dreck. Who the hell cares about these characters? And I hate the fiction of a rich private investigator.
I was 14 when it aired, and it sent me to read all the Queen novels, which aren’t nearly as good as that TV series was.
I admit to being a major sucker for the ol’ “turn-to-the-camera-just-before-the-final-station-break” schtick, and “You have all the clues!” And all the little bits of business they added, like Ellery being a horrible driver, were extremely entertaining.
Hutton, David Wayne, and Tom Reese were all superb. I can’t think of Inspector Queen or Sgt. Velie without their pictures coming up.
There are over 70 Nero Wolfe stories (novels and novellas).
The last novel is A Family Affair.
The short answer is “no.” Stout just throws Wolfe and Archie at us a fully-developed characters. We learn a little about their past lives (freedom-fighting for Wolfe, growing up in Ohio for Archie) but nothing in-depth. The book about Wolfe’s past is The Black Mountain, which you’ve already read.
The Baring-Gould book recommended by Exapno Mapcase is fun to read, but is not canon, and cannot completely be taken seriously. Stout read the manuscript but never commented on it for B-G. B-G hypothesizes that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler (conceived when all the world thought Holmes was dead and he was wondering around Europe); that Marko was Wolfe’s brother; that Marko had an affair with Archie’s mother and was, in fact, Archie’s father; and that therefore, Archie is Wolfe’s nephew. Fun, but really?
I suggest reading all 70-some odd stories, especially in chronological order. They’re wonderful.
As for the series, well, it had it’s moments, but it had lots of problems too. For one thing, it moved to quickly and it was difficult at times to figure out what was going on. But I’m sorry to see it go–Tim Hutton really appreciated Stout’s work.
The order in which you read the books is mostly irrelevant.
There are a few books that form a series – such as the three books with Zeck (And Be a Villain etc). And there are some recurring characters who appear or disappear, and if you read the books out of order, you won’t know what happened to them (or where they came from). But it’s largely irrelevant. Each book stands alone. There is no “character development” or aging like with Peter Wimsey or Amelia Peabody.
However, a chronological order for the books is:
Fer-de-Lance (1934)
The League of Frightened Men (1935)
The Rubber Band (1936)
The Red Box (1937)
Too Many Cooks (1938)
Some Buried Caesar (1939)
Over My Dead Body (1940)
Where There’s a Will (1940)
Black Orchids (1942)
Cordially Invited to Meet Death (1942)
Not Quite Dead Enough (1944)
Booby Trap (1944)
The Silent Speaker (1946)
Too Many Women (1947)
And Be A Villain (1948)
The Second Confession (1949)
Trouble in Triplicate (1949)
In the Best Families (1950)
Three Doors to Death (1950)
Curtains for Three (1950)
Murder By the Book (1951)
Prisoner’s Base (1952)
Triple Jeopardy (1952)
The Golden Spiders (1953)
The Black Mountain (1954)
Three Men Out (1954)
Before Midnight (1955)
Might As Well Be Dead (1956)
Three Witnesses (1956)
If Death Ever Slept (1957)
Three for the Chair (1957)
Champagne for One (1958)
And Four to Go (1958)
Plot It Yourself (1959)
Too Many Clients (1960)
Three at Wolfe’s Door (1960)
The Final Deduction (1961)
Gambit (1962)
Homicide Trinity (1962)
The Mother Hunt (1063)
Trio for Blunt Instruments (1964)
The Doorbell Rang (1965)
Death of Doxy (1966)
The Father Hunt (1968)
Death of a Dude (1969)
Please Pass the Guild (1973)
A Family Affair (1975)
A bunch of those titles are actually collections of novellas…mainly the ones with the words “Three” or “Four” (or words pertaining to the numerals) in the titles, but also Black Orchids and some others.
I started reading Wolfe with Champagne for One and Gambit, and the out-of-sequence thing never hurt me any. I DID find that the best ones were from the '30s and '40s.
Fer-de-Lance presents the characters incompletely molded…Fred Durkin is called “Durkin” instead of “Fred,” and Archie refers to Wolfe “firing” him on the first page (for pouring vinegar on his dinner), which confused me as a kid because I was used to Fred being one of the freelancers Wolfe uses, and not the recipient of a regular paycheck.
But by The League of Frightened Men, everything and everyone’s in place and purring along. That one might be my favorite, along with Too Many Cooks.
i had read somewhere, i’m not sure where, it was quite a while ago; that mr stout would write the books straight out. just him, pencils and writing tablet. start at the begining go through to the end.
i find that amazing.
i enjoyed the series. the ones by goldsbourough are interesting, but rather separate from the stout books.
Stout was an interesting person in his own right. He knocked about for awhile, living by his wits. In NYC, he ended up running a hotel by walking in and ingratiating himself with the owner. He didn’t have any experience in the job, but realized that the operator and the maintenance man knew everything about the place and charmed them into helping him.
He also wrote several literary novels that were considered avant-garde for the time, but they didn’t make much money, so he turned to mysteries.
He kept pretty good records of his writing, clocking his work and output. To meet the demand for NW stories, he would sometimes take a story and rework it into another, sometimes longer, form. I’m terribly jealous of him.
In order to keep the series as timeless as possible, Stout made up the names for the cars, locks, guns and wines.
These stories were taken from the excellent biography on him. Well worth reading if you at all interested in the books.
The series of books written by Goldsborough are best used for kindling.
I hold a heretical opinion on Stout: I think Stout’s strength lay in creating a delightful world and a chamring narrator to describe it. It was always a pleasure to read about Fritz Brenner’s sumptuous meals, Nero’s latest favorite book, Sol Panzer’s big nose and stubbly face, as described by Archie Goodwin.
Stout wrote snappy, funny dialogue as well as any writer who ever lived.
His plots, however, were another story. The mystery was invariably the weakest element of any Stout novel. You might say that Rex Stout was the inverse of Agatha Christie. Christie’s characters were often paper-thin, hardly real people at all, but the basic whodunnit was almost always delightfully clever. Stotut, on the other hand, created delightful characters, but placed them in uninteresting, uninspired stories.
Indeed, while Robert Goldsborough isn’t half the writer Stout was (his Archie Goodwin is a much clunkier narrator than Stout’s), he’s come up with more interesting crimes to write about than Stout usually did.
I’ve read a few Nero Wolfe novels, but I find them a bit hard to get into. When they’re good, they’re excellent, but sometimes they’re a pain. Wolfe and Archie are fgascinating characters, though. Wolfe devotion to his tastes and sense of honor overriding eveything else (including, sometimes, common morality and law and order) are an interesting departure from the usual detective fiction heroes.
I note that Wolfe and Archie changed through time. It’s more than the bit about firing Fred alluded to above – there are real changes in what Wolfe knows and what is background and knowledge seem to be, and how he and Archie relate to each other and Inspector Kramer. And it’s not the sort of change that comes with the passage of time and maturation. It just seems as if Stout’s conceptions of the characters changed with time. Sherlock Holmes and Watson were a great deal more consistent over their run.
I, too, have to put in a vote for the A&E series. They depart from the originals at times, but it’s hard to try to shoehorn an entire story into one or two one-hour shows. I also like the repeated ensemble handling. It’s interesting to finally see James Tolkan do roles different from his usual hard-boiled cop/principal. My chief complaint is that Wolfe seems petulant, rather than masterfully in control of himself, in the series. (I understand that there have been several attempts to put NW on TV, one of them starring William Conrad, and that these have been even worse than the current series.)
I also kinda like the Robert Goldsborough books (has anyone pointed out to him that he has the same name as Bobby Goldsborough?). They’re not as good as those by Stout, but they give you the pleasure of seeing Wolfe brought a little further forward in time. Besides, I first encountered Wolfe through one of these.
Lastly, I recommend the Wolfe books on audiotape. There are several different companies doing these, and many are unabridged, so they’re superior in fidelity to the TV series.
Are you sure about that? Archie sometimes makes reference to a black Heron sedan. Did Stout make that car up? ISTR hearing about Heron sedans in vintage car collections here and there. But maybe Stout is so good that he worked one of his fictitious creations into my consciousness.
Gotta disagree with you there. Like CalMeacham, my first NW book was a Goldsborough (Murder in E Minor, to be exact). I find that Goldsborough has come up with more interesting crimes than Stout.
My biggest complaint about Goldsborough is that he likes to use Wolfe as a sounding board for his own political viewpoints. For example, in The Bloodied Ivy Wolfe and another character debate politics a bit, and it seems obvious that Wolfe favors the left. That, and the right-leaning characters are raving idiots. In Death on Deadline, Wolfe harangues a newspaper publisher for favoring Republican candidates.
A rare treat if you can find them is the nero wolfe radio series
As far as I know of theres 2 a us national one that was made in the late 40s early 50s with sidney greenstreet and a canadian one that ran for 15 episodes in the early 80s
Both have good writing from the few episoides I’ve heard