I agree. I believe Sidney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart would have made a great Wolfe and Archie.
I wrote a Wolfe satire some years ago with a broom handle Mauser. My critic insisted that I pull another brand name out of my hat, for Stout never used an existing brand name. Archie carried a Marley revolver, did he not?
I dunno. Bogart is already iconic for playing Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. If you give him all the PI roles, won’t they all kind of blur together?
Plus, Archie doesn’t have the world-weariness that I associate with Bogie.
He also drove a Cadilac (and a Heron, made up name). He used a Colt on occassion. Stout was inconsitant in not using brand names.
And Archie was well known to be quite handsome, which Bogart was not.
The answers have been stated and re-stated, so I won’t add to that. I’ll only add that Stout’s characterization of Wolfe as practically immobile really doesn’t seem consistent with that less-than-300 pound weight. (And, yes, Stout did have Wolfe exercising at the start of WWII, and almost literally running around Montenegro in the Black Mountain. But those were clearly aberrations)
I just wanted to re-iterate a suggestion I made before – that Stout based Wolfe and his appearance on Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. I was struck, when re-reading Falcon by Hammett’s description of Gutman intertwining his fingers “over his central mound” – that’s exactly the way Stout describes Wolfe as doing it. I then noticed that the Sam Spade/Gutman dynamic plays out similarly to that of Archie and Wolfe. The Maltese Falcon was first serialized in 1929 and later published in book form. The first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer de Lance, came out five years later.
There were two film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon before Huston’s definitive 1941 version with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, but surely Stout saw this, and saw Greenstreet playing Gutman on the screen. It’s significant that Stout disapproved of all adaptations of his work, but had one good thing to say – he approved of Sidney Greenstreet’s portrayal of Nero Wolfe (Greenstreet played him on the radio in *The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, 1950-1 on NBC. There’s even a publicity photo of Greenstreet as Wolfe with his orchids: The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe - Wikipedia ). That sort of makes sense if Greenstreet’s portrayal of Gutman figured into it.
I have several on my Kindle, and I don’t remember having any issues when I read them. I was wondering if they were actually scanned versions of the old books, but when I checked, I see that they include those pages at the back where you can check the books you want and send in $4.99 (plus $2.50 to cover postage and handling), so they must be direct scans of the originals.
My understanding is that Stout mainly used made up brands for items that Wolfe and Archie used because he didn’t want to seem to be endorsing anything. One exception is that Archie used a Remington typewriter.
The brandy Wolfe served was called Remisier. I like to think the name was a mashup of Remy Martin and Courvoisier.
Robert Goldsborough writes “new” Nero Wolfe novels. I believe that he uses real brand names.
As someone commented when I mentioned that being Jewish I cook beef ribs instead of pork ribs, “Beef ribs is better than no ribs.”
While I can see Greenstreet as a physical model for Wolfe’s appearance, I think that Mycroft Holmes also has a part to play in the development of his character and lifestyle. There’s a passage in The Greek Interpreter, where Sherlock speaks of his big brother:
It’s not exact: Mycroft goes out more often, if only to his club, and Wolfe has enough ambition to set up a business for himself without leaving his yellow office chair more than necessary, but I can see Stout getting the idea for a certain new and unusual kind of detective from that description.
These names are at least believable as real products. I find his disguised names for Time magazine less so. Would you read a magazine called Clock or Tick-Tock unless you were in the timepieces trade?
Mrs. Plant (v.3.0) does not agree. I believe being strong looking was the definition of handsome at the time, not the present day pretty boys.
:dubious:
I didn’t realize that is what Stout was doing. I thought Tick-Tock was a Stoutian tattle magazine. It has been a while since I read Stout, save for three ebooks I have on my phone.
Anther vote that Bogart was handsome.
I have Triple Zeck in the Nook format and the scan is good but the books are in reverse order. Not a problem if you’ve read them before and know about it but to a newcomer it would be startling.
I have all the novels in book form and am gradually adding them all to my e-reader as well. Many of my paperbacks are quite old and falling apart. If you subscribe to Book Bub you will be notified when one goes on sale for $1.00 or so, and can “e-ize” them quite cheaply. I re-read them often; when I can’t think of anything else to read, a good dose of Archie and Nero is very comforting.
Yeah, I thought it was unquestioned that Mycroft was the model for Wolfe. And you can substitute Rustermann’s restaurant for Mycroft’s club as the one place that Wolfe regularly leaves the house for.
And maybe Wolfe has Holmesian genes that would account for the resemblance. In Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, the book by William S. Baring-Gould that aceplace mentioned, he floats the theory that Wolfe was Sherlock’s illegitimate son, birthed by Irene Adler during his mysterious three years absence after Reichenbach Falls. As proof he adduces the great o-e theory. Surely it’s obvious.
Sherlock Holmes
Nero Wolfe
You’ll notice that theory also contains an o and an e. Q.O.E.D.
:smack:
I’ve read more than a dozen on Kindle and there is a very occasional mis-scan of a word that didn’t get caught or corrected, but on the whole quite good. I get mine from the library, so I don’t get to keep them.
What is the name of the third Zeck book? Just by chance I’ve read the first two, but I haven’t come across the third one yet (and I’m glad to hear, after that buildup, that there is one.)
I think a younger Bogart would have been fine, but by the time he made Maltese Falcon he already had that sad, world-weary look coming on, and that just isn’t right for Archie. Also, while Greenstreet certainly looked the part, I wouldn’t have liked his raspy voice in that role. I can’t remember where exactly, but from somewhere I have the impression that his voice is supposed to be deep and resonant.
I personally just don’t envision Archie as looking like Bogie at any time in the actor’s career.
The A&E series has made it impossible for me to see anyone other than Timothy Hutton as Archie or Maury Chaykin as Wolfe. I was put off at first because Chaykin’s Wolfe was so much more animated than the Wolfe of the books, but then I realized a Wolfe who barely moved wouldn’t make for very good television and the difference must have been intentional. The entire series and every aspect of it (acting, writing, set dressing, costumes, etc.) was superb. I’ve watched them over and over on DVD from Netflix (2 at a time, alas) and am about to order the whole set from Amazon so I can watch any episode whenever the spirit moves me.
I just discovered that full episodes of the A&E Wolfe series is currently up for viewing on Youtube. Anyone curious to see what they’re like can find them here.
The third Zeck book is In the Best Families.
Wolfe’s weight was usually described only vaguely: the seventh-of-a-ton and nineteen stone (because “it looks better in stone than in pounds”) puts him between 266 and 286 pounds. Which for the time would make him unusually fat.
My memory tells me that Archie used an Underwood typewriter, not a Remington, and that he carried a Marley more often than a Colt, but it isn’t always right.