Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels are among my favorite books. I’ve read all 47 of them multiple times, and every few years I’ll run through the whole series again, just to be able to spend some time in the brownstone on West 35th Street with Archie, Fritz, and Wolfe.
But there are a few things about them that just bug me. No, it’s not the anachronisms, like the fact that Stout gives Wolfe’s house several different street numbers, some of which couldn’t be between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, or that lawyer Nathaniel Parker is called Henry the first few times he appears, or that police Lt. George Rowcliff is identified as J.M. Rowcliff in one book, and sometimes spelled Rowcliffe. These are small and insignificant points that provide fanatics with fun trivia factoids.
I’m also not unduly bothered by Archie’s sexism and rare mild racism. By the standards of the day, Archie and Wolfe are quite woke.
No, there are several things Stout mentions or has his characters say or do that are just wrong and that bug me very time I come across them. Here are a few, in no particular order:
The window in Wolfe’s office. This is mentioned several times, but Manhattan brownstones are row houses, and no matter what street number you put Wolfe’s at, there must be other houses on both sides. The office is between the front room, which has windows that open to the street, and the kitchen, which looks over the back yard. There cannot be a window in the office unless there is a vacant lot next door. Although not impossible, it is unlikely, and nothing is ever said about it to explain the window.
The soundproofed rooms. The office and front room are said to be soundproofed and on a few occasions claims of extreme soundproofing are made (e.g. a scream couldn’t be heard). If you’ve ever been to a recording studio, you may have noticed that the doors between the studio and the outside often have an “air lock” and in almost all cases are very thick, much more so than ordinary household doors. Real soundproofing is not as simple as Stout seemed to think.
Killing people by running them over with a car. This is how quite a few victims in the Nero Wolfe corpus meet their end, but it has always struck me as a rather improbable and unreliable way to try to kill someone. Most such murders are done with a stolen car, a task that would not be simple for the non-professional killers who are the usual perps in the stories. Although a few are done in remote locations, many are done on the streets of NYC, which raises the problem of witnesses. So many issues.
Opening locked doors. Archie’s method of getting into a locked house or apartment is to grab his big ring of keys. But by the 1930s, when the stories begin, simple skeleton keys that might be common to many locks were a thing of the past. The notion that you could carry a large enough variety of keys to get into a strange house is ludicrous, and nothing is ever said about picking locks, which would be the way any competent private detective would do it. This is a technical blind spot of Stout’s that is among my chief complaints. Someone should have clued him in to this.
I may think of some others, but these are my main ones with Nero Wofe.
What are yours?