Thanks, Soup!
OK - thanks for clearing that up - I remembered the story, but not all the details.
Olive
There’s a book by William S. Baring-Gould, Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street which posits that Archie is Wolfe’s nephew. To get there, he surmises that Marko Vukcic, Wolfe’s best friend, is really his brother. Marko, a ladies’ man, traveled around the world, ended up in Ohio, had an affair with Archie’s mother, and, Bob’s (well, Nero’s) your uncle. There’s some canon references (Wolfe fans call it the “Corpus” rather than the Canon) from which to pull the theory, but it’s really stretching.
There’s no doubt that Wolfe and Archie are very close, like an uncle/nephew father/son thing. In the very second book, The League of Frightened Men Archie is injured and Wolfe holds him in his lap during a car ride. Surprising for 2 reasons: (1) Wolfe’s not very touchy feely; (2) Wolfe refuses to ride in any car not driven by Archie.
As for the basement, there’s a pool table down there. Also, when the FBI had the place bugged during The Doorbell Rang, Wolfe and his operatives did all their serious planning in the basement. Why, yes, I am a Wolfe/Archie fanatic. Thanks for asking.
Anyway, the gay man in the Wolfe stories is Saul Panzer. He was a bachelor (there was a mention once that he was married but this “wife” mysteriously vanished from the scene) and I don’t recall any woman being mentioned in reference to him. Fred was married, Orrie was a lady-killer, and Saul lived alone in his clean apartment, cooking good food and playing the piano. Clearly, the gay one. 
The ability to interpret these books is flexible enough that I’d like to preface this by saying that if I offer an interpretation that differs from yours, I mean to augment, rather than disagree with, your ideas. There is no such thing as a word, phrase or sentence that carries exactly the same literal, figurative or emotional meaning for any two people. Therefore, contradictory explanations of literature should be allowed to coexist, bumbling around each other, and parts of both freely given to yet other theses that may partly or wholly deny both.
In Fer-de-Lance, Goodwin has been Wolfe’s employee for a while, (5-10 years) and knows him pretty well. But neither Goodwin himself, nor his relationship with Wolfe, is anywhere near mature. Goodwin’s speech is still uneducated: his diction and grammar are often muddled, which doesn’t happen in the later stories. Wolfe is often sarcastic and insulting toward his employee: that happens, but not nearly as often, in the later stories. This is necessary: only because Archie is still learning about Wolfe does all the exposition required in a first novel make sense. Most of the books contain a reference in the first four pages to Wolfe’s weight, but they get spottier as time goes on.
In the earlier books, as my reading tells me anyhow, Wolfe is less communicative, and Archie less intuitive and autonomous , than happens later in the series. Archie’s vocabulary improves, his ability to subtly rile his employer improves, his own skills improve, and Wolfe regards him more and more as a colleague.
I have to say that I thought Family Affair was kind of a mess, not at all up to the pressure of concluding a forty-year series. The botched attempt at a continuance with Goldsborough (did I spell that right?) made it worse. I prefer to mentally fade the series out in the very early sixties, long about Final Deduction or so.
Ceejaytee, hello and good to meet you. I personally think Baring-Gould’s imagination would have served him better writing his own book rather than annotating Stout’s fiction, but there’s no denying he put lots of time and energy into his work. My own feelings are that (1) there’s a huge gap between the pre-war books and the post-war books that may not be explainable by fans’ interpolation: what post 1946 Wolfe novel would have him conversing so freely with women and children and moving fast enough to kill a snake as the first one (I’ll stipulate that The Black Mountain is an exceptional case)? (2) All the characters were still developing and didn’t gel much until Some Buried Caesar, when Stout decided he’d like his books to be funny as well as exciting and suspenseful, and (3) Stout put pretty much all his efforts toward establishing a close emotional relationship between Wolfe and Archie into The League of Frightened Men (the card-case, as well as the rescue), and that was just part of what he wanted to establish as the background of the series: you can’t tell me he wasn’t writing for the long haul. The idea of Marko accidentally siring Archie strikes me as just uncomfortable and absurd.
In my opinion, the point of Saul isn’t that he’s gay or not gay, it’s that Stout just plain does not give a damn about his creations’ sex lives. People who do are scraping the paint off a canvas because they think something wonderful is underneath. I say Stout knew exactly what he was doing, and it was a subtle admonition to mind our own business.
King: I was only joking about Saul, though I think you probably know that. I don’t think Stout was completely unconcerned about his characters sex lives though, at least not where they impact on his character’s actions. Wolfe exhorts Archie to use his skills with women on numerous occassions to get information. Orrie’s preoccupation with the ladies gets him into very serious trouble twice. But I agree that there’s nothing hidden that Stout’s left for us to uncover. But Wolfe fans, like Holmes fans, will wonder about inconsistencies, little dropped hints, etc. It’s part of the fun, and part of feeling like the characters live.
By the way, you’re not a member of the Wolfe Pack are you?
Family Affair was ghastly. It was as though Stout had run out of ideas and was reduced to cannibalizing his characters. No way would
Orrie kill anyone, and no way would Archie & Saul & Fred drive him to suicide.
Completely out of character for everyone.
Somehow I imagine this being uttered with a significant pause after the word “long.” 
Yeah, I liked Orrie dammit!
You liked Orrie?! But, but, he was after Archie’s job! And he was an arrogant jerk!
I always thought of him as the poor man’s Archie Goodwin–wanting to be witty and suave but always falling short of Archie’s high standards. Sorry. Is my love for Archie really obvious here?
It was the interaction. Like the time he sat at Archie’s desk and Goodwin grabbed him by the ankles and jerked him out of the chair.
He did run the joint once while Archie was doning something else, didn’t he?
(Even money says Soup will know!) 
I always liked Orrie, too; he was imperfect, so he seemed more human. Archie comes across as [blasphemy coming :eek: ] being way too cold.
As long as we are hijacking, who should play who in the movies? We aren’t limited to time.
Bogart for Archie, Sidney Greenstreet for Wolfe, Lauren Bacall for Lily.
Dustin Hoffman for Saul Panzer.
Ron Dean for Cramer.
The big three stories in which Archie went undercover at a client’s establishment were Too Many Women, The Second Confession and If Death Ever Slept. The scene you describe takes place in Slept. I think. I’d like whoever really knows the answer to embarrass me gently, please.
Ceejaytee, no, I’m not a member of anything, I just managed to read the books at an impressionable age, so a lot got stuck where my education should be.
Family Affair was an ugly vessel stuffed full of junk (like the gratuitous, going-nowhere Watergate connection), and for my money one of three I’d as soon he hadn’t bothered to write. But Stout was almost ninety when he wrote it (he barely lived to see it published), and the desire to end the series without killing off Wolfe and Archie is understandable, as is the poor execution.
For what it’s worth, Orrie was a fairly vanilla character until Johnny Keems was killed off in Might as Well be Dead, and over a fairly short time absorbed some of the Keems character’s cockiness and ambition.
I had always taken the sexual nature of orchids to be part of his sexual sublimation, but not in any DIRECT way. Horstmann, there’s no way to know, from what I’ve read. I haven’t read “The Black Mountain” because the stories in which Wolfe stirs from his brownstone don’t appeal to me. Part of the fun of a Wolfe novel is watching the pains he takes to stay at home. There are SCADS of detectives who run around all over the place solving crimes.
You’re totally insane. Cagney is much more Archie-like.
I hesitate to mention it because I think the characters are straight and I grow a few easy orchids; what makes an orchid an orchid is that the sexual pats of the flower are fused into a single organ.
Make of that what you will.
Ha!
Cagney can play Z. He’s a born bad guy.
You’re both insane. No goofy speech mannerisms allowed. How about, geez, I dunno, Edward Norton or someone?
You’ve got to be kidding.
You can’t see him with a porkpie hat? 