Nero Wolfe Archives - Black Mask

“Three at Wolfe’s Door”

classic mysteries, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Private Eyes, Rex Stout, Short Stories Comments Off

Apr 012013

Who's that knocking at my door?

Why it's three nasty little murder cases!

First, there's the problem of the gourmet who found that the arsenic sprinkled on his appetizer really didn't agree with him at all.

Then there was the female cab driver who pulled up outside the door...with a dead body in the back seat.

And finally, there was a party for some visiting rodeo stars where a visitor died rather suddenly when somebody decided to practice a fancy rope toss that wound up around the guest's neck.

We're talking about three interesting cases for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin in "Three at Wolfe's Door," by Rex Stout. The 1960 collection of three novellas is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

It's worth pointing out that none of these cases which landed at Wolfe's door made Nero Wolfe particularly happy - but he wound up having to solve all of them, for a variety of reasons. After all, that deadly gourmet dinner was prepared by his own personal chef, Fritz Brenner. That cab driver showed up just as Archie had walked off the job, so Wolfe really had to get involved as well. And that deadly little party for the rodeo stars took place in the apartment of Archie's close friend, Lily Rowan, who promptly hired Wolfe to find out who had abused her hospitality.

I would argue that many of Rex Stout's novella-length mysteries are better than many of his full-length books, and I think that's the case with these three novellas. Yes, there are some better ones in other collections, but this is a thoroughly enjoyable collection displaying the talents of Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin and Rex Stout quite nicely. It seems to be available both in paper and as an e-book, and you should add it to your To Be Read pile.

Wolfe Comes to Baltimore

Food and Drink, General Suggestions, Nero Wolfe, Private Eyes, Rex Stout, wolfe pack Comments Off

Mar 012013

Here's an announcement from my friends at the Wolfe Pack that should be of interest to Nero Wolfe fans who live in the Baltimore-Washington area. There's a new branch...oops, sorry, this is a Wolfe orchid...a new raceme forming in the mid-Atlantic area. The group is calling itself the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Area Book Raceme, surely a MACABRe name for an organization, but there you are. At any rate, they are having a general get-acquainted meetup and gathering (and, for the braver souls among you, a costume party) on Saturday afternoon, March 16, in Baltimore, and they are planning their first book discussion for April. Details at the link above.

As I've said here fairly often, I try to attend as many of the New York-area Wolfe Pack events as possible, as they are always lively and entertaining gatherings. For those who live in the Baltimore/Washington/Annapolis area, I suggest you check out the new group!

Talking Books and Nero Wolfe

Food and Drink, General Suggestions, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Private Eyes, Rex Stout, wolfe pack Comments Off

Jan 252013

The Wolfe Pack, the organization of fans of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, has announced its book discussion meeting dates for 2013. Designed for fans who either live in the New York City area or who may be visiting here on those dates, the book talks are great fun, as the group works its way slowly through all the books and novellas - and then, of course, starts over again at the beginning.

The meetings are generally held at a local New York City pub, with separate checks for attendees who want to have food and/or drink. The books and dates this year:

Monday, January 28: "Method Three for Murder" and "Rodeo Murder" (the last two novellas in Three at Wolfe's Door;

Monday, March 18: Too Many Clients;

Monday, May 20: The Final Deduction;

Monday, September 16: Gambit;

Friday, December 6 (part of the annual Black Orchid weekend festivities): Book Event TBD - probably something from the novellas in Trio for Blunt Instruments.

The New England raceme of the Wolfe Pack, meanwhile, has a book discussion event planned in Acton, MA, on Sunday, March 24, discussing both Where There's a Will and Black Orchids.

You will find full details on the Wolfe Pack's website.

If you're in a position to join us for any of the events, please do so - no resrvations necessary. The discussions are lively and they are very enjoyable for any Nero Wolfe fan - and new Wolfean readers are always welcomed.

For that matter, you might consider joining the Wolfe Pack - currently, it's $35 for two years' membership, and that includes four issues of the privately-published Gazette. Check it all out at the website. Hope to see you at one of the meetings!

"Too Many Clients"

classic mysteries, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Out of print, Private Eyes, Rex Stout Comments Off

Dec 242012

It is all too possible to have too much of a good thing. Consider the events that took place when Archie Goodwin, concerned that the bank account of his boss, Nero Wolfe, was getting dangerously low, decided to scare up a client. He was successful, all right - but too much so, as entirely too many people started trying to persuade Wolfe to represent their interests in a compicated case, where murder was only one small factor in the equation.

Welcome to "Too Many Clients," another in Rex Stout's marvelous series about the exploits of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin and the rest of the "Thirty-Fifth Street Irregulars" who lived and/or worked at the Wolfe brownstone in New York City. Written in 1960, "Too Many Clients" is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

It was the precarious state of Wolfe's bank balance that made Archie open the door to the unprepossessing man on the brownstone's stoop. No problem; the man claimed to be a fabulously wealthy businessman who wanted to hire Archie - yes, Archie, not Wolfe himself - to find out who was following him when he went to a certain address on the upper west side of Manhattan. Certainly it seemed like easy money.

Only it wasn't. Not when the body of a murdered man turned up near that apartment. The victim turned out to be that same fabulously wealthy businessman - only it was not the man who had hired Archie. THAT man had disappeared. That upper west side address turned out to be the site of an elaborate and secret love nest, used by the businessman for his illicit trysts with a surprising number of partners. And, suddenly, potential clients for Nero Wolfe's services were lining up, wanting Wolfe to get involved to keep the secret of that apartment - and find the killer.

It's all great fun - even if some of the 1960-ish attitudes, particularly towards women, sex and domestic violence, are likely to cause raised eyebrows among many modern readers. "Too Many Clients" is still one of Rex Stout's better plots, with some lovely characters and one of Wolfe's greatest duels with Inspector Cramer of Homicide. At the moment, it appears to be out of print, but it is available as an e-book and there are plenty of copies available via the network of used book stores and mystery specialists.

Pierce’s Picks: “Archie Meets Nero Wolfe”

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Nov 172012

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
(The Mysterious Press/Open Road):
Several years ago, when I re-read Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin novel, Fer-de-Lance (1934), I was rather surprised at its paucity of back-story. I’d somehow forgotten that the more than 40 novels and dozens of novellas Stout penned about his rotund and eccentric, yet brilliant armchair detective and Wolfe’s more dynamic legman/sidekick, Goodwin, supplied little

in the way of history for either character. Readers were told much about the everyday rituals at Wolfe’s West 35th Street brownstone and Archie’s endeavors to charm women (particularly female suspects), but considerably less of an intimate nature about Stout’s odd couple. In Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, though, Robert Goldsborough--who concocted seven Wolfe novels in the 1980s and ’90s, beginning with Murder in E Minor (1986), before moving on to unrelated literary endeavors--tries to change that a wee bit, imagining how Goodwin might have earned his memorable place in Wolfe’s retinue. Set during the waning years of America’s Prohibition era (1920-1933), Goldsborough’s tale finds the then 19-year-old, Ohio-born Archie having decamped to Gotham with hopes of expanding his realm of experience, only to wind up working as a night watchman--a job during which he shoots a couple of burglars. Promptly dismissed for being “trigger happy,” he wangles a better position with a moderately successful (and seemingly honest) private investigator by the name of Del Bascom. It’s when Bascom is recruited to help solve the kidnapping of young Tommie Williamson that Goodwin meets Wolfe. Burke Williamson, Tommie’s dad and a wealthy hotel owner, has hired Wolfe to figure out who snatched his boy from the family home, and get him back pronto, no matter the cost. As you might well guess, Archie proves more than able in resolving this mystery, impressing Nero Wolfe with both his memory and his moxie. The rest, as they say, is history. This concept could have come off as egregiously gimmicky, but Goldsborough--capturing something akin to Stout’s voice and storytelling energy--delivers a whodunit that satisfies above and beyond its place as a Wolfe prequel. Having enjoyed this novel, I now hope to go back and read Goldsborough’s earlier Wolfe/Goodwin pastiches, which have been released in e-book format.

* * *

With Thanksgiving coming next Thursday, and several other professional assignments drawing heavily on my time, I’ve decided to take a week off from writing “Pierce’s Picks.” So let me leave you with mentions of a few other new crime-fiction works to investigate while I am busy elsewhere: Road to Nowhere (Thomas & Mercer), by Jim Fusilli, about a drifter whose life takes an unexpected and violent twist after he plays Good Samaritan to a young woman; Crashed (Soho Crime), by Timothy Hallinan, which introduces burglar-turned-gumshoe Junior Bender in a story having to do with sabotage on a porn-film set and the downward-spiralling career of a once-beloved child star; and A Death in the Small Hours (Minotaur), the sixth of Charles Finch’s mysteries featuring Victorian politician and amateur sleuth Sir Charles Lenox, who in these pages finds his relaxation in a country village upset by a succession of odd vandalisms that may indicate a substantially more sinister plan in the works.

"Archie Meets Nero Wolfe"

archie goodwin, book reviews, classic mysteries, General Suggestions, Modern Masters, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Private Eyes, Rex Stout Comments Off

Nov 092012

To mystery fans, they will always be the odd couple.

Nero Wolfe is gigantic. Archie Goodwin is slim.

Nero Wolfe is sedentary. Archie Goodwin is dynamic.

Nero Wolfe is a genius. Archie Goodwin, who supplies the brawn and the narration, is smart, but no genius.

Nero Wolfe is a misogynist. Archie Goodwin is...well, he's not.

I could go on at some length about Rex Stout's most famous characters, but one thing is certain: while they are quite different from each other, they make an incredible team - and for many decades, their escapades have excited and entertained us.

But you have to wonder: how did two such different people ever get together to form a team? Rex Stout, in all his writing, never really told us.

Wonder no longer. Robert Goldsborough, with the blessings of Rex Stout's estate, has written an account of that historic meeting, in "Archie Meets Nero Wolfe: A Prequel to Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Mysteries," published today by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road. It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

Robert Goldsborough had already written seven other post-Rex Stout novels about Wolfe and Archie before this one. They were enjoyable - but, to many Wolfe fans including myself, they weren't quite on target all the time. Writing new books about existing and popular characters isn't easy (look at all the Sherlock Holmes pastiches!).

This time, though, Goldsborough really has found a way around that problem by writing an account of the first meeting beetween Wolfe and his future right-hand man. In other words, this takes place BEFORE the two men had a chance to get to know each other. So if a particular line of dialogue doesn't sound like the Nero Wolfe or Archie Goodwin we all know...well of course it doesn't; they were both still unused to each other and developing as characters. (Frankly, I find that even in the earliest Rex Stout novels, particularly "Fer-de-Lance," the rough edges on the characters are very apparent.)

And so, in this story, we learn about Archie's early days in New York, how he got himself fired from a night watchman's job after a shootout with a couple of small-time thugs, how he drifted into private eye work, and how he (and his then-boss, Del Bascom), along with several other soon-to-be regular characters, were hired by Nero Wolfe to find a kidnapped boy. Along the way, there are murders to be solved, and Archie and Wolfe discover that they rather approve of each other - or, as Wolfe might say of their relationship, "Satisfactory."

What we have here is an enjoyable mystery in its own right and its own voice. Regular readers of the Wolfe-Goodwin canon will recognize references to events that are mentioned in Rex Stout's books. Taken for what it is - a prequel involving some very familiar and endearing characters - it's really worth reading. As it was literally published today, you should have no difficulty in finding copies, whether in print or as ebooks.

"Murder by the Book"

classic mysteries, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Private Eyes, Rex Stout Comments Off

Oct 012012

It began with the unsolved murder of a clerk in a law office and a list of names that meant absolutely nothing to anyone. It ended with several more murders, all of them apparently tied to a book - a book so dangerous that anyone who might have read it could wind up dead.

That's the basic plot line in "Murder by the Book," by Rex Stout, a 1951 mystery featuring Nero Wolfe and his assistant, the irrepressible Archie Goodwin. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

Wolfe and Archie are hired by a midwestern businessman whose daughter has been killed by a hit-and-run driver. Her father thinks the police aren't paying enough attention. Wolfe agrees, particularly when the man produces a letter from his daughter which includes a name Wolfe recognizes as having been linked to an earlier murder. It quickly becomes apparent that the deaths are in some way connected to an unpublished manuscript - a manuscript which has disappeared. The problem, for both the police and Nero Wolfe, is that there is no obvious clue, no way to figure out why the missing manuscript should be so deadly.

This is one of my favorites. There's more to the characters in this book that causes them to linger in the reader's memory, particularly the relatives of two of the victims. In order to make and prove his case, Nero Wolfe has to stage what has to be one of the best office confrontation scenes in any of the books.

"Murder by the Book" is vintage Rex Stout, writing at the top of his form. It is available in paperback and there's an Amazon Kindle edition. I recommend it very highly.

A Wolfean Fourth

4th of July, archie goodwin, July Fourth, Looking Back, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Private Eyes, Rex Stout Comments Off

Jul 032012

So how would Nero Wolfe celebrate the Fourth of July? Well, on one occasion at least, he "celebrated" by getting himself dragged into a murder case, when a Fourth of July speaker got himself killed while Wolfe and Archie Goodwin were on hand on New York's Long Island. Wolfe and Archie immediately run afoul of the Long Island authorities, and Wolfe finds himself forced once again to find and deliver the killer before the police make his life totally miserable.

The novella is called "Fourth of July Picnic," and it's one of four in the collection "And Four to Go." I hope your Fourth of July celebrations this week will be enjoyable and murder-free.

"Plot It Yourself"

classic mysteries, mysteries, mystery, Nero Wolfe, Out of print, Private Eyes, Rex Stout Comments Off

Jul 022012

Let's face it. Most of us read - and re-read - the Nero Wolfe books for reasons that have little to do with the plots of the stories. We read them for the interplay between Wolfe - the often-insufferable genius who rarely moves at all - and Archie Goodwin, who acts as his arms, legs and eyes, as well as being the wisecracking narrator of the stories. We read them for the regular characters, for Fritz and Theodore and Saul, Fred, Orrie, Inspector Cramer, Purley Stebbins, even the despised Lt. Rowcliff. We want to know what Fritz is serving for dinner tonight in the brownstone, or whether Cramer will finally light that cigar, or how Archie will be able to goad Wolfe back into action after the detective relapses into inactivity.

But the plots? Not so much. We enjoy the climactic office confrontations, to be sure. But very often, the plots themselves are on the thin side.

Which brings me to a glaring exception to the rule. I think the plot of "Plot It Yourself" is among the strongest of any Wolfe book - at least in its initial setup and exposition. "Plot It Yourself," by Rex Stout, is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to that review in its entirety by clicking here.

The plot of "Plot It Yourself" revolves around charges of plagiarism - charges, apparently brought by unsuccessful writers against very successful ones. It appears to be a racket - a very lucrative racket indeed, and the successful authors and their publishers want it stopped.

The best part of "Plot It Yourself" is found in the first several chapters, where Nero Wolfe analyzes the claims of perjury and proves - to his satisfaction and ours - that all the claims must have been made by the same villainous writer. But then the murders begin - and Wolfe becomes so enraged that he takes an oath to stop eating meat and stop drinking beer until he has caught the killer (and plagiarist). Regular readers of Rex Stout's books will understand what an earth-shattering step that is for Wolfe to take.

No need to "Plot It Yourself"; Rex Stout has provided a wonderful plot indeed, and I think it's one of the stronger entries in the series. At the moment, it seems to be out of print again - but it is available (at the link above) in an electronic edition for the Amazon Kindle, and it is most likely available for other e-readers as well.

Nero Nominations

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Jun 052012

The Wolfe Pack, the association of Rex Stout/Nero Wolfe enthusiasts, has announced that six authors were nominated for the annual Nero Award, presented each year to the best mystery written in the tradition of the Nero Wolfe stories.

This year's nominees:

Guilt by Association, Marcia Clark
The Silent Girl, Tess Gerritsen
The House of Silk, Anthony Horowitz
Spiral, Paul McEuen
Though Not Dead, Dana Stabenow
Black Orchid Blues, Persia Walker

The winner will be announced in December at the annual Black Orchid Banquet in New York City.

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