Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street

Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street Also by William Baring-Gould Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street The Lure of the Li...

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Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street

Also by William Baring-Gould Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street The Lure of the Limerick The Annotated Sherlock Holmes

WITH

CEIL

BARING-GOULD

The Annotated Mother Goose

Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth The Life and Times of America's Largest Private Detective

by William S. Baring-Gould New York / The Viking Press

Copyright © 1969 by Lucile M. Baring-Gould All rights reserved First published in 1969 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited Library of Congress catalog card number: 68-29055 Printed in U.S.A. by The Colonial Press Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Baker Street Journal (New Series, Volume VI, Number 1, January 1956): "Some Notes Relating to a Preliminary Investigation into the Paternity of Nero Wolfe" by John D. Clark. Harper & Row, Publishers: 14 definitions from Orchids: Their Botany and Culture by Alex D. Hawkes, Copyright © 1961 by Alex D. Hawkes. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers. Harper's Magazine (July 1954): "Alias Nero Wolfe" by Bernard DeVoto, by permission of Mrs. Bernard DeVoto, owner of copyright. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.: from Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William S. Baring-Gould, Copyright © 1962 by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Used by permission. The Viking Press, Inc.: Biographical text based on "Rex Stout: A Biographical Note" by J.I.C., Copyright © 1965 by The Viking Press, Inc. No part of this book, including quotations from Rex Stout's books, may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publishers.

For REX STOUT (of course) and also for my friend WILLIAM A. LAUTEN who bows to nobody in his admiration for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin

Foreword "If I'm not having fun writing a book no one's going to have any fun reading it." —Rex Stout

There are about six hundred murders a year in New York City (634 in 1965, 637 the year before that), and, in Nero Wolfe's considered opinion, if it were not for him, Wolfe, "one out of every three" of the Homicide Squad's cases would go unsolved. He says of Inspector Cramer, who heads the Squad, "He is an excellent man. In nine murders out of ten his services would be more valuable than mine; to mention a few points only, I need to keep regular hours, I could not function even passably where properly chilled beer was not continually available, and I cannot run fast. If I am forced to engage in extreme physical effort, such as killing a snake in my office, I am hungry for days." Nero Wolfe has been called "one of the most convincing, and certainly the most lovable, [of] fictional detectives since Sherlock Holmes," by P.S. magazine, which interviewed Rex Stout, self-styled "literary agent" for Archie Goodwin, reporter of Wolfe's cases, in its August 1966 issue. vii

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"As with Holmes," P.S. continued, "the reader feels he knows Wolfe personally, and as with 22iB Baker Street, he only has to close his eyes to see the office in Wolfe's brownstone house." In forty-two books over forty-one years (each takes thirtyfive to forty days to write, always in the winter) Nero Wolfe has taken on an awesome assortment of murderers with fearless irreverence and consistent success. (Five omnibus collections have been made of previously published Wolfe-Archie adventures.) No one really knows how many copies of Archie's reports have been purchased, in hardbound and in paperback, in this country and overseas, but his admirers are as counties^ as they are worldwide. "Have you ever seen a Nero Wol^fë story printed in Singhalese? Wow!" Rex Stout said once. Mr. Stout averages about sixty fan letters a week. At least he did until The Doorbell Rang was published in 1965 by The Viking Press; the number has been about three times that since. He had to make a sketch map of the ground floor of Wolfe's home because he got so many requests from people who asked exactly what that ground floor looked like. He's had hundreds of letters asking him to do a Nero Wolfe cookbook. "I've refused because it's too damn much work. But three food editors and one professional food expert are now working on one for The Viking Press." Stout will okay the text, then write a brief introduction. It should be noted that Stout himself, with the help of an old friend, the late Sheila Hibben, food editor of The New Yorker for twentyfive years, has cooked all the dishes mentioned in the adventures "at least two or three times." Archie Goodwin's first account of a Nero Wolfe caper was F er-de-hance} published in book form (it had previously been serialized in The Saturday Evening Post) in 1934; it is No. 131 on the Howard Haycraft-Ellery Queen Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction list; Archie's second, The

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League of Frightened Men, published in book form in 1935, is No. 132 on the same list. About the creation of the hefty, cantankerous private detective Nero Wolfe, we may want to ask: Did Rex Stout have anybody in mind? Well, Alexander Woollcott claimed to his dying day that he was the model. But Stout has said, "I have never included a character in any story, either major or minor, where I had an individual in mind. I don't say that's not a good idea. It's just that I don't do it." Nero Wolfe is a unique personality because his creator is a unique personality. As Alva Johnston once pointed out, "Nero is odd and a trifle grotesque because he has all the foibles and peculiarities of the man inside of him. . . . The fat detective . . . gets his stuff from the variegated experiences of the author." In truth, however, irreverence is one of the few things Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe have in common. Wolfe is sedentary and irascible; Stout is agile and affable. Wolfe is a connoisseur of gourmet cooking; Stout likes good food and both eats and cooks it, but will not refuse a hot dog. Wolfe seldom goes anywhere; Stout left Kansas at nineteen, bummed around the world for years before settling down to write. Physically, Stout bears no resemblance whatever to his creation. Nero tips the scales at one-seventh of a ton and is notoriously lazy; Stout has for many years been a lean 150 pounds and has the energy of a draft horse. Nero is smooth-shaven; Stout has a beard, once described by a New York Post writer as "a wishy-washy thing that looks as if he stole it off a billy-goat, or maybe G. B. Shaw." Nero is an avowed misogynist; Stout is devoted to his wife, Pola, a textile designer, and has an eye for pretty girls; he and Pola have two married daughters, Barbara and Rebecca. Nero is an inveterate stay-at-home; Stout relishes fishing and tramping through country paths or city streets. The case for Stout's resemblance to Nero improves, however, when their intellectual attributes are considered: both

x / "Foreword are formidable antagonists in verbal battle; both often stoop to irregular means to prove a point. Then, too, Nero's hobbies resemble Stout's. Nero is obsessed by orchids; Stout has won blue ribbons at country fairs for his mammoth pumpkins and strawberries. His garden abounds with fruit, vegetables, and flowers (one year five thousand of his tulips were consumed by deer); his home contains three hundred plants, and from the ceiling of his garage hang countless gourds. "I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children," the author of the Nero Wolfe detective stories has said, and added, "I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies and television, loud noises, and oiliness." It is often asked why Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin do not appear more often in motion pictures and have never, to date, appeared on television. The answer is simply that Rex Stout cherishes the characters he has created: he himself is much too busy, or too disinclined, to write the screenplays or the television scripts himself, and he will not allow anyone else to "adapt" his work, much less to "write" new adventures of Wolfe and Archie for the visual media. Add to this the fact that he has not always been one hundred per cent enraptured by those who have portrayed Wolfe and Archie in motion pictures (Lionel Stander, a fine actor, was a flagrant bit of miscasting as Archie Goodwin). Rex Todhunter Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, on the first day of December in the year 1886.1 He was one of nine children. A child prodigy, he had read through the Bible twice by the age of three and before he was ten had read some twelve hundred other volumes of biography, history, fiction, 1

Much of what follows, indeed, much of what has gone before, has been based, with permission, on "Rex Stout: A Biographical Note" by J.I.C., first published in A Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout (New York: The Viking Press, 1965).

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philosophy, science, and poetry in the library of his father, John Wallace Stout, a Quaker and a teacher. His favorites then were the works of Bacon and Macaulay. He moved to Topeka, Kansas, because he was "fed up with Indiana politics," when he was one year old, and was educated at the local public schools. At thirteen he was the state's champion speller. At eighteen he joined the United States Navy, where he eventually landed a nice berth as a yeoman aboard the Mayflower, President Theodore Roosevelt's yacht, a post he held until he left the Navy in 1908. Once liberated, the young man answered want ads in New York City. For the lordly sum of $18 a week he was employed as bookkeeper of Pharmaceutical Era and Soda Fountain,', the job was short-lived, for the management discovered their employee was hustling advertisements on the side. Roaming the country as an itinerant bookkeeper, Stout also tried his hand at being a cigar salesman in Cleveland, a salesman of Indian baskets at Albuquerque, a guide to the Indian pueblos near Santa Fe, a barker for a sightseeing bus in Colorado Springs, a bookstore salesman in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee, and a stable hand in New York. In fact, he ran up the staggering total of thirty jobs in four years. During this period Stout dipped into journalism only once, and with remarkable success: he wrote, and sold to the New York World for $200, a piece analyzing the palmprints of William Howard Taft, then the Republican nominee for President, and Tom L. Johnson, a prominent Democrat. In 1912 Rex Stout decided to become a magazine writer, and until 1916 he ground out—and successfully sold—reams of fiction and articles for Munsey's and other magazines of the day. Money never burned a hole in his pocket; he spent it as fast as he earned it. Wanting to acquire wealth enough to give himself leisure for full-time serious writing—$200,000, he thought at first, then upped his sights to $400,000—he created and implemented the school banking system, which was

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installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In each of the schools that adopted Bank Day, Stout would explain the ideals of thrift to the students. Only once in his proselytizing of America's youth did he encounter irreducible opposition: one adamant youngster in Pittsburgh insisted that "if you put a dollar in the bank, you'll never see it again." During the 1920s the thrift system was thriving sufficiently for Stout to indulge in some travel. Every summer for several years he went to Montana and took thirty pack horses and a pair of cowboys into the high Rockies, where for three months he fished, read, and walked; it was on one of these retreats that he cultivated his beard. In the same decade he traveled throughout Europe. He once walked 180 miles to see Thermopylae. Carthage, however, was the place that impressed him most. "There were no ruins," he recalls, "just a lovely meadow with yellow flowers." Stout also lived in France for two years, although he refuses to be numbered among the Paris expatriates of that era; he prefers to be thought of merely as one who joined them for a year or two. In 1927, having accumulated enough money, Stout retired from the world of finance and went back to writing. His first novel, How Like a God, was published in 1929, and it was followed by four other non-mystery novels. "They were all well received," he recalls, "but I discovered two things: I was a good storyteller, and I would never be a great writer." His first detective story, Fer-de-Lance (1934), was such a hit that Stout couldn't have pulled out of the field even if he had wanted to. And he didn't want to. "Writing one of the three best mystery stories in the world could satisfy my soul as much as anything I can think of," he once said. In Stout's own view, "the last dozen books I've seen which deal with literature in the English language in the last century almost never mention the book that I would rather have written than any other one book in our language in the last

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century, Alice in Wonderland." A close second is T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (you will notice, in our text, that Wolfe himself has read it three times). When it comes to crime-mystery-detective fiction, Stout thinks Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is "the best detective story . . . written in this century." When it comes to the spy thriller, he likes a couple of Graham Greene's. And The Spy Who Came in from the Cold "and at least half a dozen other spy stories are just about as good storytelling as you'll find anywhere. But they aren't detective stories." Stout considers the late Ian Fleming to have been a good storyteller too, but he turned down Fleming's suggestion that M, James Bond, Nero Wolfe, and Archie Goodwin should all appear together in the same novel. "Bond would have gotten all the girls," Stout admits ruefully. Of course, as is well known, Stout has a boundless admiration for the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is a long-time member of the Baker Street Irregulars, that curious but thoroughly delightful group of Holmes enthusiasts. He has been toastmaster at most of their annual dinners for more years than most members can remember, and he is the author of the all-time high in Holmesian spoofery, a "slight monograph" called "Watson Was a Woman." In this he used an acrostic, made up from the initial letters of eleven of the adventures, to spell out IRENE WATSON. (Irene Adler was always, to Sherlock Holmes, the woman.) It was Stout's contention that she became Mrs. Sherlock Holmes, also known as the entirely fictitious "John Hamish Watson, M.D." The following year, at the annual dinner of the BSI, Dr. Julian Wolff, no relation to Nero except in bulk, but the closest thing the BSI has to a president, submitted his paper, "That Was No Lady," in which he too developed an acrostic, which read: NUTS TO REX STOUT.

At least half of Stout's current reading material consists of books he has read before—Sherlock Holmes, of course, and

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Shakespeare's sonnets, which he has committed to memory and which he considers the most nearly perfect use of words in the English language. Yeats, he feels, is the only poet of our own century to whom the word "great" may be accorded. "The thing I regret most," he confesses, "is not being able to read some of the classics—War and Peace, for example—in the original language." He indicts German fiction and drama on the grounds that they contain no real people, just stereotypes. He once voiced the opinion to a nonplused Thomas Mann, whose daughter consoled him by saying, "That's all right, Father. You're half Brazilian." Stout has called Double for Death2 the best detective story he himself has ever written. "Just the way everything seemed to fit so nicely. Of course, you can make everything fit in a story just by forcing things to fit, but the reader always knows when you've done that. When everything in a story seems to go ahead and fit without any contriving—well, that's the way Double for Death worked out." The activities of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin were disrupted in 1940 when Stout devoted himself to writing propaganda for American participation in World War II and making speeches for preparedness and later for Lend-Lease and the draft. He edited a book, The Illustrious Dunderheads, an analysis of isolationists and anti-preparedness members of Congress. During World War II he was master of ceremonies for the Council of Democracy's radio program, Speaking of Liberty, and chairman of the Writers' War Board from 1941 to 1946. He has been chairman of the Writers' Board for World Government since 1949. From 1943 to 1945 he was president of the Authors Guild. He was president of the Authors League of America from 1951 to 1955, vicepresident from 1956 to 1961, and president again from 1962 2

Not a Nero Wolfe but a Tecumseh Fox adventure. Others in this series: The Broken Vase, Bad for Business. Stout is also the creator of Alphabet Hicks (book of that name) and Dol Bonner (The Hand in the Glove), whom we will meet also in these pages.

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to now. He is also active in Mystery Writers of America, whose slogan is "Crime does not pay—enough." Recently he has campaigned in Washington to reform America's copyright laws. Stout is also a member of the Board of Directors of Freedom House. The recording of Wolfe's activities was resumed in 1946 with the publication of The Silent Speaker, the first Nero Wolfe novel to appear under the Viking imprint. In 1930 Stout had interrupted his literary career to build High Meadow, a unique house located near Brewster on a thousand-foot elevation that straddles the state line between Putnam County, New York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut. It has a fantastic view. During a vacation in the Mediterranean area, Stout had seen the palace of the Bey of Tunis and decided to model his home after it. The result is a concrete U-shaped structure of fourteen rooms built around an interior court. "We didn't put in a eunuch well," he explains indulgently, "because there aren't enough eunuchs in this country to make it worth while." Determined to have the best possible building materials and to use the best construction methods, Stout studied the various phases of construction—from concrete-mixing and -pouring to cabinet-making—and either directly supervised or executed all the work himself. "I worked like hell fourteen hours a day for months," he reported to Sandra Schmidt in a Life "Close-Up." "I had nine men and three and a half boys, all amateurs, working for me. A professional contractor would have had his own ideas, and I wanted to have it done my way in my house." Will the detective story as Rex Stout writes it survive? "It depends entirely on whether in the future there are any talented writers who want to write that kind of story," Stout says. "One hundred and sixty years ago everybody was saying that the Petrarchan sonnet was dead, and then Edna St. Vincent Millay came along and proved that the Petrarchan sonnet

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wasn't dead. Any kind of writing, any form of storytelling, can and will survive if talented writers want to use that form." WILLIAM S. BARING-GOULD

Stonycroft East Woods Road Pound Ridge, New York January 22, 1967

Contents vii

FOREWORD

P A R T O N E : Cast of Characters 1. The Private Detective 2. The Man of Action 3. An Old Brownstone House on West Thirtyfifth Street 4. The Major Domo 5. The Oldest and Best Friend Wolfe Ever Had 6. The Man of Mystery 7. Homicide Squad 8. And the West Thirty-fifth Street Irregulars PART TWO: 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

3 25 39 52 56 59 62 70

The Case-Book of Nero Wolfe

Alias Nero Wolfe Nero Wolfe, Secret Agent Portrait of Archie as a Young Man A Fer-de-Lance and Some Frightened Men A Rubber Band, a Red Box, Too Many Cooks, and a Buried Caesar 14. Bodies, Wills, Black Orchids, and a Cordial Invitation to Meet Death

83 92 99 104 108 111 xvii

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15. Wolfe and Archie Go to War 114 16. Help Wanted (Male), Something Instead of Evidence, a Bullet for One, a Silent Speaker, and Too Many Women 117 17. Nero Wolfe versus Arnold Zeck 122 18. Backtrack: Omit Flowers, a Door to Death, a Gun with Wings, and a Disguise for Murder 129 19. Into the Fifties with Murders by the Books 132 20. The Black Mountain—and Beyond 136 21. A Window for Death, Immune to Murder, and Too Many Detectives 140 22. No Holiday for Nero Wolfe 143 23. Eeny Meeny Murder Mo 147 24. The Many Clients of 1960 151 25. Gambits 155 26. A Doorbell Rings, and a Doxy Dies 161 P A R T T H R E E : From the Files of Archie Goodwin 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. MAP

The Philosophy of Nero Wolfe The Library of Nero Wolfe Wining and Dining with Nero Wolfe A Wolfean Guide to the Orchidaceae The Fiscal Nero Wolfe

OF THE GROUND FLOOR OF NERO W O L F E ' S HOUSE

A

165 171 176 183 189

CHRONOLOGY

APOLOGIA

OF NERO WOLFE

AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

192 193 203

Part One: Cast of Characters "Nero Wolfe is putting on a show and we're in the cast." —Archie Goodwin to Clara Fox, The Rubber Band

1 The Private Detective "I am not a policeman. I am a private detective. I entrap criminals, and find evidence to imprison or kill them, for hire." —Nero Wolfe to Jerome Berin, Too Many Cooks

" I have no talents. I have genius or nothing," Nero Wolfe is fond of saying. "But all genius is distorted," he is prepared to admit, "even my own." In his own view, Wolfe is also "a philosopher," "an artist," and "a born actor with a weakness for dramatic statements." "I was born romantic," he adds, "and I shall never recover from it." And again: " I need a lot of money and ordinarily my clients get soaked. But I am also an incurable romantic." Among other things, Wolfe is a man of honor, although he does not approve of that word. "It has been employed too much by objectionable people and has been badly soiled," he says in Some Buried Caesar. " I rarely offer pledges, because I would redeem one, tritely, with my life," he tells Howard Bronson in that same adventure. "What the tongue has promised the body must submit to," he says in Too Many Cooks, perhaps quoting an East European folk saying. To Rudolf Faber in Over My Dead Body he says, " I can give you my word, but I know what it's worth and you don't." And: "No man alive can say that I ever dishonored my word," he

says in The Doorbell Rang.

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NERO WOLFE OF WEST THIRTY-FIFTH STREET

Wolfe is also admirably free of prejudice: he despises the word "nigger" and insists on "Ethiope." "The ideal human arrangement," he told the cooks, waiters, and busboys at Kanawha Spa in West Virginia, "is one in which distinctions of race and color and religion are totally disregarded." Wolfe further regards himself as one of the "only three or four" men in the world who can be depended upon to base their decisions on reason—"and even we will bear watching." His colossal conceit aside, Wolfe's "only serious flaw" is his lethargy, and he tolerates Archie Goodwin and "even pays him" to help him circumvent it. Wolfe's outstanding physical characteristic is, of course, his extreme corpulence. He is—we must face it—very fat, although he prefers to be called "Gargantuan." Archie said in Too Many Cooks (1937) that Wolfe at that time weighed "something between 250 and a ton." "He had never, so far as I knew, been on a scale," Archie added, "so it was anybody's guess. I was guessing high that night and was just ready to settle on 310 as a basis for calculations." Wolfe's weight, we are told, stood at 260 and some pounds in "Help Wanted, Male" (1945), at 340 in Too Many Women (1947), at 278 in "Immune to Murder" (1951), at 270 in "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" (1958), at 285 in The Final Deduction (1961). He was once said to weigh "a sixth of a ton," but in more recent years Archie seems to have settled more or less permanently on "a seventh of a ton." Professor Jacques Barzun has rightly pointed out1 that Archie does not make clear whether this is a short ton or a long ton. If a short ton (2000 pounds) is meant, Wolfe would weigh about 286, if a long ton (2240 pounds), he would weigh a round 320. "I carry this fat to insulate my feelings," Wolfe explained in Over My Dead Body. "They got too strong for me once or twice and I had that idea. If I had stayed lean and kept moving around I would have been dead long ago." 1

"About Rex Stout" in A Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout, op. cit.

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Once, in the autumn of 1935, Wolfe got the impression that he weighed too much, which to Archie "was about the same as if the Atlantic Ocean formed the opinion that it was too wet." So Wolfe added a new item to his daily routine, scheduling it from 3:45 to 4:00 every afternoon. This was to throw darts—Wolfe called them "javelins" —at a board about two feet square, faced with cork, with a large circle marked on it. Twenty-six radii and a smaller inner circle, outlined with fine wire, divided most of the circle's area into fifty-two sections. Each section had its symbol painted on it, and together they made up a deck of cards; the bull's eye, a small disk in the center, was the Joker. The idea was to hang the board up on the wall, stand off ten or fifteen feet, hurl the darts at it, and make up a poker hand, with the Joker wild. Over a period of two months Wolfe nicked Archie for a little more than eighty-five bucks, playing draw with the Joker and deuces wild, at two bits a go. He got so he could stick the Joker twice out of five shots. For all his bulk, however, Wolfe, a tall man—five feet eleven inches—moves with steady and not ungraceful deliberation; he has even been known to "stalk" out of a room. When Wolfe needs a book from one of the top shelves in his office, he gets the ladder, mounts it as high as necessary, and steps down, and he doesn't even wobble, let alone tumble. And he can move without delay when he has to: the speed and decision with which he slapped Inspector Ash on the side of his jaw were a real surprise even to Archie. "You know he's going to be clumsy and wait to see it," Archie wrote in And Be a Villain, "but by gum you never do. First thing you know, there he is, in his chair or wherever he was bound for, and there was nothing clumsy about it at all. It was smooth and balanced and efficient." Wolfe has been called "handsome" at least once—by Mrs. Barry Rackham—and there is no question that his big oblong face and his massive but well-proportioned body make

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him an impressive figure. His brown hair, showing a little gray now, is always neatly trimmed 2 and carefully brushed. His teeth are very white, and they gleam. He is immaculately clean; he occasionally tells Archie, just returned from a mission, to go wash his hands and face. In dress, Wolfe is conservative, neat and even natty; he can't stand a spot on his clothes. He rarely carries a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, but he always thinks he has one there; Archie keeps a stock of handkerchiefs in a drawer of Wolfe's office desk. Wolfe invariably wears a vest, in which he used to carry a big platinum watch; he never carries money. He uses two fresh shirts every day, and they are a bright canary yellow, his favorite color. His silk pajamas are yellow also (it takes ten yards to make him a pair), and he has five yellow dressing-gowns. He wears a tie summer and winter (in 1938 he favored a brown number with tan stripes, sent to him from Paris as a gift from Constanza Berin). In 1942, at the time of the Not Quite Dead Enough affair, he wore a dark blue cheviot with a pin stripe, with a yellow shirt and a dark blue tie—"really snappy," in Archie's opinion. When Wolfe ventures forth on one of his rare expeditions, he wears, in winter, a brown or gray overcoat with a big fur collar, a scarf, what he calls "gaiters," a black felt pirate's hat, size eight, and gloves, and he carries a walking-stick, perhaps his redthorn or his heavy applewood. From time to time Wolfe's gigantic countenance is animated, to some extent at least, by these movements: When Wolfe is amused, the folds of his cheeks pull away a little from the corners of his mouth; then he thinks he is smiling. He really laughs about once a year (a stranger would call Wolfe's laugh a snort, but Archie can tell the difference). 9

Wolfe used to go to a barber named Fletcher in a shop on Twenty-eighth Street. When Fletcher retired, Wolfe switched to Ed Graboff, Archie's barber at the Goldenrod Barber Shop on Lexington Avenue, didn't like him, and finally settled on an artist named Jimmie Kirk at the same shop.

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When he is suffering acute pain, one corner of his mouth twists a little out of line. When he approves of something, his eyelids lower slowly, then raise slowly; he may also scratch his ear. When Wolfe's eyes are wide open, it is a sign that he is indifferent, irritated, or sleepy; when his eyes are all but closed, he is most attentive, most alert, and most dangerous. When Wolfe is really concentrating on a problem, his lips push out a little, tight together—just a little movement —and back again, and then out. Archie must not interrupt him then. When Wolfe "surrenders to his emotions" (and this he does today only when Archie is the only person present) he "whistles"—that is, his lips round into the proper position and air goes in and out, but there is no sound. Wolfe raises his eyebrows frequently; on occasion he will even go so far as to wink at Archie. Rarely—very rarely—he will make a gesture of spitting when he detests something or somebody; Archie has seen him do it only twice in the years they have been together. Wolfe has characteristic bodily as well as facial movements: When Wolfe pinches his nose, it means he is sure some felon is making a complete jackass of himself; when he rubs the side of his nose, it means he is self-satisfied. When Wolfe inclines his head two inches or less, he is bowing. When he lifts his shoulders very slightly, then drops them, as he often does, he is shrugging. When he is at ease in his office it is his habit to lean back with his fingers interlaced over the midpoint of his belly. When Wolfe is agitated—"speechless with fury"—the forefinger of his right hand moves so that its tip describes a little circle over and over again on his desk or on the polished wood arm of his chair. From time to time he may put up his hand, palm out. This, for him, is "a pretty violent gesture."

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Wolfe uses his voice as the superb musical instrument it is. It is normally low and quiet, easy and informal; Archie has heard Wolfe bellow not more than three times in recent years. (When Wolfe does bellow, it would stop a tiger ready to spring.) But he can put volume and depth into his voice suddenly and unexpectedly; he can purr, but he can also snap like a whip; he can be silky or sulky, crisp or smooth, dry and disgusted, sometimes even sympathetic. He can also snarl on occasion. "It was one of the few times on record that I would have called his tone a snarl," Archie wrote in Over My Dead Body. When Wolfe is giving Archie a set-up, he habitually uses a "drawling murmur." When he wishes to be especially forceful, he wiggles a finger a few times and uses his "certain tone of voice" (he used it on Archie at their first meeting); it makes you feel "that if he wanted to he could cut your head off without lifting a hand." He utilizes many others: a tone of authority, a man-to-man tone, and one which says, "Go on," without actually saying it. He has a casual tone that means "Look out for an attack in force." He also has a sarcastic whine which he seldom uses, and a "sweet voice" which makes Archie want to kick him. Wolfe grunts a lot, and Archie has classified the grunts; his number three grunt means he is displeased with something. Wolfe also chuckles audibly—not very often—and after all the years Archie has been with Wolfe he hasn't got the chuckles tagged. Wolfe is extremely careful with words—he will always stretch a point for people who use words as he thinks they should be used—and he insists that this same care be exercised by those around him. He has forbidden Archie to use either "louse" or "unquote." Most of all he hates to have Archie call him "boss." He himself calls Archie "Archie"—"Mr. Goodwin" only when there are clients around or when, alone with Archie, he is exasperated almost beyond control.


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Wolfe will not say "ad" for "advertisement"; he dislikes the word "newscast"; he cannot stand anyone who uses the noun "contact" as a verb. When Archie contradicted him once and said that "contact" is a verb, transitive or intransitive, Wolfe replied, "Contact is not a verb under this roof." "She's probably a lulu," Archie says. And Wolfe sniffs. "I suspect that of being a vulgarization of the word 'allure.' " "Archie," Wolfe says in Some Buried Caesar, "get the dictionary and look up the meaning of the word 'spiritual.' " And in that same adventure he cautions Frederick Pratt against calling Lily Rowan a "strumpet." "A strumpet takes money," Wolfe explains. Wolfe is startled when Archie calls him a "werowance" in Too Many Cooks. "A word he didn't know invariably got him," Archie reports, gloating. "I contemn clichés," Wolfe says in The Black Mountain, "especially those that have been corrupted by fascists and communists. Such phrases as 'great and norjle cause' and 'fruit of their labor' have been given an ineradicable stink by Hitler and Stalin and all their verminous brood." Like all of us, Wolfe has his favorite words, phrases, and sayings. Among the words, many are unusual and some are abstruse. A partial list of them would include: Acarpus Apodictical Caracoles Chit Chouse Churlish Contumelious Dysgenic Egregious Excoriate Flummery Gibbosity

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Gullery Intrigante Obreptitious Plerophory Puerile Quibble (a particular pet) Quixotic Rodomontade Springe Subdolous Twaddle Usufructs Witling Still another of Wolfe's favorite words is "satisfactory"; when he is pleased with the way Archie has concluded an assignment or Fritz Brenner, his chef and factotum, has handled a difficult dish, this is almost his highest praise. "Most satisfactory" is for Wolfe positively lavish. Wolfe is also fond of saying to Archie in moments of stress, "You badger me" or "You rile me," "You bully me" or "You pester me" or "I will not be hounded" (but that is what Archie is being paid for). One of Wolfe's favorite sayings or proverbs is "Any spoke will lead an ant to the hub," but he employs many others, among them: "The corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime has rolled to." "Frogs can't fly." "We're combing a meadow for a mustard seed." "The devil will have his horns on your pillow." "We don't usually hang our linen on the line till it is washed." "We're fishing in a big stream." "A hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating." "One man's flower is another man's weed."


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"A tiger's eyes can't make light, they can only reflect it." "Once the fabric is woven it may be embellished at will." "You can't pick plums in a desert." Occasionally Wolfe curses; he justifies his use of bad language by calling it "a considered expression of a profound desire." "Egad," he exclaims in milder moments. "Great hounds and Cerberusl"—rarely. "Bah," "Confound it"— more often. By all odds, however, his favorite ejaculation is "Pfui!" (closely followed by "Pah!"). But he does not overwork this speech mannerism; he uses the exclamation first in Fer-deLance, his first recorded case, but once and only once in that adventure. In addition to his fluent English, Wolfe speaks seven languages. One is excellent French (to Mme. Mondor in Too Many Cooks, for one, and to Nathaniel Parker, his lawyer, for security reasons, for another). "You talk French," Inspector Cramer states in Over My Dead Body. As early as Fer-de-Lance, Wolfe cautions Archie, "To pronounce French you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred Anglo-Saxon prejudices." (Archie has had three lessons in French, one from Fritz Brenner, two from a girl he met once when he and Wolfe were working on a forgery case.) Wolfe speaks Spanish to the Perez couple in Too Many Clients. He also speaks Serbo-Croat so well that he must have learned it young. He recites poetry in Hungarian to Clara Fox in The Rubber Band. He takes an overseas telephone call from Paolo Telesio in Bari and speaks with him in Italian; later in The Black Mountain he demonstrates his familiarity with Albanian. Wolfe also indicates that he knows Latin well. "Archie, stop gibbering," he says in "Immune to Murder." " 'Lumbago' denotes locality. From the Latin lumbus, meaning 'loin.' " "Vultus est index animi" he says in "Death of a Demon." "That's a Latin proverb. 'The face is the index of

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the mind.' " Yet he seldom uses foreign words or phrases in his day-to-day conversation (he does use bon enfant in Ferde-Lance and coup d'éclat in "The Zero Clue"). Wolfe can be suave when he chooses to be, at times even skittish. He can also be gentle, almost tender, and mild and inoffensive, particularly when he is impressing the authorities. With Archie, with his clients, with almost everyone, however, his customary manner is brusqueness to the point of boorishness. "I have all the simplicities," he says, "including that of brusqueness." Although Wolfe professes to be "insensitive" to the charms of women, he himself admits that his "insensitiveness" is "counterfeit and self-protective." "Not like women?" he exclaims in horror in Too Many Cooks. "They are astonishing and successful animals. For reasons of convenience, I merely preserve an appearance of immunity which I developed some years ago under the pressure of necessity." "Miss Osgood aroused my admiration this afternoon, which is rare for a woman," he confesses to Howard Bronson in Some Buried Caesar. And in that same adventure he says to Lily Rowan, "I rarely dislike women, and never like them." On the other hand, on another occasion Wolfe said, "You can depend on a woman for anything except constancy." And on another: "Not that I disapprove of women, except when they attempt to function as domestic animals. When they stick to the vocations for which they are best adapted, such as chicanery, sophistry, self-advertisement, cajolery, mystification, and incubation, they are sometimes superb creatures." "I ask questions of women only when it is unavoidable," Wolfe told Helen Frost in The Red Box. But he is usually "elegant," in Archie's word, to his female clients. Despite this, Wolfe, who never rises when a man enters his office,


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seldom does for a woman. His customary routine is to explain, if he feels like taking the trouble, that he keeps to his chair because getting out of it and back in again is a more serious undertaking for him than for most people. "I am not rude, merely unwieldy," he excuses himself. Or: "The engineering considerations keep me in my chair." He did rise for Evelyn Hibbard of The League of Frightened Men —"an extraordinary concession," wrote Archie—and he has done so since, under similar provocations. Wolfe and women is a subject that fascinates Archie Goodwin. "I had made a close and prolonged study of Wolfe's attitude toward women," Archie wrote in The Silent Speaker. "The basic fact about a woman that seemed to irritate him was that she was a woman; the long record showed not a single exception; but from there on the documentation was cockeyed. If woman as woman grated on him you would suppose that the most womanly details would be the worst for him, but time and again I have known him to have a chair placed for a female so that his desk would not obstruct his view of her legs, and the answer can't be that his interest is professional and he reads character from legs, because the older and dumpier she is the less he cares where she sits. It is a very complex question and some day I'm going to take a whole chapter for it. Another little detail: he is much more sensitive to women's noses than he is to men's. I have never been able to detect that extremes or unorthodoxies in men's noses have any effect on him, but in women's they do. Above all he doesn't like a pug, or in fact a pronounced incurve anywhere along the bridge." It now becomes germane to ask: Has Nero Wolfe ever been married? (We may pass lightly over Archie's whimsy in The Rubber Band: "Wolfe has three wives and nineteen children in Turkey.") Instead, for the first but not for the last time, let us consult that profound student of Archie's writings, the late Bernard

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DeVoto, who investigated this question, among others, in his brilliant essay "Alias Nero Wolfe" in his department "The Easy Chair" in Harper's Magazine for July 1954. It is an inescapable assumption [DeVoto wrote] that a professional detective tells the true about himself when interrogated by the FBI. . . . Well, in [November] 1938 an FBI agent named Stahl questioned [Wolfe] about his early life. In the course of the inquiry, Stahl asked whether he had been married. Wolfe said, "No. Married? No." The flat, emphasized negative is final: we can't go beyond it. Wolfe thereupon began but broke off a sentence apparently intended to explain some circumstance which might have suggested that once he had a wife ["That was what—"], but this is irrelevant. Perhaps the circumstance is hinted at in a remark of his to Archie [in this same adventure, Over My Dead Body], "I have skedaddled, physically, once in my life, from one person, and that was a Montenegrin woman." But four years earlier, in 1934, while exploring the murderous fantasies of the novelist Paul Chapin (The League of Frightened Men) Wolfe had said to Archie: "I knew a woman in Hungary once whose husband [italics mine] had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted applications of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of a penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. [This woman sounds to me like a gypsy. And now the italics are again mine.] The man on whom she tried the experiment was myself." Still, perhaps we should not take this too seriously. Says Archie, immediately following, "He was just trying to keep me from annoying him about business." There is also something of a mystery about Wolfe's relations with Bess Huddleston of "Cordially Invited to Meet Death." Wolfe sent eight of his precious black orchids to her funeral. Why? Archie volunteered three separate solutions,


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but he added that "there's no doubt" Wolfe "has fifteen or twenty pasts; I know that much about him." Until Rex Stout chooses to reveal more about the private life of Nero Wolfe, we prefer to believe that Wolfe has never been married. Wolfe's other likes and dislikes are, like himself, Gargantuan. He has an intense distaste for being touched, to such an extent that he will avoid shaking hands whenever possible; Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, the private operatives Wolfe uses most frequently, are three of the nine or ten people to whom Wolfe willingly offers a hand. He hates things that move (except for his elevator), airplanes in particular, and he is fond of arguing that nine times out of ten the places that people are on their way to are no improvement whatever on those they are coming from. In addition to misused words and all clichés, Wolfe abhors alternatives, meaningless remarks, hypothetical questions ("I shall not advise replies to hypothetical questions"), redundancy, unsupported assumptions (he refuses to answer questions containing two or more of them), and ultimatums— "even my own." He especially dislikes, or actively hates: Arguing on the telephone All haggling and quibbling Being read aloud to Bells—it distresses him to hear them ring Cinnamon rolls Coarse talk, but he can stand it better from men than from women Diamonds Eating with strangers Flies, but he cannot bring himself to kill one; that job he always leaves to Archie, as he does so many others Geraniums

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Gin-drinkers (they're all barbarians, in Wolfe's opinion) Hearth fires (so does Rex Stout) Horseradish on raw oysters Interruptions Jellied consommé More than six at table Music—he calls it "a vestige of barbarism" Mystification—he claims that he himself "never practices it for diversion" Paper cups People who don't eat enough People who look down at him, because then he has to lift his head to look up The colors purple and red Rain; when Archie ventures out into a shower, Wolfe calls him "intrepid" Restaurants; he would not eat in one—Rusterman's always excepted—were Vatel himself the chef Smoking, particularly in his own office (he will actually walk clear across the room to the bathroom to empty an ashtray) Television Violence On the other hand, he is "foolishly fond" of good form, good color, fine texture; he particularly likes good rugs, and he knows a great deal about them. Still, as is well known, the three great enthusiasms of Wolfe's life are his books, his food and drink, and his orchids in the plant rooms on the roof. His other amusements are so few as to be nonexistent. He does enjoy difficult crossword puzzles—particularly those in the London Times and those by Ximenes in the London Observer—and although he seldom plays cards or other games, he did play cribbage with Andrew Hibbard and checkers, once, with Saul Panzer.


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The upkeep of Wolfe's home, with its larder, cellar, library, and orchid rooms, and the staff to maintain them, takes money and lots of it, and Wolfe, who despises work, will labor only to get it in large quantities. Despite the fee offered him, however, he will seldom, almost never, leave his home on business; to do so on any other occasion he still regards as a foolhardy venture. "My disinclination to leave my home has a ponderable basis," he says. "Wolfe could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out," Archie noted on one occasion. And again: "I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands in a swimming-suit, after what I had just gone through." Very seldom—as when Wolfe was training to kill Germans during World War II—has Archie known him to abandon his elevator and mount the stairs. "I doubt if he's been outdoors since I left, two months ago," Archie said of Wolfe in March 1942. When Archie once suggested that he step out to the sidewalk in front of his own house, Wolfe regarded even this as a "sortie." "Out?" he asked incredulously. "Out and down the stoop?" To Wolfe, a twenty-block ride in a taxi is a "frantic dash." "I will not ride in a taxicab, I will not ride in anything, even my own car with Mr. Goodwin driving, except to meet my personal contingencies," he once said. But even with Archie driving, Wolfe clams up and sits on the edge of his seat, gripping the strap, set to jump for his life. We note that Wolfe will leave his home to meet his "personal contingencies." Once a year, for example, he attends the Metropolitan Orchid Show. And he left his house in September 1934 "for the privilege of dining at the same table with Albert Einstein." Certainly it is impossible to imagine Wolfe as a commuter, part-time, much less full-time, to New York. "No publication

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either before or after the invention of printing," he once said, "no theological treatise and no political or scientific creed, has ever been as narrowly dogmatic or as offensively arbitrary in its prejudices as a railway timetable." Personal contingencies aside, Wolfe usually leaves his house because Archie is in trouble. "The last time I left it was in a taxicab driven by Dora Chapin, for the purpose of saving the life of my assistant," he said in The Rubber Band. A much earlier excursion was Wolfe's visit to a hospital to bring Archie home after a half-dozen skinny savages had roughed him up (Archie was trying to buy baddenroot for Wolfe from the captain of a tramp steamer who was probably smuggling opium). In March 1942, when Archie was jailed in the Not Quite Dead Enough affair, Wolfe visited Inspector Cramer's office for the first time and threatened to have the police force abolished. And he went so far as actually to crash a Christmas party in costume when he seriously thought that Archie was going to marry Margot Dickey. Very occasionally Wolfe will visit the scene of a crime. Archie says of the Marko Vukcic murder (The Black Mountain), "It was the very first time to my knowledge that he had ever started investigating a murder by a personal visit." But Archie is forgetting here that Wolfe in 1936 allowed himself to be bullied into a twenty-block trip to Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue, but only because the six best orchidgrowers in America had urged him to investigate the poisoning of Molly Lauck (Archie had instigated the letter). For the most part, however, Wolfe, Fritz, and Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, all adhere to a schedule. The custom is for Fritz to deliver a tray to Wolfe's room on the second floor at 8:00 or 8:15. Sometimes Wolfe breakfasts in bed and sometimes at the table by his window. In either case, he never says a word if he can help it until his orange juice is down, and he will not gulp orange juice.


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By eight-thirty or so Wolfe has also downed the peaches and cream, most of the bacon, and two-thirds of the eggs, not to mention green-tomato jam. (He never drinks tea or coffee for breakfast, only chocolate.) Few people except Fritz and Archie have ever seen Wolfe at breakfast, but he once stretched a point for Inspector Cramer. By nine Wolfe has read two newspapers. He then goes to the plant rooms on the roof for the first of his two two-hour sessions with the orchids; the other is from four to six in the afternoon, and Archie can remember only five occasions when Wolfe has cut short his afternoon session because of business. While Wolfe is in the plant rooms, Archie is in the office, opening the mail, dusting, emptying the wastebaskets, removing sheets from the desk calendars, putting fresh water in the vases. From 11:00 to 1:15 and again, if necessary, from 6:00 to dinnertime, and after dinner, are Wolfe's business hours. At 11:00, in the office, he gives his usual greeting—"Good morning, Archie; did you sleep well?"—progresses to his desk, gets deposited, arranges in a vase the orchids he has brought with him, looks through the mail, glances at the calendar pad, tries his fountain pen to see if Archie has filled it, signs a few checks, inspects the bank balance, dictates some letters and memos, inspects an orchid catalogue or two, puts his thumb on the button to summon beer, leans back, adjusts himself, lets his eyes go shut, sighs, and, if he has a case, requests a full report on Archie's activities on the previous day. To Wolfe a full report means every word and gesture and expression, and he is the best listener Archie knows, usually with his elbow on the chair arm, his chin resting on his fist, and his eyes closed. Wolfe usually has lunch at 1:15 and dines at 7:15 or 7:30, but he will relax these hours somewhat if business makes it necessary. Usually he comes closest to being human after dinner, when he and Archie leave the dining room to cross

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the hall to the office, and Wolfe gets his bulk deposited in his favorite chair, behind his desk, and either opens his current book or, if Archie has no date and is staying in, starts a conversation. The topic may be anything from women's shoes to the importance of the new moon in Babylonian astrology. Wolfe never goes to bed early, whether or not he has a case. That is the Monday-through-Saturday schedule. The Sunday schedule at Wolfe's house has varied somewhat over the years. At one time Marko Vukcic, Wolfe's oldest and best friend, talked him into installing a billiard table in the basement. It was still routine for Wolfe to spend Sunday morning in the kitchen with Fritz, preparing something special. Then, at 1:30, Marko would arrive to appreciate it, after which they would go down to the basement for a five-hour session with the cues. Archie rarely took part in the play in those days, even when he was around; it made Wolfe grumpy when Archie got lucky and piled up a big run. To Wolfe, billiards were not play, they were exercise. Theodore Horstmann sometimes has Sundays off and goes to visit his married sister in New Jersey, but Wolfe often has a regular session in the plant rooms on Sunday morning. He always goes up once or twice during the day to look around and do whatever chores the situation and the weather may require. Later, down in the office, he settles down with The Week in Review section of The New York Times, which he goes right through. Sunday evenings Wolfe and Archie snack in the kitchen with Fritz; Sunday nights, Wolfe sometimes enjoys turning off TV. Wolfe allows only one outside interest to interfere with his personal routine of comfort, not to mention luxury. That is Rusterman's restaurant. When its founder, Marko Vukcic, died, leaving the restaurant to members of the staff and making Wolfe executor of his estate, he also left a letter ask-


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ing Wolfe to see to it that the restaurant's standards and reputation were maintained; and Wolfe has done so, making unannounced visits there once or twice a week, and sometimes oftener, without grumbling—well, hardly ever. We should note here, however, that now and again Wolfe gets a "sighing mood," which might mean anything from one measly little orchid getting bugs on it to a major relapse. "Relapse" is Archie's word for it when Wolfe gets so offended or so disgusted by something about a case, or so appalled by the kind or amount of work it is going to take to solve it, that he decides to pretend he has never heard of it. Wolfe has these lapses occasionally, and then the whole schedule goes to pot. They may incapacitate him for an afternoon, or for a couple of weeks. When this happens he either goes to bed and stays there, living on bread and onion soup, refusing to see anyone but Archie, or he sits in the kitchen, making life miserable for Fritz by telling him how to cook things, and taking his meals on the little table where Archie eats breakfast. Archie recalls that Wolfe once "ate a whole half a sheep that way in two days—different parts of it cooked in twenty different ways." On another such occasion Wolfe disposed completely of a ten-pound goose between eight o'clock and midnight. "You should know that detectives do sometimes detect— at least some of them do," Wolfe says to Llewellyn Frost in The Red Box. And now it is time to investigate Nero Wolfe as an investigator. Wolfe's outstanding qualities as a private detective are his thoroughness ("When gathering eggs you must look in every nest"), his perseverance (once he is committed to an enterprise, any attempt to circumvent him will be futile), and his patience ("If you eat the apple before it's ripe, your only reward will be a bellyache"). He grants, however, that "there are times when there is no leisure for finesse." He has a deep respect for the facts ("It is wise to reject

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all suppositions, even painful ones, until surmise can stand on the legs of fact"), but he is sensitive to the environment in which he finds them ("You know a fact when you see it, Archie, but you have no feeling for phenomena"; "When I am engaged on a case I am capable of sensitivities, though you wouldn't think it to look at me"), and he considers all the possibilities ("It is a distortion to regard this or that aspect of a phenomenon to the exclusion of others"). Not that he believes that anything is possible: "It is the fashion to say anything is possible. The truth is, very few things are possible." With thoroughness, perseverance, and patience, Wolfe believes that the truth will out. "Indeed, it cannot remain hidden. You can't conceal truth by building a glass house around it." Particularly is this true in the case of murder. "All murder is melodrama," he says, "because the real tragedy is not death but the condition which induces it." On another occasion he said, "The difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences." On another: "No man can commit so complicated a deed as a murder and leave no vulnerable points; the best he can do is render them inaccessible save to a patience longer than his own and an ingenuity more inspired." In The League of Frightened Men Wolfe remarks, "There are so many methods available for killing a man! Many more than there are for most of our usual activities, like pruning a tree or threshing wheat or making a bed or swimming. I have been often impressed, in my experience, by the ease and lack of bother with which the average murder is executed. Consider: with the quarry within reach, the purpose fixed, and the weapon in hand, it will often require up to eight or ten minutes to kill a fly, whereas the average murder, I would guess, consumes ten or fifteen seconds at the outside. In cases of slow poison and other ingenuities death of course is lingering, but the act of murder is commonly quite brief. Consider again: there are certainly not more than two or


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three methods of killing a pig, but there are hundreds of ways to kill a man." In Wolfe's opinion, the only way you can commit a murder and remain safe from detection, despite any ingenuity in pursuit and trusting to no luck, is to do it impromptu: await your opportunity, keep your wits about you, and strike when the instant offers; and he adds that the luxury of the impromptu murder can be afforded only by those who happen to be in no great hurry about it. It should also be noted here that Wolfe does not regard himself as infallible; not quite, he doesn't. He claims that he loves to make a mistake because "it is the only insurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the burden of omnipotence." "When I get results," he likes to say, "I get them by hard work." Wolfe is fond of ending a case by assembling all those concerned in it in his office and then pulling his rabbit out of the hat. ("We shall do it in style if we can—and with finality.") Archie calls these gatherings "Wolfe's charades." Some of Wolfe's charades are tricky affairs. "He doesn't have any nerves," Archie says, "and he is too conceited to suffer any painful apprehension of failure." "You're tricky and you're hard to get ahead of," Inspector Cramer said to Wolfe in The Rubber Band. And he added grudgingly, "But I've never known you to slip in the mud." Wolfe's charades frequently involve him in lying. "We use a great many lies in this business," he told Julie Alving, "sometimes calculated with great care, sometimes quite at random." "In the past dozen years," Cramer once said, "you have told me, I suppose, in round figures, ten million lies." Wolfe defends himself: "I tell only useful lies, and only those not easily exposed." On another occasion he claims that candor is "his favorite weapon." Long before Wolfe is ready to stage one of his charades,

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he has asked countless questions of everyone concerned, and gotten their answers. You may think that some of his questions are irrelevant or even asinine; if so, you are mistaken. Wolfe has an extraordinary talent for examination and crossexamination. He seldom searches for negative evidence. "Such a search," he says, "is a desperate last resort when no positive evidence can be found. Collecting and checking alibis is a dreary and usually futile drudgery. No. Get your positive evidence, and if you find it confronted by an alibi, and if your evidence is any good, break the alibi." No question about it; he gets results. This, then, is Nero Wolfe. He is an odd one, for sure. Indeed, he works at being one and he revels in it, and he will not give up his quirks and foibles easily. As Wolfe himself says, "It would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action."

2 The Man of Action "I do nothing without Mr. Goodwin. . . . He is inquisitive, impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful." —Nero Wolfe, "Before I Die," "Blood Will Tell"

With the exception of Nero Wolfe himself, Archie Goodwin is the smartest private detective in the business today, in the opinion of Orrie Cather, the best-looking of the operatives Wolfe usually employs. Wolfe would not agree. "It is futile to ask you to exclude from your brain all the fallacies which creep, familiar worms, through its chambers," he once snarled at Archie in a moment of extreme exasperation. "Your head full of ideas?" he barked on another occasion. "Even my death by violence is not too high a price for so rare and happy a phenomenon as that." Wolfe complains that Archie has "no gift for guile" and he, Wolfe, often takes steps, either on his own or with one or more of the operatives he uses, without burdening Archie's mind with them. His stated reason is that Archie works better if he thinks all depends on him, but his actual reason is that he loves to have a curtain go up revealing him balancing a live seal on his nose. Archie is on to this. "When the day finally comes that I tie

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Wolfe to a stake and shoot him," he wrote in "Instead of Evidence," "one of the fundamental reasons will be his theory that the less I know the more I can help, or to put it another way, that everything inside my head shows on my face. It only makes it worse that he doesn't really believe it. He merely can't stand to have anybody keep up with him at any time on any track. I am being fair about it." Wolfe also complains that Archie "always dives into the nearest pool." Archie himself admits, "I'm a great one for the obvious, because it saves a lot of fiddling around." And again he says candidly, "I don't pretend to be strong on nuances. Fundamentally, I'm the direct type, and that's why I can never really be a fine detective." "Chiefly you lack patience," Wolfe explains to Archie when he has time. "And my exercise of it infuriates you." Still, it isn't often that Wolfe loses Archie completely on a case. Archie is panting along right behind him, and sooner or later he too will spot the murderer. Archie has many qualities that make him invaluable to Wolfe, but it is chiefly as a man of action that Wolfe values him. He expects him to be always ready, without even one swift glance of preparation. "Your speed and wit require no preparation," he tells Archie with somewhat heavy sarcasm. But again, in one of his rare compliments to Archie, Wolfe may say, "As a man of action, you are tolerable, you are even competent." And once, when he was being dead serious, Wolfe said, "Archie, if I need to tell you, I do, that I have unqualified confidence in you and am completely satisfied with your performance in this case, as I have been in all past cases and expect to be in all future ones. Of course you tell lies and so do I, even to clients when it is advisable, but you would never lie to me nor I to you in a matter where mutual trust and respect are involved. Your lack of brilliance may be

The Man of Action

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regrettable but is really a triviality, and in any event two brilliant men under one roof would be intolerable. Of course your senseless peccadilloes, such as your refusal to use a noiseless typewriter, are a confounded nuisance." Archie, on his side, is firm in his belief that the largest part of his job is to keep Wolfe's mind on his work. This sometimes means that he must infuriate Wolfe; to rustle papers at him is one of Archie's favorite devices. "Aside from my primary function as the thorn in the seat of Wolfe's chair to keep him from going to sleep and waking up only for meals, I'm chiefly cut out for two things," Archie says in The Red Box, "to jump and grab something before the other guy gets his paws on it, and to collect pieces of the puzzle for Wolfe to work on." Functioning as the more-or-less-immovable Wolfe's man of action keeps Archie pretty constantly on the go. "Wolfe never puts off till tomorrow what I can do today," he complained in Over My Dead Body. But seldom if ever does Archie come back from one of his expeditions empty-handed. "Over a period of years," he said once, "Wolfe had sent me many places many times, to bring him everything from a spool of thread to a Wall Street broker, and I had batted mighty close to a thousand." Nero Wolfe is well aware of Archie's worth: "When have my expectations of you ventured beyond your capacity?" he snaps at Archie. Or: "You have your gifts. I have always admired your resourcefulness when faced by barriers." "All's fair in love and business," is Archie's motto; in the course of his duties he would just as soon kick dust in the eyes of the entire Police Department, from Commissioner Humbert "up." As Wolfe has said, while he himself is no slouch as a liar to the official detectives, Archie in this department can give cards and spades and little cassino even to the maestro. "For barefaced lying I'd play you on the nose," Inspector Cramer told Archie in Black Orchids.

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Still, Archie can be very discreet when he chooses to be. "His discretion is the twin of his valor," Wolfe says of him. "Mr. Goodwin's discretion reaches to infinity. Anything too confidential for him would find me deaf." Piqued, Wolfe once declared, "I trust your discretion, Archie, but I sometimes feel I am trusting the discretion of an avalanche." In a more mellow mood: "Mr. Goodwin is a discreet and wholesome man and not without acuity." There aren't many blocks in old Manhattan that Archie doesn't know; he does not claim to be a fingerprint expert (although Wolfe calls him one in The Final Deduction), but he can make a good go at it; nor is he a lock expert, but he can tell a Hotchkiss from a Euler, and he can open your suitcase with a paper clip if you'll just give him a little time. Another of Archie's many assets to Wolfe in the detective business is his truly phenomenal memory: whatever else his years with Wolfe may have done for or to him, they have practically turned him into a tape recorder. "One thing I know how to do is to report current events which I have witnessed," Archie says in Not Quite Dead Enough. "Can you remember a few things without putting them down?" Wolfe asked him in Too Many Cooks. "Sure," said Archie, "any quantity." And he is second only to Saul Panzer when it comes to never forgetting a face. Archie is intensely loyal to Wolfe. At the same time, however, he is fiercely independent. In Over My Dead Body he says, "I'm Nero Wolfe's employee, bodyguard, office manager, and wage slave, but I can quit any minute. I'm my own man." In addition to acting as Wolfe's cockleburr and errand boy, Archie has numerous other functions. As chauffeur, he is a skilled driver, particularly when Wolfe is aboard; then his handling of the big Heron sedan is "as smooth as a dip's fingers." As accountant, he pays the household bills, records the ex-

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penses of Wolfe and himself and others when they are on a case, banks the client's fee when the case is successfully concluded. As office manager, he almost invariably answers the phone; his usual formula is "Nero Wolfe's office, Archie Goodwin speaking." He ushers clients in and out, helps them on and off with their wraps, sees that the front door is locked, bolted, and chained after them. As amanuensis, he answers much of Wolfe's mail, takes down memos, keeps the cards on plant propagation and performance which Theodore Horstmann puts on his desk every evening, and records all interviews in his personal phonetic shorthand, which he has condensed to a point where he can write the Constitution of the United States on the back of an envelope. (In this department he has one fault, which he freely admits: he is not at his best with foreign words and phrases. In his Foreword to Too Many Cooks, Archie wrote: "I used as few French and miscellaneous phrases as possible in writing up this stunt of Nero Wolfe's but I couldn't keep them out altogether, on account of the people involved. . . . Wolfe refused to help me out on it, and I had to go up to the Heinemann School of Languages and pay a professor thirty bucks to go over it and fix it up." Archie's speed at typing up his notes depends on the circumstances. Once in a real pinch he did ten pages an hour for three hours, but his average is around six or seven, and he has been known to mosey along at four or five. As bodyguard, Archie has saved Wolfe's life on a number of occasions. Once, he tells us in Where There's a Will, he smacked a dainty little Cuban lassie out of her senses when she came to the office with a dagger in her sock, with the intention of presenting it to Wolfe point first because he had draped a smuggling job around the neck of her black-eyed boy friend. We have Wolfe's word for it that Archie is "exceptionally

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strong," and he is trained in both clean and dirty fighting. ("I am a self-made man, and am a roughneck but not a rowdy.") Archie will use any punch, fair or foul, that the occasion seems to warrant, but his best blow would seem to be a good stiff right hook to the kidney spot, with his whole weight behind it exactly as if he meant to spin clear on around; this punch can lift a man out of a dive and turn him over. "You're good enough for the Garden—I'll be a cripple for a week; that right of yours would dent a tank," Harry Anthony told him. Here is one of Archie's own descriptions of himself in a rough-and-tumble with two dicks from Headquarters: "I sprang back and got in front and gave one of them a knee in the belly and used a stiff-arm on the other. He started to swing, but I picked up the one that had stopped my knee and used him for a whisk-broom and depended on speed and my 180 pounds. The combination swept the hall out." "I'll quit only when the ambulance comes," Archie says grimly. Sometimes, too, Archie must use a gun; his early arsenal consisted of two Colt revolvers and a Wembley automatic, which he kept in the drawer of his office desk. He later added a snub-nosed Farger, a Marley .38, and others. Out to get a man, Archie slips a gun into a side pocket of his topcoat or jacket. He also wears a shoulder-holster, in which he carries a Worthington .38, number 63092T (later a Marley .32). He also sometimes carries a rubber silencer. When Archie is really out to take somebody, he is always on edge: there never seems to be enough air for him; he breathes more quickly, and everything he touches "seems to be alive with blood going in it." He doesn't particularly like this feeling, but he inevitably has it. In such moments of stress Archie may overwork the word "indeed" in his conversation. This is one of Nero Wolfe's words, and it severely annoys Archie when he catches him-

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self using it, because "when I look in a mirror I prefer to see me as is, with no skin grafted from anybody else's hide, even Nero Wolfe." Archie, like Sherlock Holmes, is "always in training." He likes to sleep his "full 510 minutes" a night. "Getting to bed too late or having my sleep disturbed unduly, poisons my system." He does exercises every morning. He holds his cigarette smoking to a minimum. His favorite drink is milk, which he consumes by the pitcherful. (He doesn't like beer.) In the early days, however, he kept a bottle of rye whisky in his bedroom closet and resorted to it from time to time. He apparently got a good deal of enjoyment out of the Repeal highballs he sipped with Manuel Kimball during his investigation of the Fer-de-Lance affair. He drank vermouth with Albert Wright at the Harvard Club while he and Wolfe were uncovering the secret behind the League of Frightened Men. He had two "modicums" of bourbon from the office cabinet during the case of the Rubber Band, and he drank cognac and bourbon at Kanawha Spa. In Over My Dead Body he poured himself a drink—and a good one—tossed it off, then poured himself another. In later years he seems to have maintained and cultivated an equally catholic taste in liquors. He drank three highballs with Larry Huddleston in "Cordially Invited to Meet Death"; scotch with Joe Groll in "Instead of Evidence," scotch and water in // Death Ever Slept and Champagne for One, two scotches on the rocks in "The Gun with Wings"; he drank a Tom Collins, then a bourbon and water in The Second Confession, three fingers of Old Sandy bourbon in both Gambit and The Doorbell Rang, Mangan's Irish in "Invitation to Murder." He drank Gibsons with a neat little blonde aboard the Basilia on his return from the Black Mountain, a gin and tonic in Plot It Yourself, a martini in The Doorbell Rang. But "I seldom take a drink before dark," Archie once

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stated. "Not that I don't like something with more authority than a drink of water in my off hours," he wrote in Prisoner's Base, "but that hour was far off." And ever since he had four martinis to be sociable and missed an important point as a result of them, he has limited himself to one dose during working hours. Like Wolfe, Archie is a stout trencherman. He particularly relishes a big breakfast: grapefruit or orange juice, which he often takes at room temperature, ham and eggs, muffins, and lots of coffee, black with two lumps. Or it may be a pile of toast and four eggs cooked in black butter and sherry under a cover over a slow fire. Or Canadian bacon and pancakes with the wild-thyme honey Wolfe gets from Syria. Or an anchovy omelet. Or one of Fritz's casseroles: butter, six tablespoons of cream, three fresh eggs, four Lambert sausages, salt, pepper, paprika, and chives. In Archie's opinion, some of the differences between him and Wolfe show up more plainly at the table than anywhere else. Wolfe is a taster and Archie is a swallower. "What chiefly attracted Wolfe about food in his pharynx was the affair it was having with his taste buds," Archie writes, "whereas with me the important point was that it was bound for my belly." Archie loves tarragon; Wolfe is not quite so fond of it, and this has led to some minor dissension between them. In physique Archie is tall, just a shade under six feet, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped; he has brown hair and eyes and a nose that he likes to think is patrician but admits is flat. He also has a pleasant baritone voice. There is no question about it, Archie Goodwin is a very good-looking young man. "I have never had a drink with a detective, especially such a darned good-looking detective," one young lady told him in Over My Dead Body. A second remarked, "You look healthy and handsome." Mrs. Martin Sorell said to Archie, "You're handsome—very handsome."

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And Julie Jacquette called him both "quick" and "graceful." Still another young woman, in Black Orchids, compared him to Clark Gable. Archie issued a disclaimer on that one: "No one can say I resemble a movie actor, and if they did it would be more apt to be Gary Cooper." In the opinion of Rex Stout, on the other hand, Archie looks quite a bit like the late Humphrey Bogart. Much of Archie's hard-earned income goes to buy his clothes, and he would seem to have excellent taste in dress. In Fer-de-Lance—a spring case—he wore a dark blue suit with a blue shirt,1 a tan tie, and a Panama hat. In The League of Frightened Men—an autumnal case— he wore a gray suit with pin checks, "one of the best fits I ever had," with a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. In The Red Box (March) he put on his "suit of quiet brown with a faint tan stripe, a light tan shirt, a green challis four-in-hand, and my dark green soft-brim hat." In The Golden Spiders (May) he wore a brown tropical worsted, light tan striped shirt, brown tie, and tan shoes. In Before Midnight (April) he wore a dark brown pinstripe that was a good fit, with a solid tan shirt and a softweave medium-brown tie. When he visited Birchvale, Mrs. Barry Rackham's Westchester estate, Archie wore "a mixed tweed by Fradick with an off-white shirt and a maroon tie." At home on West Thirty-fifth Street, in the privacy of his own bedroom, Archie dons the dressing-gown Wolfe once gave him for Christmas, over silk pajamas, a present from his sister on his birthday; Wolfe called them "hideous, hideous but handsome." It would appear, however, that Archie merely dons these pajamas to see how he looks in them; he does not usually wear them to bed. "I was born neat," Archie says in Over My Dead Body, 1

Archie says in A Right to Die, "I wouldn't be caught dead in a white shirt except when an evening requires the uniform."

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"and I don't go around with my pocket flaps pushed in." His shoes (number nines) are always shined; if Archie didn't keep them that way himself, Wolfe would insist on it. Archie wears a wristwatch which he claims is never more than thirty seconds off, and he customarily carries his wallet, a pad and pencil, a pocketknife, a fountain pen, and a handkerchief, of course. But his proudest possession ("I might have traded it for New York City if you had thrown in a couple of good suburbs") is a birthday present from Wolfe: a leather case in which Archie carries his police and fire cards and his operator's license. It is brown ostrichskin, tooled in gold all over the outside. On one side the tooling is fine lines about an inch apart with orchids (Cattleyas) stemming out of them; the other side is covered with fifty-two perfect little Colt automatics, all aiming at the center; inside, it is stamped in gold "A. G. from N. W." Archie's busy life as Nero Wolfe's man of action leaves him little time for outside amusements. He does like to walk and to swim, however, and he has monkeyed around with chess. As we have seen, he is fairly good with a billiard cue, and he is very good with cards. He enjoys a few hands of poker (Thursday night is poker night for Archie, with a deadline of two o'clock); he can take money even from Saul Panzer at gin; at bridge he seems to be so clairvoyant that some suspect he is a shark. Archie occasionally risks a finif on the gee-gees; Saturday nights he usually takes some person of an interesting sex to a hockey or basketball game, or maybe a fight at the Garden; and he goes to baseball games as often as he can (so does Rex Stout). Now and again he lets Lily Rowan share her opera seats with him, and he likes to see the latest and best films. His Sundays are his own, if he is not engaged on an important case, and he often goes to the movies on a dull Sunday when he has finished reading The New York Times. He has no

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television favorites and doesn't watch much, news programs excepted, "because most of the programs seem to be intended for either the under-brained or the over-brained and I come in between." "I do read books," Archie admits, "but I never yet got any real satisfaction out of one; I always have a feeling there's nothing alive about it, it's all dead and gone, what's the use, you might as well try to enjoy yourself on a picnic in a graveyard." He also writes books, of course, in a prose which Professor Jacques Barzun has called "sinewy, pellucid, propelling"—• his accounts of the Nero Wolfe cases. But he will take the trouble to relate the facts only when murder is involved. Occasionally, when things are slack, Archie takes a little vacation. He was fishing in Maine the summer before the case of Too Many Cooks, and in the autumn of the year he may drive up to Pike County to do a little duck-shooting with Cleve Sturgis, whom he met during the Hay Fever affair. In general, however, Archie is very much a city boy. The country "is all right, I've got nothing against it, and of course in the country something might as well be growing or what would you do with all the space, but I must admit it's a poor place to look for excitement. Compare it, for instance, with Times Square." There is one diversion for which Archie will make time any time, however, and that is dancing, at which he is exceedingly able. Nine times out of ten he chooses to do his dancing at the Flamingo Club; he thinks it has the best band in town. But he is not wedded to it; he has been known to go to Gillotti's or to the Silver Room at the Churchill. Add his talent for terpsichore to his well-groomed good looks and his expensive, well-fitting clothes, and you can believe that Archie Goodwin is a favorite with the ladies. "Mr. Goodwin may have his equal in making the acquaintance of

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a young woman and building it into intimacy, but I doubt it," Nero Wolfe says. Or: "His judgment of women under thirty is infallible." Archie is very much aware of the fact that he bats close to a thousand on invitations to damsels. But he modestly claims this is only because he doesn't issue an invitation unless the circumstances strongly indicate that it will be accepted. "I'm funny about women," he admits. "I've seen dozens of them I wouldn't mind marrying, but I've never been pulled so hard I lost my balance." (Here he is conveniently forgetting what he wrote earlier: "The only girl I had ever been really soft on had found another bargain she liked better. That was how I happened to meet Wolfe.") "I don't know whether any of them would have married me or not, that's the truth," Archie continues, "since I never gave one a chance to collect enough data to form an intelligent opinion. When I meet a new one there's no doubt I'm interested and I'm fully alive to all the possibilities, and I've never dodged the issue as far as I can tell, but I never seem to get infatuated. For instance, take the women I meet in my line of business—that is, Nero Wolfe's business. I never run into one, provided she's not just an item for the cleaners, without letting my eyes do the best they can for my judgment, and more than that, it puts a tickle in my blood. I can feel the nudge on che accelerator. But then of course the business gets started, whatever it happens to be, and I guess the trouble is I'm too conscientious. I love to do a good job more than anything else I can think of, and I suppose that's what shorts the line." But sooner or later, Archie warns both Nero Wolfe and his readers in Black Orchids, "one of my threats to get married will turn out not to be a gag." Who might she be? It seems that women may come and women may go in Archie Goodwin's more or less carefree existence, but over

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the years he has consistently entertained, and been entertained by, one lovely lady, and her name is Lily Rowan. Lily's head comes close to Archie's chin or above, she is a blonde but not at all a faded one, she has dark blue eyes, and she dances better than anyone else Archie knows. Lily is lazy, very. And Lily is rich, very. Lily's mother was a waitress, and her father was an immigrant from Ireland who made eight million dollars building sewers for the city of New York. He was also a Tammany Hall district leader for thirty years; Lily votes for Democrats only. She and Archie met in 1938, just outside the fence of an upstate pasture. The episode started with Archie in the pasture with a bull named Caesar, and the situation was such that when he reached the fence considerations of form and dignity were minor matters. Somehow he got over the fence, rolled ten yards, and scrambled to his feet, and a girl in a yellow shirt and slacks clapped her hands sarcastically and drawled at him, "Beautiful, Escamillo! Do it again!" Lily has been calling Archie "Escamillo" ever since. "One thing had led to another. Several others," as Archie put it. The "others" included a trip to Norway together, after Wolfe and Archie had finished up the Best Families case. In 1942 Lily was living at the Ritz, "where she had her own tower," but now she has a penthouse on the roof of a ten-story building on East Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park Avenues. The penthouse has a Kashan carpet, 19 feet by 34 feet, in a garden pattern in seven colors, on the living-room floor (it set Lily back $14,000). On the walls hang paintings by Renoir, Monet, and Cézanne—Archie knows about art from Lily—and there are an off-white piano and glass doors to the terrace, banked with flowers in the summer and with evergreens in the winter months. Lily also owns a summer place near Katonah and a ranch in Montana, which she and Archie occasionally visit.

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Every now and then Lily uses the penthouse to throw a poker party. She, like Archie, loves to play poker, often with a little twist to a corner of her mouth—that is when she is betting her stack on four spades with nothing but a six of clubs in the hole. Wolfe has called Lily "rich, intemperate, and notorious," a carry-over from the time she got her perfume all over him. Archie has softened this to "well-heeled and playful." Every week or so Archie sends Lily orchids of a kind that can't be bought anywhere; they come from Wolfe's plant rooms—with his permission, of course. Will Archie and Lily marry, one of these days? Well, if it isn't Lily, it can only be Lucy Valdon or the disturbingly beautiful Julie Jacquette, a swinging songstress from the Ten Little Indians. Julie is making their eyes pop at college now, trying to educate herself. And she wishes Archie well in her frequent letters to him.

3 An Old Brownstone House on West Thirty-fifth Street "You're over here by the river in a corner of your own." —John P. Barrett to Nero Wolfe, Over My Dead Body

Take a taxi to West Thirty-fifth Street in New York City. Get out at Tenth Avenue and walk almost to Eleventh, less than half a block from the Hudson River. On the south side of the street, opposite a tailor shop, you will come to the old brownstone house—four stories, if you count the plant rooms on the roof—where Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin live and have their office. It is as much a character in the saga as is Wolfe or Archie. Archie is evasive about the exact number. He gives it as 506 in Over My Dead Body, as 618 in Too Many Clients and "Blood Will Tell," as 902 in Murder by the Book, as 909 in "Before I Die," as 914 in Prisoner's Base and The Doorbell Rang, as 918 in The Red Box and "Method Three for Murder," 1 as 922 in The Silent Speaker, as 924 in "Man Alive," and as 938 in Death of a Doxy. He is equally evasive about the telephone number. Is it BRyant 9-2828 or PEnnsylvania 3-1212 or PRoctor 5-5000? 1

Wolfe himself says it is gi8 in "The Next Witness."

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We touch upon another sensitive area when we ask how long Wolfe has owned the house and lived in it. In the summer of 1933 Wolfe investigated the death of President Barstow of Holland College, and in that year, so the record states, Wolfe had lived in this house for twenty years. The statement is obviously false. It would mean he acquired the house in 1913 and lived there more or less continuously during the next few years. But in 1913, as we shall see later, Wolfe was in Europe and had been for a long time, and he did not return to the United States until 1919 at the earliest, and probably not until 1921 or shortly thereafter. To make the matter even more confusing, Wolfe himself states in "Fourth of July Picnic": "Coming to this country in 1930, not penniless, I bought this house." On the ground floor of this old house are "the front room," the dining room, the office, the kitchen, and the pantry. Beneath these is what is called "the basement," although it is only three feet below the street level. It is reached by a flight of twelve steps from the kitchen, or by a door from the garden (down four steps), or by way of a heavy door to the left of the front stoop, with an iron grate and grill and five steps leading to the sidewalk. Here Fritz has his bedroom and bath, facing the street; next to them is a cubbyhole with an old couch in it. Here too is the pool table occasionally used by Wolfe and Archie; it stands in a large room, has the usual raised bench plus a big comfortable chair on a platform for Wolfe. Here too are the insulated bottle department and the curtained shelves for luggage, trunks, and empty packing cartons. Fritz could have a room upstairs, but he prefers the basement. His den is as big as the office and the front room combined, but over the years it has got pretty cluttered—tables with stacks of magazines, busts of Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin on stands, framed menus on the walls, a king-size bed, five chairs, shelves of books (he has 289 cookbooks), a head of a

An

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wild boar he shot in the Vosges, a television and stereo cabinet, two large cases of ancient cooking vessels, one of which he thinks was used by Julius Caesar, and so on. Wolfe's bedroom is on the second floor rear, and Archie for a time occupied the second floor front. Now, however, he sleeps in the third floor front (Wolfe snores). The South Room, behind it, is reserved for overnight or longer guests. On the roof level, the entire space is glassed in for the orchids, except for the potting room and the corner where Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, sleeps. To call on Wolfe, you mount the seven steps to his front stoop and ring the bell. (When Archie has been on an errand for Wolfe, and Fritz is answering the door, Archie has a special ring to let Fritz know it is he—usually two shorts and a long.) You are facing a door with a curtained glass panel. It is, in fact, a one-way glass panel: Archie (or Fritz) can see out, but you can't see in. The front door itself is kept locked, bolted, and chained until Archie or Fritz chooses to let you in. To your left, as you stand there, are the front-room windows, heavily curtained and with Venetian blinds; to your right are the matching windows of the dining room. If you're expected—or Archie, in a good mood, lets you in to wait in the front room or office until Wolfe comes down from the plant rooms—you will find yourself in a wide rubber-tiled hall with an enormous oak (or is it walnut?) rack, with a mirror, for coats and hats, and a stand for umbrellas and canes. There is also a bench across from the rack, and there are several chairs. On your right, back to front, are the stairs, Wolfe's elevator, and the door to the dining room. On your left, at the front, is the door to the front room, and down the hall is the door to the office. The swinging door to the kitchen is at the rear, at the far end of the hall, facing the front door. (Wolfe had the vestibule removed to make the hall bigger.) The front room, which doesn't get used much, contains a

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table, a sofa with six velvet cushions on it, a piano and bench, and a checkerboard, used by Johnny Keems and Fred Durkin in The Rubber Band. It has a fireplace and three doors: one to the hall, another to the bathroom between the front room and the office, a third to the office itself. The office is twice as big as any other room on the ground floor. It is actually the living room too, and since Wolfe spends most of his time there you have to allow him his rule regarding furniture and accessories: nothing enters it or stays in it that he doesn't enjoy looking at. The office has a high ceiling, and steps have to be used for all the upper shelves and the files and cabinets above them. One of the upper cabinets contains a Veblex camera and a Tollens, with accessories; one of the lower, a five-week file of The New York Times; another, an assortment of tools, everything from keys to jimmies and rubber gloves; still another contains brushes and powders, a complete fingerprint outfit. There are eight different lights in the office: one in the ceiling above a big bowl of banded Oriental alabaster, which is on the wall switch; one on the wall behind Wolfe's chair; one on his desk; one on Archie's desk; one flooding the big globe; and three for the bookshelves. The one on Wolfe's desk is strictly for business, like crossword puzzles. The one on the wall behind him is for reading. He likes all the lights turned on. Wolfe sits at a cherry desk with his back to the south wall of the office and two windows at his right, with yellow drapes. His desk has three drawers on the left, four on the right, and a wide, shallow middle drawer, in which he keeps an 18-carat gold bottle-opener, the gift of a satisfied client many years ago, and into which he puts his beer-bottle caps when he has finished opening the bottles. (This is Wolfe's way of keeping track of his beer consumption.) In another drawer is an old oilstone, on which Wolfe sharpens his pencils. On top of Wolfe's desk are: a desk blotter; his paper-

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weights, a block of petrified wood which a man named Duggan had used as a murder weapon, and a hunk of carved ebony that had once been used by a man named Mortimer to crack his wife's skull; a vase, which may contain Cymbidium or Laeliocattleya; Wolfe's bookmark, a counterfeit ten-dollar bill autographed in red ink by a former Secretary of the Treasury in appreciation of services rendered; his letteropener, a knife with a horn handle that was thrown at him in 1954, in the cellar of an old border fort in Albania, by a man named Bua; a pen-block; pencils; a scratch pad and a calendar; a telephone; his desk light; a gadget for turning on or off the radio and the television; and a buzzer with which to summon Fritz (two shorts or two shorts and a long for beer, one long ring for other matters). A dictionary, a Webster's Unabridged, leatherbound, is on a stand at Wolfe's right. It is the second edition—Wolfe once burned the third edition, page by page, in the front-room fireplace. Wolfe has worn out three second editions of Webster's Unabridged and is now working on his fourth. There are many chairs in the house that have been made to order for width and depth—one in Wolfe's bedroom, one in the dining room, one in the plant rooms—but the chair behind Wolfe's desk is the one that suits him best of all the chairs in the world. It is enormous, of Brazilian Mauro upholstered in brown leather, and it was specially constructed for Wolfe by Meyer. It is warranted safe for a quarter of a ton. Archie's desk—eight feet from Wolfe's—stands under the windows. Archie has a typewriter, of course, and his desk is one of those so constructed that the typewriter remains out of sight when not in use; then it slides out of its drawer and rests at the proper height on its support. The desk also has a leaf on which Archie takes his notes. In one drawer is the arsenal; in another there is an assortment of calling cards, nine or ten different kinds, worded differently for different

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needs and occasions. Archie's bottom drawer is personal. On top are a telephone, Archie's notepad and pencil, Archie's desk ashtray, which is mostly for decoration, since he seldom smokes; it is a jade bowl six inches across, the gift of a client. There is also a worn red leather box (the Red Box) in which, since 1936, Archie has stored his postage stamps. Archie's desk chair is a swivel so placed that a half-turn brings him facing Wolfe. The big red leather chair in which Inspector Cramer likes to sit stands to the right of Wolfe's desk, turned to face him. "I have surveyed a lot of people in that chair," Archie once said, "and there has only been one who was exactly right for it." There is another leather chair which Wolfe sometimes uses, over by the big globe, which is 32 and s/s inches in diameter. The globe was made by Gouchard, and there aren't many like it; the Marquis of Clivers estimated that "it couldn't have cost less than a hundred pounds." Actually, it cost $500. Whenever a situation gets so ticklish that Wolfe wishes he were somewhere else, he can walk over to the globe and pick spots to go to. Small yellow chairs—straightbacks—are scattered around the room. There is also a bright yellow couch with cushions on it in the corner made by the wall of the lavatory. There is a radio and television cabinet in the office, controlled, as we have seen, from Wolfe's desk. (Wolfe's favorite radio program in the early days was the Joy Boys. To Archie they seemed pretty damn vulgar; he preferred the band at the Surf Room of the Hotel Portland.) There is a cabinet for liquor—including Old Corcoran Irish whisky and 1890 Guarnier brandy, Korbeloff vodka and Meyer's rum and Follansbee's gin. The office furnishings also include an old-fashioned twoton safe with a four-way combination lock on the inner door. It contains the petty cash—$5000 in used hundreds, twenties,

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and tens, as an emergency reserve; a bunch of skeleton keys and picklocks; a book in which Archie keeps his private telephone numbers, including that of Wolfe's London associate, Ethelbert2 Hitchcock; and a metal box to which Wolfe alone has the key and which he never opens in anyone's presence, not even Archie's. There is also a large table in the office, with a big vase and a magnifying glass on it. It stands between the windows. To the right of the red leather chair there is a solid little table of massaranduba; its primary purpose is to act as a resting place for checkbooks while the clients write in them. Against the walls are the bookcases, crammed with twelve hundred or so titles. On the walls are maps, some Holbein reproductions, an engraving of Brillât-Savarin, a picture that looks like an unsigned Van Gogh but is really by a man named Mclntyre whom Wolfe once got out of a scrape. There is also a wall clock. Above Archie's desk is a big mirror which gives him a view of the door to the hall. Here, too, hangs a certain portrait; we will reserve for the time being the name of the man shown in it. Behind Wolfe's desk, five feet to his left as he sits there, hangs a painting on glass of a waterfall (in earlier days, the picture showed the Washington Monument). The picture is camouflage; it is actually a specially constructed cover for a panel through which you can view the office from an alcove at the end of the hall next to the kitchen. (As early as the Rubber Band case Wolfe said, "There would be no point in sending Archie out of the office, for he would merely find a point of vantage we have prepared, and set down what he heard.") Just beyond the picture is a tier of shallow shelves holding various odds and ends, including mementos of the cases Wolfe and Archie have worked on. *By early 1954 Hitchcock had changed his Christian name to Geoffrey. Who can blame him?

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On the floor is a big i4-by-26-foot rug, mostly yellow, given to Wolfe in 1932 as a token of gratitude by an Armenian merchant who had got himself in a bad hole (Wolfe suspected he had stolen the rug in Kandahar). It is either a Keraghan or a Shirvan—Archie does not seem to be quite sure which, although he claims to have learned about rugs from Wolfe. The office has three doors: one to the hall, one to the bathroom, a third to the front room. This is a convenient arrangement: if Cramer calls, and there is a client Wolfe would rather he didn't know about, Archie can have the client wait in the front room—or escape, if necessary, via the hall while Cramer is in the office. Cramer calls the office "the place where more fancy tricks have been played than any other spot in New York." To Wolfe, "it's a good room to think in. The faint sounds from the street are just right." (As a matter of fact, both the office and the front room are completely soundproofed, including the doors, but for many years there was no air-conditioning in the entire house, thanks to Wolfe's mistrust of machinery.) Leave the office now and proceed three paces toward the kitchen. To your left is the alcove. Here, hanging on the wall that separates the alcove from the office, is an old brown wood carving, a panel in three sections. The two side sections are hinged to the middle one. Swing the right section around, stoop a little, and look through the peephole. Through two little apertures backed by gauze you can see the office, practically all of it. Also you can hear any words spoken there by straining a little. Close the panel and look across the hall. There is the door to Wolfe's 4-DV-6 elevator (it cost him $7000 to install); to its left is a carpeted flight of stairs leading to the upper stories; to its right, facing on the street, is the dining room. There is not much to tell you about the dining room, except that it contains all the furniture you would normally expect to find in such a room. Wolfe sits at meals at the end

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of the dining table, his back to the front windows, Archie at his right, on the side that puts him facing the door to the hall. To your left now, opposite the front door, at the end of the hall, is the kitchen. It is a warm, bright room, full of appetizing smells. In addition to all the usual furnishings— sink, cabinets—it contains two refrigerators, one cool and one cold, and a big linoleum-covered table where Fritz prepares the meals, and the little table where Archie always eats his breakfast. On this table is a rack on which The New York Times can be propped. There are stools and a specially constructed wooden chair with arms, by the window, where Wolfe always sits to direct Fritz. A telephone extension rests on a stand, with a memo pad beside it, and there is a small radio. Off the kitchen is a pantry with swinging doors connecting it to both the kitchen and the dining room. Opposite the kitchen door leading to the hall is the door to a little porch. Beyond this are a court and a garden with brick walks, where Fritz tries to grow chives and tarragon and other herbs. The court and garden are fenced in, but there is a door in the solid board fence, locked from the inside with a spring lock. This leads into a dark and narrow passageway between a warehouse with a landing platform at the left and a garage—or is it a wholesale paper-products place?—on the right. The passageway leads into Thirtyfourth Street. Wolfe's home does not have its personal garage. He garages his two cars—a convertible for Archie, a big gray sedan for the two of them—at Curran's Motors on Tenth Avenue between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets. Wolfe owned a Heron sedan in the early days. Then he switched to a Wethersill, then to a Cadillac, then back to a Heron. He now buys a new Heron sedan every year. (Archie thinks it's a fine car, but too big, and there were arguments when Wolfe first invested in one.) Back in the house, you climb the stairs now to the second

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floor and enter Wolfe's bedroom, big and comfortable and all right to be in. It has a bookshelf on which Wolfe keeps a few dozen favorite books (Montaigne's Essays is one of them). But far and away the most eye-catching piece of furniture in this room is Wolfe's bed. Over the double mattress there is a black silk puffy cover, which Wolfe uses winter and summer. The headboard is also black; it incorporates a canopy which ends a foot or so beyond Wolfe's chin and hangs quite low on all three sides. A cord hangs at Wolfe's right, and the canopy folds back against the headboard when he is ready to get up. There is a low footboard of streaky anselmo—yellowish with sweeping dark brown streaks. There is a bright yellow telephone, which Archie thinks is in bad taste, on a table near the window, since Wolfe refuses to concede the possibility that he will ever be willing to talk on the phone while in bed. The room also contains a mirror and a screen, and there is a tapestry-covered easy chair with a strong reading light beside it. A bathroom connects. Since Wolfe likes plenty of air at night but a good warm room at breakfasttime, it has been necessary to install a contraption that will automatically close his windows at 6 a. m. It is not advisable to approach this room after Wolfe has gone to bed. On the wall under Archie's bed is a big gong; if anyone steps within ten feet of Wolfe's bedroom after the house has retired, or touches any of Wolfe's windows, the gong goes off. It was installed many years ago on account of a certain occurrence when Wolfe got a knife stuck in him. The room above Wolfe's is the South Room. It isn't often used, but it is by no means wasted. On various occasions all kinds of people have slept in it, from a Secretary of State to a woman who had poisoned three husbands and was making a fourth very sick. It contains twin beds, an armchair, a mirror, a dresser, on which stands a bowl of orchids when the room is occupied, a telephone on a stand, a table

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for books and magazines. It too connects with a bathroom. It has two curtained windows; the one on the left opens onto a fire escape (this same fire escape goes by a window in Wolfe's bedroom). Archie's bedroom—now the north room on the third floor—contains a good big bed, a chest of drawers near the windows, a desk with plenty of drawer space and a typewriter on which Archie chronicles the Nero Wolfe cases, three chairs, all roomy. The most comfortable of the three chairs stands under a reading lamp and has a little tiletopped table beside it. There is a small radio on this table. Archie's bedroom also has shelves on which he keeps a few books (Herbert Block's Here and Now would seem to be one of them). The pictures on the wall include one of Mount Vernon, a colored one of a lion's head, another colored one of a wood with grass and flowers, a big framed photograph of Archie's mother and father. (There is a reproduction of "September Morn" hanging in Archie's bathroom.) The bedroom is wall-to-wall carpeted, and it also has a Kirman rug, 8 feet 4 inches by 3 feet 2 inches. Archie has been known to keep an African violet on his windowsill. Wolfe owns everything in the house except the furniture in Archie's bedroom; Archie paid for that himself. Now mount a steep flight of stairs to the roof level, walk through a narrow aluminum door, and you are in the plant rooms. In a blaze of dazzling orchids you pass down narrow aisles with angle-iron staging painted silver, and concrete benches under a spraying system invented by old Theodore Horstmann. A word here on Theodore Horstmann, about whom we know too little. He weighs 135 pounds; he gets around $200 a week from Wolfe; he is an enthusiast for walking—thinks it is good for everybody, and is still, at his age, trying to prove it. Theodore takes his meals in the kitchen with Fritz. Wolfe's roof is partitioned into five rooms in all, where

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varying conditions of temperature and humidity are maintained by the vigilance of Horstmann. There is one room for Cattleya, Laelia, and hybrids; one for Odontoglossum, Oncidium, and Miltonia; a tropical room with graduating flasks and lath screens. There is Horstmann's den, where he sleeps. There is also a potting room with its telephone and Wolfe's special stool, which is more like a throne than a stool. Here Theodore keeps his parakeets. This room can be flooded with ciphogene by a valve outside, to turn it into a fumigating room. Supplies—pots, sand, sphagnum, leafmold, loam, osmundine, charcoal, crock—are kept in an unheated and unglazed cubby alongside the shaft where the outside elevator comes up. Wolfe has ten thousand plants in hundreds of varieties in the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street. Many are very rare; many have won prizes. He buys them from collectors all over the world—it is just routine for Wolfe to spend $800 for one plant from Burma—and others are given to him by friends who are fellow orchid-fanciers. His Zygopetalum, for example, came from the hundred-foot North Cove, Long Island, greenhouses of Lewis Hewitt, capitalist, socialite, orchid-fancier, and aristologist, who dines with Wolfe twice a year. Even Inspector Cramer once gave Wolfe an orchid. Wolfe's collection includes the famous "black" orchids, the color of molasses on coal, according to Archie (the labellum is large, the sepals are lanceolate, the throat is tinged with orange). Cuyler Ditson once offered Wolfe enough for one of them to buy an anti-aircraft gun. Wolfe has remarked to Archie that orchids are his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic, and temperamental. He brings them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the limits of their perfection, then gives them away; he has never been known to sell one. His patience and ingenuity, supported by Horstmann's fidelity, have produced remarkable results and gained for

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the roof a reputation in quite different circles from those whose interests center in the office downstairs. Undoubtedly Wolfe is one of the seven most respected breeders of orchids in the United States. Among his other accomplishments in this field are the albinos he obtained by making three new crosses with Paphiopedilum lawrenceanum hyeanum. Wolfe is proud to show his orchids, to individuals or to groups, by invitation only. "Mr. Wolfe, you know Miss Rowan," Archie says to him. "She wants to be shown the orchids." "That is one compliment I always surrender to," says Wolfe.

4 The Major Domo "There are a few great cooks, a sprinkling of good ones, and a pestiferous host of bad ones. I have in my home a good one. Mr. Fritz Brenner." —Nero Wolfe to Jerome Berin, Too Many Cooks

Fritz Brenner has been with Wolfe even longer than Archie Goodwin, and he is more than a good cook; he is the major domo of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street. Fritz gets up at 6:30 in the morning, and he never goes to bed until Wolfe does, at midnight or later. He sometimes answers the doorbell after 11:00 in the morning, when Archie is in the office with Wolfe, except between 6:00 and 8:00 in the evening, when he is busy fixing dinner. It would be fair to say that (when Archie is not around) Fritz protects Wolfe, acting as his buffer against the world, from anything and everything, taking his telephone calls, and generally guarding the mansion. Fritz also keeps the old brownstone neat; he is responsible for the condition of the castle, with the exception of the plant rooms (Theodore's responsibility), the office (Archie insists on taking care of this himself), and Archie's bedroom (again, Archie's personal responsibility).

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"You know, Mr. Goodwin, this house represents the most insolent denial of female rights the mind of man has ever conceived. No woman in it from top to bottom, but the routine is faultless, the food is perfect, and the sweeping and dusting impeccable." Clara Fox of The Rubber Band is paying a compliment to Nero Wolfe here, but he must share the credit in no small part with Fritz. When working in the kitchen (he does not like to talk or listen when he is actually cooking), Fritz quite properly wears a chef's cap and apron. Alone there, he likes to sit in his stocking feet, listening to the radio and playing solitaire. He keeps a pair of slippers beside him, however, to don if there is a caller at the door. This habit, Archie explains, is "on account of things left on his toes and feet by the war to remember it by." Fritz always makes a special effort to prepare a good dinner when things are going well in the office; he worries (much more than Archie, certainly more than Wolfe) when there is no client in the offing. Archie has never, quite honestly, been able to understand Fritz's attitude toward murder. Fritz deplores it, naturally. To him the idea of one human being killing another is insupportable, except in the case of war between the nations. He never shows the slightest interest in the details of any murder case that Wolfe and Archie are at work on, not even who the victim was, or the murderer, and if Archie tries to tell him about any of the fine points in the solution of the case, they just plain bore him. For Fritz, a good case is one that will not interfere with meals, will not last long enough to make Wolfe cranky, will not bring any females into the old brownstone, and will probably result in a nice fat fee. When there are guests at Wolfe's home on West Thirtyfifth Street, and they are invited to lunch or dine, Wolfe is punctilious in introducing them to Fritz.

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Fritz knows how to drive a car but pretends he doesn't, and he has no license; he wants that department left entirely to Archie. For his services Fritz was paid, at one time, $1000 a month (he probably makes more today). That was when Wolfe, on the trail of Arnold Zeck, decided to disappear for a while. He suggested that Fritz during this period should go to work for Marko Vukcic at Rusterman's at a salary of ''at least $2000 a month," which Archie said was twice as much as Wolfe was paying him. Fritz is not supposed to double in acrobatics, but when they are called for he does just fine. On one occasion he dropped to the floor, grabbed a man's ankles, and jerked his feet out from under him. When Fritz takes a stand, there is no moving him. He once told Inspector Cramer, "I think a great deal of this disturbance is unnecessary. My duties here are of the household and not professional, but I cannot help hearing what reaches my ears, and I am aware of the many times that Mr. Wolfe has found the answers to problems that were too much for you. This happened in his own house, and I think it should be left entirely to him." Fritz comes from the part of Switzerland where people speak French, and he has always preferred to read a French newspaper. He has a sweet sort of faraway smile, he blushes easily, and he can giggle without giving you doubts about his fundamentals. He can catch a joke, and while he never tries to return it, he can be a very tenacious kidder. "And how!" is the only slang he ever uses. While he deplores murders, he loves conspiracies and all sorts of sinister things. He is very fond of his pet turtle. Fritz is almost always good-humored, although he went on the warpath once because Saul Panzer and Johnny Keems were hanging out in his kitchen too much, and Johnny had eaten some tambo shells Fritz was going to put mushrooms

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into for lunch. But he never totes a grudge. He is always willing to oblige in even the smallest things. "I could bring your milk, Archie, if you would just tell me." "If I can drink it I can carry it." One of the nicest things about Fritz is that to him anything in a skirt is a lady. He is stiffly formal when there is a woman present, however, not from any sense of propriety (at the time of the Murder by the Book case, he said to Archie, "If you need any help with the ladies, for my age I am not to be ignored; a Swiss has a long usefulness"), but from fear. Whenever any female, no matter what age or appearance, gets inside Nero Wolfe's house, Fritz is apprehensive and ill-at-ease until she gets out again. Fritz is particularly mistrustful of Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner, the only female owner and operator of a detective agency in New York City. He says to Archie, "You know quite well that a woman with eyes the color of that Miss Bonner, and eyelashes, her own, is a dangerous animal." Fritz suspects, and will continue to suspect, that Dol has designs not on Archie but on Nero Wolfe himself. Fritz, like Wolfe, is something of a philosopher—at least about food. "Starving the live," he tells Wolfe in The Black Mountain, "will not profit the dead." Wolfe responds: "Montaigne?" "No, sir," says Fritz. "I made it up." "I congratulate you. To be taken for Montaigne is a peak few men can reach."

5 The Oldest and Best Friend Wolfe Ever Had "I am not a turtle in aspic, like you."

—Marko Vukcic to Nero Wolfe, Too Many Cooks

In the month of March in the year 1954 Marko Vukcic, the oldest and best friend Wolfe ever had, was shot three times, twice in the chest, once in the belly, as he came out of the apartment house in which he lived, on East Fifty-fourth Street. The murderer was a man who had been waiting for him in a parked car. In fulfillment of a pledge made many years ago, Nero Wolfe visited the city morgue on East Twenty-ninth Street for the one and only time. He went there to place two dinars on Vukcic's eyes. (Wolfe, as we shall see, also got the murderer.) Marko Vukcic was the only man in New York City who called Nero Wolfe by his first name and one of the very few men in the world whom Wolfe ever called by their first names. The two had been boys together in the Balkans; in New York, Vukcic for many years dined regularly at Wolfe's table, and Wolfe and Archie returned the favor by dining once a month at Rusterman's, the restaurant of which Vukcic was founder and sole owner. (If you want to eat there you 56

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have to reserve a table a day in advance and then pay six bucks for one helping of guinea hen.) Up until the time of his death Vukcic was also one of the Fifteen Masters, the foremost chefs of the world; in his youth he had worked under Virgil Pompa at Mondor's in Paris. Politically, in Wolfe's opinion, Vukcic was "headstrong, gullible, over-sanguine, and naïve." He was also a very wealthy man, and a man who vastly enjoyed the company of women. In Sergeant Purley Stebbins' estimation, Vukcic was "a chicken-chaser." Felix Courbet, of Rusterman's staff, put it a little differently. "Marko was a gallant man. Only one thing could ever take him away from his work here: a woman. I will not say that to him a woman was more important than a sauce—he could not be accused of ever neglecting a sauce—but he had a warm eye for women. After all, it was not essential for him to be in the kitchen when everything was planned and ready, and Joe and Leo and I are competent for the tables and service, and if Marko chose to enjoy dinner at his own table with a guest there was no feeling about it among us. But it might have caused feeling among others." Archie himself had one revelation of Marko's gallantry. "When I took Sue Dondero to Rusterman's for dinner, Marko had cast an eye on her and contributed a bottle of one of his best clarets, and the next day had phoned to ask if I would care to give him her address and phone number, and I had done so and crossed her off." Vukcic had been married once to Dina Rossi, daughter of Domenico Rossi of the Empire Café in London and another of the Fifteen Masters, but Philip Laszio had stolen her away; and he must have been married again, at a later date, for he is recorded as "a widower" when we first meet him in the chronicles. Vukcic had come to the United States, we are told, in 1927, eight years before the affair at Kanawha Spa. Physically

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he was not fat, like Wolfe, but he was huge, "like a lion upright on its hind legs." He had magnificent white teeth, a rather swarthy complexion, and a dense tangle of dark brown hair that kept tumbling into his eyes so that he constantly had to comb it back with his fingers in moments of agitation. Does this sound a little like someone we already know? Indeed it does.

It sounds like Nero Wolfe himself. For the present, let us leave it at that.

6 The Man of Mystery "I told you to forget that man's name, and I mean it. The reason is simply that I don't want to hear his name because he is the only man on earth that I'm afraid of. I'm not afraid he'll hurt me; I'm afraid of what he may someday force me to do to keep from hurting him." —Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, The Second Confession

"I want to tell you about a man," Nero Wolfe said to the Sperling family in The Second Confession. "I know his name but prefer not to pronounce it, so shall call him X. I assure you he is no figment; I only wish he were. I have little concrete knowledge of the immense properties he owns, though I do know that one of them is a high and commanding hill not a hundred miles from here on which, some years ago, he built a large and luxurious mansion. He has varied and extensive sources of income. All of them are illegal and some of them are morally repulsive. Narcotics, smuggling, industrial and commercial rackets, gambling, waterfront blackguardism, professional larceny, blackmailing, political malfeasance—that by no means exhausts his curriculum, but it sufficiently indicates his character. He has, up to now, triumphantly kept himself invulnerable by having the perspicacity to see that a criminal practicing on a large scale over 59

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a wide area and a long period of time can get impunity only by maintaining a gap between his person and his crimes which cannot be bridged; and by having unexcelled talent, a remorseless purpose, and a will that cannot be dented or deflected." Despite interruptions, Wolfe continued. "If you think I am describing an extraordinary man, I am indeed. How, for instance, does he maintain the gap? There are two ways to catch a criminal: one, connect him with the crime itself; or two, prove that he knowingly took a share of the spoils. Neither is feasible with X. Take for illustration a typical crime—anything from a triviality like pocket picking or bag snatching up to a major raid on the public treasury. The criminal or gang of criminals nearly always takes full responsibility for the operation itself, but in facing the problem of disposal of the loot, which always appears, and of protection against discovery and prosecutions, which is seldom entirely absent, he cannot avoid dealing with others. He may need a fence, a lawyer, a witness for an alibi, a channel to police or political influence—no matter what; he will almost inevitably need someone or something. He goes to one he knows, or knows about, one named A. A, finding a little difficulty, consults B. We are already, observe, somewhat removed from the crime, and B now takes us still further away by enlisting the help of C. C, having trouble with a stubborn knot in the thread, communicates with D. Here we near the terminal. D knows X and how to get to him. "In and around New York there are many thousands of crimes each month, from mean little thefts to the highest reaches of fraud and thuggery. In a majority of them the difficulties of the criminals are met, or are not met, either by the criminals themselves or by A or B or C. But a large number of them get up to D, and if they reach D they go to X. I don't know how many D's there are, but certainly not

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many, for they are selected by X after a long and hard scrutiny and the application of severe tests, since he knows that a D once accepted by him must be backed with a fierce loyalty at almost any cost. I would guess that there are very few of them and even so, I would also guess that if a D were impelled, no matter how, to resort to treachery, he would find that that too had been foreseen and provision had been made. "You see where X is. Few criminals, or A's and B's and C's, even know he exists. Those few do not know his name. If a fraction of them have guessed his name, it remains a guess. Estimates of the annual dollar volume involved in criminal operations in the metropolitan area vary from three hundred million to half a billion. X has been in this business more than twenty years now, and the share that finds its way tortuously to him must be considerable, after deducting his payments to appointed and elected persons and their staffs. A million a year? Half that? I don't know. Some years ago a man not far from the top of the New York Police Department did many favors for X, but I doubt if he was ever paid a cent. Blackmailing is one of X's favorite fields, and that man was susceptible." ''Inspector Drake," Jimmy Sperling blurted. Wolfe shook his head. "I am not giving names, and anyway I said not far from the top." Wolfe's eyes went from right to left and back again. "I am obliged for your forbearance," he said. "These details are necessary." We shall meet this man of mystery again.

7 Homicide Squad " I respect and admire Mr. Cramer and would like to help him." —Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, "Man Alive"

When Inspector L. T. Cramer,1 head of the Homicide Bureau, calls on Nero Wolfe, he is usually sore and sour. He stalks into the old brownstone house, tosses his coat and hat at Archie, marches down the hall to the office, plunks himself into the red leather chair, plants his feet flat on the floor, slams his fist on the desk, and lets Wolfe have it: Wolfe is lying to him; Wolfe is interfering with the proper workings of the New York Police Department in general and with those of the Homicide Squad in particular; Wolfe is withholding evidence; Wolfe is deliberately obstructing justice. Wolfe is not intimidated, only exasperated. On other, rarer, occasions, Cramer is all sweetness and light. That is when he would welcome any information Wolfe or Archie may have to give him. He may even drink a glass of beer with Wolfe, but only when he wants it understood that he's only human and should be treated accordingly. When Wolfe offers refreshment and does not specify beer, Cramer chooses a bourbon and water. Once in a great 1

Cramer's initials are given as "L.T.C." in The Silent Speaker. We are never told what the "L." and the "T." stand for. 6*

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while he is even invited to dine at the old brownstone house in West Thirty-fifth Street. Still and all, Cramer is official. It is not Wolfe's job to take a murderer into custody, it is merely his job to catch him and, sometimes, to provide the evidence that will electrocute him or imprison him for life. So Cramer is nearly always invited to the charade at which Wolfe solves his current mystery. In Cramer's own, too modest2 opinion of himself, he is "not exactly a boob. I arrested a man once and he turned out to be guilty, that's why they made me an inspector." For this he is paid almost $10,000 a year by the city of New York. He is a cop, he says. And he is a good cop. "I am paid to go and look at dead people and decide if they died as the result of a crime, and, if they did, find the criminal and fasten it on him so it will stick." He is also an honest cop. "Am I on the level?" he once had to say to Archie. "Absolutely." "I am?" "You know damn well you are." He is also a fearless cop. "I wouldn't give an unconditional guarantee on his brains," Archie once said, "but there is nothing wrong with his guts." In 1935, at the time of the Red Box affair, Cramer had been enforcing the law "for thirty years." He started out by pounding the pavements. Lily Rowan's father was one of his best friends and got him on the force, and got him out of a couple of tight holes in the old days when Rowan, the sewer contractor, was on the inside of Tammany Hall. Cramer knew Lily before she could walk. "I'm not the man to do any cleaning job on her," he told Wolfe in Not Quite Dead Enough, "and I don't want to turn her over to any of these * Cramer solves his own complicated case, without any help from Wolfe or Archie, in Red Threads, recorded by Rex Stout.

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wolves. I want you to handle her up at your place. And I want to be there in the front room where she can't see me." Cramer said in 1935 that he would be ready to retire "in another ten years." But he is still going strong, and in the fifties and the sixties he has seldom talked of retirement from active duty. Cramer has known Wolfe even longer than Archie has. When he is not feeling sore and acting sour, Cramer will admit that "Wolfe has always been better than square with me and there's one or two things I owe him. I'll hand him a favor whenever I've got one the right size." And he knows that Wolfe is smart—"as smart a man as I ever knew." "You're the worst thorn in the flesh I know of," he barked at Wolfe in The Red Box, "but you are also half as smart as you think you are, and that puts you head and shoulders above everybody else since Julius Caesar." As for Cramer's attitude toward Archie, "You know, son," he says in one of his gentler moments, when he wants to peddle the impression that he regards himself as a member of the family, "you have one or two good qualities. In a way I even like you. In another way I could stand and watch your hide peeling off and not shed any tears. You have undoubtedly got the goddamnedest nerve of anybody I know except Nero Wolfe." In a more irate mood Cramer says to Archie, "You're the most damn contrary pest within my knowledge. Twenty times I've had you under my feet when I was busy and had no use for you. Now I go to look at a murder and I am told the important witness has calmly taken his hat and coat and departed, and by God, it turns out to be you! The one time you're supposed to be there you're not! I've told you before I'd throw you in the jug for a nickel. This time I'd do it for nothing." Archie can always tell what Cramer's tone is going to be by the way he greets him when Archie lets him in. If he calls

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Archie "Archie," which doesn't happen often, he wants something he can expect to get only as a favor, and has determined to forget old sores and keep it friendly. If he calls Archie "Goodwin" and asks how he is, he still is after a favor but thinks he is entitled to it. If he calls Archie "Goodwin" but shows no interest in his health, he has come for what he would call cooperation and intends to get it. If he calls Archie nothing at all, he's ready to shoot from the hip, and watch out. Over the years Wolfe's respect and admiration for Cramer have developed and increased, but for the most part Wolfe keeps them carefully repressed. Exasperated, he will snarl to Archie, "Mr. Cramer needs a mirror to make sure he has a nose on his face." He once said to Cramer's face, "I repeat, sir, that your acceptance of your salary constitutes a fraud on the people of New York and you are a disgrace to an honorable profession." But he does not really mean it. "He unquestionably means well," he will say of Cramer in a calmer moment. As for Archie, he has called Cramer "a born executive, if an executive is a guy who, when anything difficult or unexpected happens, yells for somebody else to come help him." But there's one thing about Cramer that Archie does like. "He never fiddle-faddles much." He even admitted, in "The Gun with Wings," that Cramer was "by no means a nitwit." Perhaps the two adjectives that best describe Inspector Cramer are "forceful" and "rugged." He is a large man—around 190 in weight—with a sizable bottom and heavy, broad, but erect and military shoulders below a thick, muscular bull neck. His middle, though it will never be in Wolfe's class, is beginning to make pretensions. In spite of his size and years, Cramer is still springy. His big round phiz is usually beet-red, more so in summer than in winter. He has gray hair, sometimes scraggly; cold, sharp, blue-gray eyes, surrounded by crinkles, under bushy

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gray eyebrows; they can twinkle when things are going well or narrow when things are not so good for him. He also has delicate little ears that stay close to his skull, a blunt nose, and a wide determined mouth. Cramer can look frank and friendly, he can be as amiable as a guy stopping you on a lonely hill because he is out of gas, but he may or may not mean it. With Wolfe he can sometimes be tactful and adroit; he can even drip honey when he wants to get something out of him. He can also bluster and yap in his grittiest rasp, but he usually knows when to drop it. Like Wolfe, he is a frequent grunter and an occasional puffer. He has strong principles, which he steadfastly adheres to when they do not interfere with his work: he will say "Bellywash!" or even "Balls!" to Wolfe and Archie, but he has old-fashioned ideas about using such language in front of ladies. Cramer is a cigar-chewer; he has seldom been known to light one, at least in Wolfe's office. He must consume a good many of them every day. "When I get into such shape that I don't want a cigar, I'm in a hell of a fix." No matter how hot the day, Cramer is never seen in public without his coat and vest; he wears an old felt hat winter and summer, rain or shine; he requires number twelve shoes; occasionally he carries a briefcase. Cramer has a trick of squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again; once in a while he pulls at the lobe of his ear; he sometimes lifts a forefinger to rub the side of his nose in perplexity; but he has few other characteristic gestures. Cramer spends most of his time at an old well-scarred desk in his medium-sized office with three windows on the third floor of the dingy old building of the Tenth Precinct at 230 West Twentieth Street, which includes the headquarters of Homicide West (now Homicide South), reading poetry and drawing horses and letting the cops earn his salary for him when he is not personally on a case. But he is married and

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he has a home, when he can manage to get to it. He also has a daughter who was in high school in 1937 and a son who was in Australia with the Air Corps in 1942. If Inspector Cramer has an Archie Goodwin, it is Sergeant Purley Stebbins of the Homicide Squad. Purley is big (half an inch taller than Archie, 190 pounds) and broad (broader than Archie by two inches) and strong, but he is not handsome. He has a bony face with big ears, pig-bristle eyebrows, and a square jaw. He has no sense of humor, and he doesn't laugh often, especially when he is on duty, but when he does laugh he shows a gold tooth. Purley is not dumb by any means, and he has never forgotten the prize boner that Wolfe bluffed him into on the Longren case. Even Archie can tolerate Sergeant Stebbins. "Purley and I have often been enemies and even friends once or twice." But Archie is one of the few people Purley knows that he has not completely made up his mind about. Since Archie is a private detective, the sooner he dies or at least gets lost outside the city limits, the better—but that is basic. What Purley can't quite get rid of is the suspicion that Archie might have made a good cop if he had been caught in time. As it stands, however, Purley is always upset in the presence of either Wolfe or Archie, and the two of them together absolutely give him the fidgets. The result is that he talks too loudly and too fast. While he hates to come to Wolfe, he always comes himself; he never passes the buck to a subordinate. When all that is really wanted or expected of Archie is a piece of his hide, he is assigned to Lieutenant George Rowcliff. If and when he is offered a choice of going to heaven or hell, Archie says, it will be simple enough for him to answer; he'll merely ask, "Where's Rowcliff?" Rowcliff is strong and handsome, and he has earned medals for personal bravery, but he has fishy pop eyes and a voice

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that snarls. He wants to be a captain so bad he can taste it, and one of these days he will probably make the grade. His biggest handicap is that when he gets irritated to a certain point he can't help stuttering, and Archie is on to him enough to tell when he's just about there. Then Archie starts stuttering before Rowcliff does. Even with a close watch and careful timing, it takes luck to do it just right, but Archie is pretty lucky. He once had Rowcliff stuttering in two minutes and twenty seconds, a record, but he has a standing bet with Saul Panzer that he can do it in two minutes flat with three or more tries. When Archie stutters back at him, it makes Rowcliff so mad that he stutters worse than before, and then Archie complains that Rowcliff is mimicking him. VI would enjoy a murder where Rowcliff was the one that got it," Archie once said to Sergeant Purley Stebbins. "And so would you." Rowcliff is no favorite with the present Commissioner, William Skinner, either: on April 3, 1940, he made Rowcliff sign a written apology to Wolfe and Archie. To Wolfe, Rowcliff will always be "the officer who came here once with a warrant and searched my house." Cramer, of course, has his superiors in rank as well as his army of underlings—men in and out of the Department from whom he has to take orders, sometimes reluctantly. In the early days there were Police Commissioner Humbert, for example, in Wolfe's opinion "a disagreeable noise," and District Attorney (later Commissioner) Skinner with his thin nose, his ratty eyes, and his deep, croaking voice. John Charles Dunn, when United States Secretary of State, called Skinner "a slick rabble-rouser." There is also Deputy Commissioner O'Hara, who has never forgiven Archie for being clever once. O'Hara has the nicest office at Centre Street, on a corner, with six large windows and chairs and rugs and other furnishings paid for by O'Hara's rich wife. Nor should we forget Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, who later shortened his name to Mandel.

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He is a little plump and a little short, bald in front and bigeared. He isn't impressive to look at, but he is businesslike and self-assured without being cocky, and Wolfe and Archie can stand him a lot better than they can most of the city officials with whom they come in contact. When a case takes Wolfe and Archie to Westchester County, as one rather often does, they come to grips with another set of officials. Originally, in White Plains there was Wolfe's old enemy, Fletcher M. Anderson. In 1928 Anderson was an Assistant District Attorney in New York City, but he moved to the country in 1929, when he married money. Then he was District Attorney of Westchester County, "a rich man with professional ambitions, and no fool," in Wolfe's opinion. Anderson's professional ambitions presumably paid off, because he is no longer District Attorney. That position is now held by plump Cleveland Archer. His laugh is more a giggle than a guffaw, which suits him just right, and he has good reason to remember the Fashalt case. Ben Cook is the Chief of Police in White Plains, and Ben Dykes is the head of the Westchester County detectives, but Archie's bête noire in that part of the world is the Rowcliff of the North, Lieutenant Con Noonan of the New York State Police—"a stinker from the start," Archie wrote in "Door to Death." Wolfe called Noonan "a typical uniformed blackguard." In Archie's view, Noonan would have been very much at home in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy, and he has the meanest smile of anyone Archie knows, except maybe Boris Karloff. Wolfe does not hold lightly the ability of the New York Police Department to put an army of men, in plainclothes and in uniform, Inspector Cramer at their head, into the field when murder strikes Manhattan. Far away from West Thirty-fifth Street, at Kanawha Spa in West Virginia, Wolfe said, sighing, "Inspector Cramer's indefatigable routine does have its advantages. . . ."

8 And the West Thirty-fifth Street Irregulars "Who do you think will be best for it, Saul or Fred or Orrie or Bill?" —Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, "Christmas Party"

It's hard to tell what Saul Panzer looks like, because you can't see his face for his nose, but we know that it is "a. wrinkled little mug," constantly in need of a shave, with flat ears and rust-colored hair that won't stay in place. Saul has little deepset gray eyes through which he can get an everlasting blueprint of anybody with one quick glance. He is short—5 feet 7 inches—and slight—140 pounds—and one of his shoulders is half an inch higher than the other. He has a voice that is always a little husky and a smile as tender as he is tough; it helps to make him the best poker player Archie Goodwin knows. Saul customarily wears an old gray or brown suit, and the pants are never pressed. He never wears an overcoat, but he sports an old brown cap. All in all, he looks like a character on relief, whereas he owns at least two houses in Brooklyn. He likes to smoke slick brown cigars and Egyptian cigarettes, Pharaohs, that smell like something they scatter on 70

And the West Thirty-fifth Street Irregulars

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lawns in the early spring. When Wolfe offers refreshments, Saul's usual drink is champagne. Saul never swears, and his favorite exclamation, if he has one, is "Lovin' babe!" Wolfe has said that he would trust Saul Panzer "further than might be thought credible." Saul rates even higher in Archie's opinion. Saul, he says, is about the smallest practicing dick, public or private, that he's ever seen, but he has the biggest scope. "He can't push over buildings because he simply hasn't got the size, but there's no other job he wouldn't earn his money on." "If and when I find myself up a tree with a circle of man-eating tigers crouching on the ground below, and a squad of beavers starting to gnaw at the trunk of the tree, the sight of Saul approaching would be absolutely beautiful." Saul is "the best head and foot detective west of the Atlantic." Saul is a bachelor, living by himself on the top floor— living room, bedroom, kitchenette, and bath—of a remodeled house on East Thirty-eighth Street between Lexington and Third. His living room is a big room, lighted with two floor lamps and two table lamps. One wall has windows, another is solid with books, and the other two have pictures, good ones, and shelves that are cluttered with everything from chunks of minerals to walrus tusks. In the far corner is a grand piano. Saul's telephone number, if you need him, is Liberty 2-3306, or maybe JAckson 4—3109. Saul free-lances. He has no office and he doesn't need one. He is so darn good that he demands, and gets, double the market, and any day of the week he gets so many offers that he can pick and choose as he pleases. But Archie has never known him to turn down Wolfe except when he was so tied up he couldn't shake loose. "This is the third time I've flopped on you in ten years," Saul once said to Wolfe, "and that's too often. I don't want you to pay me, not even expenses."

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But Wolfe never gets riled with Saul Panzer. At West Thirty-fifth Street, on a case, Saul is always businesslike, never frolicsome, sometimes glum. He never sits in the red leather chair, not on account of any false modesty that he doesn't rate it, but because he doesn't like to face a window. Having the best pair of eyes Archie knows of, not even excepting Wolfe's, he likes to give them every advantage. His usual perch is a straightbacked yellow chair not far from Archie's swivel. Even when he and Archie are alone in the office, playing pinochle or gin, Saul sits in a peculiar way: with his feet tight together, on their toes, pulled under his chair. Wolfe paid Saul $20 a day plus expenses in 1945. Later, as the cost of living went up, so did Saul's prices, to $30 a day in The Silent Speaker, to $50 a day in "A Window for Death," to $60 a day in "Christmas Party" and // Death Ever Slept, to $70 a day in Champagne for One, to $80 a day in "Murder Is Corny." He is sometimes paid by the hour—$10. Saul knows how good he is, but he is modest about it. "I have developed my faculties," is his way of putting it. When Saul Panzer and Orrie Cather are around at mealtimes, they eat with Wolfe and Archie, but Fred Durkin eats in the kitchen with Fritz. Fred puts vinegar on things, and no man who does that eats at Wolfe's table. Fred did it first back in 1932, calling for vinegar and stirring it into a brown roux for a squab. Nothing was said, Wolfe regarding it as immoral to interfere with anybody's meal until it is down and the digestive process completed, but the next morning he fired Fred and kept him fired for over a month. Fred is a big—5 feet 10, 190 pounds—and ungainly man who moves like a bear. But he is not clumsy. When he does anything at all, walks or talks or reaches for something, you always expect him to trip or fumble, but he never does, and he can tail better than anybody Archie knows except Saul Panzer.


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Fred's face is the map of Ireland, and it is a truthful map: Fred is as Irish as the River Shannon. He is married to an Italian girl named Fanny, whose friend Anna Fiore interested Wolfe in the affair of the Fer-de-Lance. Once, years ago, Fred fell temporarily for a pretty little trick with ample apples, and Fanny caught on, and since then he doesn't trust himself with females under thirty. Fred and Fanny now have four children. Fred, in Wolfe's office, likes to toss his hat so it will hook on the back of the swivel chair at Archie's desk, but he almost always misses. Straight rye with no chaser is Fred's drink, but Archie has never been able to talk him out of the notion that he would offend Wolfe if he didn't order beer when Wolfe offers refreshments. In Archie's view, Fred was "as honest as sunshine, but he wasn't so brilliant as sunshine." Wolfe said of him to Clara Fox, at the time of the Rubber Band case, "Within his capacity, he is worthy of your trust and mine." Fred's rate was $7.50 an hour, but has been increased to

If Fred Durkin moves like a bear, Orrie Cather moves like a cat. His strong point is getting people to tell him things. It isn't so much the questions he asks. As a matter of fact, he isn't very good at questions; it's just the way he looks at people. Something about Orrie makes people feel that he ought to be told things. Orrie has smartened up a lot since we first met him in Fer-de-Lance. Then, a veteran of World War I, he was always looking around for a place to squirt his tobacco juice. Orrie is a veteran of World War II also, as are both Panzer and Durkin. Broad-shouldered 6-foot 180-pound Orrie—in 1945 he was just beginning to go a little bald—has confident brown eyes and wavy lips. He likes to whistle while he works, and

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he has a pretty good singing voice, which he put to good use in the Red Box case. Orrie was born with the attitude toward all attractive women that a fisherman has toward all the trout in a stream, and he has never seen any reason to change it. Wolfe has said of Orrie, "I have no affection for him; he has frequently vexed me; he has not the dignity of a man who has found his place and accepted it, as you have, Fred; nor the integrity of one who knows his superiority but restricts it to areas that are acceptable to him, as you have, Saul." Orrie's rate to Wolfe used to be $7 an hour; it is now $8. Then there was Johnny (John Joseph) Keems, who looked like a Princeton boy with his face washed. Archie never liked Johnny much. His bright, eager tones, sounding like Little Willie offering to clean the blackboard, always gave Archie a pain in the back of his lap. Johnny was the kind of guy who bought gum at every slot vender he saw for an excuse to look in the mirror. He put slick stuff on his hair and he wore spats. Wolfe had "the idiotic idea" that when Johnny looked at a girl and smiled she melted like ice cream in the summer sun. Archie's gripe was that Johnny unquestionably had the idea at the back of his head that it would be a fine thing for the detective business if he, Johnny, got Archie's job, "which didn't bother me a bit," Archie lied, "because I know Wolfe would never be able to stand him. He would never get the knack of keeping Wolfe on the job by bawling him out properly." One of Johnny's favorite ways of irritating Archie was to put someone else in Archie's desk chair. Johnny himself didn't try putting himself in it again after the day in 1939 when Archie found him there looking at his notebook and sort of lost his temper. Still, Archie didn't like it at all—and Wolfe liked it a lot


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less—when Johnny got himself killed in 1956 by a particularly nasty murderer who had the habit of disposing of his victims by driving back and forth over them in a car. True, Johnny would probably not have got himself killed if he had not disobeyed Wolfe's orders. Wolfe employs Bill Gore less often than he employs Saul and Fred and Orrie, but Bill is a good man when Wolfe needs a fourth. Bill weighs 200 pounds and no fat. One glance at the top of his head shows that he will be bald in another five years. Wolfe paid Bill $20 a day in The Silent Speaker. Archie once said of Bill, "I had said something funny to him once back in 1948, and ever since he has had a policy of laughing whenever I open my trap." Then there is "Mister Jones," a character who has appeared on the expense list now and again for information supplied. He may not actually be Stalin's nephew, but he seems to be at least a deputy in the Union Square Politburo. Archie has never once seen the guy, but he knows two things about him: that it was through him that Wolfe got the dope on a couple of Commies that sent them up the river, and that when you buy him you pay in advance. Archie is against female detectives on principle. "A shedick must have a good thick hide," he says, "which is not a skin I'd like to touch; if she hasn't, she is apt to melt just when a cold eye and hard nerves are called for, and in that case she doesn't belong. However, there are times when a principle should take a nap." It seems even less likely that Nero Wolfe would welcome the assistance of a woman operative, yet the fact is that he has on several occasions when the situation seemed to warrant it. Sometimes it is Ruth Brady—she can give even Archie

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lectures on the scientific use of a persuader—but in his later cases it has been Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner1 that Wolfe has most often relied upon. Dol is about Archie's age. As Fritz Brenner has observed, she has homegrown long black lashes making a curling canopy for her caramel-colored eyes. There is nothing wrong with her lips, and she has good hands. She owns and operates her own agency on Forty-fifth Street, and she does all right with it with the assistance of Sally Colt. Sally is the right age to be Archie's younger sister; her eyes are dark blue, and in Archie's view she has only two flaws: first, she titters; second, she drinks rum and Coke. We have already had occasion to mention Ethelbert (Geoffrey) Hitchcock, Wolfe's London associate. Wolfe has an associate in Rome also—a chunky signor and a good man by Roman standards, one Giuseppe Drogo. In Bari, Wolfe can call on an old friend for information— Paolo Telesio. In New York there is Del (sometimes known as Larry) Bascom, who heads the Bascom detective agency, a man with a scar on his cheek. Bascom worked with Wolfe and Archie on the Hay Fever case, and it is likely that he and Wolfe have cooperated on other occasions. We should also remember Sol Feder of the Feder Paper Company, 535 West Seventeenth Street. Sol is not an operative, but he offers a sometimes valuable service: you ask for Sol at his office and tell him your name is Montgomery. He'll conduct you along a passage that exits on Eighteenth Street. Right there, either at the curb or double-parked, will be a taxi driven by Archie's favorite hackie, Herb Aronson. Herb's taxi will have a handkerchief tied to the door handle, and Archie will be in the cab. In later cases Archie has used 1

As noted earlier, Dol has a case of her own in The Hand in the Glove, chronicled by Rex Stout.


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Abe at the Perlman Paper Company, 214 East Twenty-eighth Street, for a similar accommodation. A newspaperman can be a rich source of information to a private detective, and Archie has made it his business to make friends with several. In the early days he would call for help from Bill Pratt of the Courier or Harry Foster of the Gazette, but these days it is Lon Cohen of the Gazette (an evening sheet with a circulation of nearly two million) who gets Archie's business. Lon used to be on the city desk, but today his position is a little mysterious; city or wire, daily or Sunday, foreign or national or local, he seems to know the way in and around without ever having to work at it. If he has a title, Archie doesn't know what it is, and he doubts that Lon would. Just his name on the door of a 9-by12 office, two doors down from the corner office of the publisher. His is the only desk in the office, and that's just as well because otherwise there would be no place for his feet, which are also about 9 by 12. (From the ankles up, he is fairly regular.) As far as Archie knows, his elevation to whatever he now is has gone to his head in only one way: he keeps a hairbrush in his desk, and every night when he is through he brushes his hair good. Lon knows more facts than the Police Department and the Public Library put together, he always seems to be up not only on what has just happened, but on what is going to happen next. Lon is very dark—dark skin stretched tight over his neat little face, dark brown deep-set eyes, clear and keen, hair almost black, slicked back and up over his sloping dome. He is next to the best of the poker players Archie spends his Thursday nights with. Lon gets to work every day at noon and quits at midnight. Archie doesn't remember a time when he has entered Lon's

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office when Lon hasn't been there, talking on one of the three phones he has on his desk. Lon has the occupational disease of every good newspaperman: when he gives information, he wants information in return. He and Archie have kept no account of how they stand on give and take over the years, but it pretty well evens up. Lon is exceedingly fond of highballs followed by two-inch steaks, and a good dinner for the two of them at Pierre's is Archie's way of paying him off. Over the years Wolfe and Archie have used the services of Doc Vollmer—Doctor Edwin A. Vollmer—for everything from stitching up Dora Chapin's head to signing a certificate that Wolfe was batty. Doc lives and works on West Thirty-fifth Street, about sixty yards from Wolfe's door, with his secretary-receptionisthousekeeper, Helen Grant, a handsome woman with ample frontage. Doc is a widower, and he has a son, Bill, away at school. When Doc calls on Wolfe he always goes to one of the smaller yellow chairs because of his short legs, takes off his spectacles, looks at them, puts them back on again, and asks, "Want some pills?" He is a sad-looking little guy with lots of forehead and a round face and round ears and not much jaw, and some years have gone by since he gave up any attempt to stand with his belly in and his chest out. He is one of the few people Wolfe really likes, maybe because he trots out of the office so fast as soon as he knows what is wanted of him. Wolfe himself is not a lawyer, although he has an excellent practical knowledge of the law, as a good private detective should. "Are you charging me with a malum}" he asks in

Murder by the Book. "In se or prohibitumT' And he once


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solved a murder case because of his knowledge about torts. When Wolfe needs a lawyer he can count on for almost anything except fee-splitting, he calls today on Nathaniel Parker (for some reason, in the early days, Nathaniel seems to have been known as Henry George Parker). In earlier, bygone days his legal counsel was Henry W. Barber. Parker is middle-aged, 6 feet 4 inches, with nothing to protect his bones from exposure to the weather but toughlooking leathery skin. He is one of the few men that Wolfe shakes hands with. If you need a good lawyer, his home number is Lincoln 3-4616; his office number is EAstwood 6-2605, or maybe PHoenix 5-2382 (again, Archie is a little evasive). When Wolfe needs a financial report on a client, he has Archie phone Higgins or Mitchell at the Metropolitan Trust Company, Thirty-fourth Street branch, where both he and Archie transact their financial business. When Wolfe wants a chemical analysis made, he gets in touch with Mr. Weinback of the Fisher Laboratories. They are expensive but thorough and reliable, and Wolfe can count on their findings to stand up as evidence, as he has more than once. No man is an island, and Wolfe well knows it; he must surround himself with men and women of character, people worthy of his trust. Nero Wolfe has done just that.

Part Two: The Case-Book of Nero Wolfe "Look at the record." —Archie Goodwin to Phoebe Gunther, The Silent Speaker

9 Alias Nero Wolfe "I would say, Mr. Stahl, that my temperament would incline me to resent and resist any attempt by any individual to inquire into my personal history or affairs." —Nero Wolfe, Over My Dead Body

Clara Wolfe, Nero Wolfe's adopted daughter, says to him in The Black Mountain, "It is true you have Montenegrin blood, you are of the race that fought back the savage Turks for five hundred years." The two girls who called themselves Carla Lovchen and Neya Tormic in Over My Dead Body were both Montenegrin, and they assumed that Wolfe was one and declared that he acted like one, although he did not look like one "since Tsernagores [Montenegrins] grow up and up, not all around like you." Much later, in 1954, Wolfe himself said, "I was born there," indicating a house in the shadow of the Black Mountain which stands between Montenegro and Albania. He was named, he says, after the mountain. The fact remains that Nero Wolfe is not a Montenegrin by birth; on the contrary, he was born in the United States of America. We cannot impeach his answer to the FBI agent Stahl's question in Over My Dead Body: "Are you a citizen 83

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of the United States?" Wolfe replied, " I am. I was born in this country." And a moment later he spoke of the United States as "my native country." But nineteen months earlier, in Too Many Cooks (1937), he had said to the Negro cooks and waiters and busboys at Kanawha Spa, "You gentlemen are Americans, much more completely American than I am, for I wasn't born here." This direct, calculated conflict is exactly paralleled by another. As late as the winter of 1951-1952 ("The Cop-Killer"), Wolfe said to Archie, " I got my naturalization papers twentyfour years ago." That is, in 1927 or 1928. Nevertheless, in 1946 (The Silent Speaker) Wolfe, in a revealing moment of exasperation, said, "And I have dared for nearly thirty years to exercise my right to vote!" Assuming the latter of the two preceding statements to have been closer to the truth, Wolfe was old enough to vote thirty years before 1946, perhaps in 1917. But he is not likely to have voted before 1920 at the earliest, as we shall see, because from 1913 to 1919, if not as late as 1921, he was not in the United States. If Wolfe was twenty-one in 1917, as he must have been in order to vote, then he was born in 1896. But, asked by Stahl, "You were at one time an agent of the Austrian government?" Wolfe replied, "Briefly, as a boy." As the late Bernard DeVoto wrote in his essay, "Alias Nero Wolfe": I am unwilling to believe that [Wolfe] could have been an Austrian agent at seventeen: I arbitrarily assume that he was at least eighteen, which moves the year of his birth back to 1895. But it is possible that he did not exercise his right to vote at the earliest opportunity he got. He may not have voted till, say, 1922. . . . Giving his phrase ["as a boy"] a flexibility of three more years, we may conclude that he could not have been eighteen but twenty-one in 1913. The limits are established: Wolfe was born between 1892 and 1895.

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Now let us turn to "Some Notes Relating to a Preliminary Investigation into the Paternity of Nero Wolfe," a pioneering piece of scholarship by Dr. John D. Clark. It appeared in The Baker Street Journal, the official publication of the Baker Street Irregulars, Vol. VI., No. 1, New Series, in January 1956. Writes Dr. Clark: Although DeVoto has proved that Wolfe was born in the United States some time during the years 1892-5, he has demonstrated nothing whatsoever regarding the geographical location of his conception, but has located it somewhere between March, 1891, and March, 1895. In the 1890s Montenegro was an isolated and almost inaccessible principality. No railroads passed through, the border was crossed by little except goat trails in the mountain passes, and the little port of Antivari was practically the only entrance to the country. The port could be reached by one of the ships of the "Puglia" steamship lines, sailing, infrequently, from Bari on the Italian coast, and a precipitous carriage road connected the port of Tieka and the capital, Cetinje. Cetinje had perhaps three thousand inhabitants, and was the site of the governmental offices, such as they were, of the new palace housing the somewhat Ruritanian court of Prince Nicholas, and of a theatre-cum-opera house. Cetinje was a city where a man who had reason to believe that he was hunted might find a reasonable degree of security. With a few tribesmen as allies (they would not be expensive) he could rest assured that no enemy would approach unseen, and could easily ensure that none would arrive. (All male Montenegrins carried arms at that time, and the ambush was a highly developed art-form in the mountainous terrain.) When Sherlock Holmes had his final discussion with Professor Moriarty [see "The Final Problem," by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes] at the Reichenbach Fall [in Switzerland] at the beginning of May, 1891, we know that he escaped through Italy. We are ignorant of the course of his travels beyond Florence, but it appears not improbable that he traveled to Bari (he had plenty of money, of course since he was in touch with [his brother Mycroft, his

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elder by seven years], presumably by cable), and he may well have boarded a "Puglia" steamer there and proceeded to Antivari and thence to Cetinje. He must have remained there for several months. He could easily keep in touch with Mycroft by the telegraph line to Belgrade and Vienna, and by a little discreet bribery, he could ensure that no news of his presence would reach the outside world. . . . Irene [Adler, the opera star, and, to Holmes, always the woman; see "A Scandal in Bohemia" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes] was . . . an operatic contralto, apparently of considerable merit, and a return to the stage would not seem too difficult. La Scala would be impossible, as would the Warsaw opera, since she had been retired for some time, but one of the smaller companies that toured through Eastern Europe would give her security as well as a chance to return to the big time, or if not, to capture an affluent and noble (if provincial) protector. In the course of its travels the company must have come to the opera house in Cetinje. Holmes was a devotee of the opera, and it is inevitable that he must have met Irene Adler again. Her admiration for him compared with his for her and although [John H. Watson, M.D., Holmes's companion and biographer] has stated that Holmes was completely devoid of the softer emotions, Holmes was not always completely candid with his friend, and was enough of an actor to dissemble his emotions. Whether Irene was still a member of the company, or whether she had, by that time, come under the protection of one of the local nobility, cannot be determined, but the latter, for reasons to appear later, seems to be more likely. Whatever the case, Holmes and Miss Adler must have seen much of each other, and when their mutual admiration was added to the fact that they were the only people in the town speaking anything but Montenegrin, Slovene, Serbian, Croatian, Turkish, or bad German, an affair was inevitable. When Irene became pregnant, it must have taken really royal bribery plus all of Holmes's ingenuity to get her aboard one of the Italian steamers, presumably to join her parents in [Trenton, New Jersey]. She may well have been disguised as a peas-

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ant boy when she boarded the Bari steamer, since the sackcloth costume worn by the peasantry could conceal not only her identity but her condition. Holmes could not accompany her for some reason—presumably because he remained behind to draw off the pursuit of the retainers of her outraged protector. Nero Wolfe was born in [Trenton, New Jersey] . . . late in 1892 or early 1893, some six months after his mother left Montenegro. . . . The thought intrudes itself here: Did Irene Adler have

twins? We do know that there was another child, sooner or later, because Wolfe had a nephew or a niece (in our view, a nephew) living in Belgrade in 1936. " 'Did you know that I am an uncle, Archie?' He knew perfectly well that I knew it, since I typed the monthly letters to Belgrade for him" {The Red Box). It is very tempting to identify the second of Irene's children with Wolfe's oldest and closest friend, Marko Vukcic, although Wolfe, when Vukcic was shot down in 1954, claimed that "Mr. Vukcic has no close relatives, and none at all in this country." But under Vukcic's will, Wolfe was made executor and trustee ad interim of Rusterman's restaurant, Vukcic's only substantial asset. "There can be [no] doubt," Dr. Clark concludes, "as to the source from which [Nero Wolfe] inherited his remarkable talents." (The "Montenegrin blood," if Wolfe really did have any, and we think that he did, must have come from his mother's side of the family.) We believe there exists considerable evidence that buttresses the Clark Hypothesis. This evidence we have attempted to tabulate elsewhere,1 and we repeat it here, considerably expanded. Like Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe is a professional de1 In Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1962).

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tective, and he is often consulted by the official police in criminal cases, as was Holmes. Both men have established residences which serve them as both home and office—Holmes on Baker Street in London, and Wolfe on West Thirty-fifth Street in New York. The name "Nero Wolfe" is an obvious alias. (As Archie himself tells Wolfe in Over My Dead Body: "Montenegro is the Venetian variant of Monte Nero, and your name is Nero.") Holmes, too, often used names other than his own, and surely it is no coincidence that the Christian name "Nero" contains the er-o of Sherlock, and the surname "Wolfe" the ol-e of Holmes. Three people only call Wolfe by his Christian name; outside his own immediate family, only one man calls Holmes "Sherlock," and then not to his face. Wolfe himself calls only two people, not employees, by their Christian names; this too was a characteristic of Sherlock's. Like Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe is assisted by a man of action who acts also as his reporter. The assistant, like Dr. John H. Watson, uses as his literary agent a celebrated author (Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Archie, Rex Stout). In his youth, Nero Wolfe, like Sherlock Holmes, was an athlete. Like Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe is a gastronome, with a fine taste in both foods and wines. Holmes was fond of roses and once called a rose "a lovely thing" (see "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"); Wolfe has his orchids. Like Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe has an (apparent) insensitiveness to women, although both can be elegant to their female clients. Like Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe has done confidential work for his government. Before World War II, Wolfe worked for the United States State Department (see, for example, Where There's a Will). During the Second World

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War he was consulted by the FBI on at least two occasions and by G-2 repeatedly. Holmes was possessed of an extraordinary delicacy of touch, as Watson frequently had occasion to observe when he watched the great detective manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments; Wolfe, as we have seen, has hands that are deft in the extreme. "He opened it," Archie tells us, "with all the deliberate and friendly exactness which his hands displayed toward all inanimate things." Holmes took a short-cut whenever he could find one; Wolfe in The Rubber Band says, "I think it is always advisable to take a short-cut when it is feasible." Wolfe says (in Might as Well Be Dead), "The more you put in a brain, the more it will hold." Holmes says (in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane"), "My mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein— so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there." Holmes constantly twitted Watson to the point of insult; Wolfe does the same to Archie. ("If I sit here two more days I'll be so damn goofy I won't know anything." "I would not care to seem mystic, but might not that, in your case, mean an increase?" . . . "Excuse me for living." "I would not take that responsibility; I have all I can do to excuse myself." . . . "God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.". . . "Your logic is impeccable. Your premise is absurd.") Not a lawyer, Holmes nevertheless had "a good practical knowledge" of the law; Wolfe has the same. Both men were born actors. Holmes, expounding to Watson, had the habit of joining his fingertips together tepee-fashion; Wolfe, expounding to Archie, does the same. We know that Holmes had an aversion to firearms and

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constantly asked Watson to have his gun ready or to bring his gun with him on a dangerous expedition. Wolfe says to Archie (in The Red Box), "Please get your gun and keep it in your hand." Many commentators believe that Holmes became a Buddhist after his long visit to the lamaseries of Tibet during the Great Hiatus (see "The Final Problem" in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and "The Adventure of the Empty House" in The Return of Sherlock Holmes). Wolfe at least once (in The League of Frightened Men) expressed his own interest in Buddha and Buddhism: "The only fault in the passivity of Buddha as a technique for the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom is the miserably brief span of human life." Temperamentally, then, Wolfe's resemblance to Sherlock Holmes is remarkable. As remarkable is Wolfe's physical resemblance to Holmes's brother Mycroft. Like Mycroft Holmes, Nero Wolfe is large and stout. His body is "absolutely corpulent." His face, "though massive," has a "sharpness of expression." His hand, like that of Mycroft Holmes, might well be described as "broad," "flat," "like the flipper of a seal." The phrases are Watson's, describing Mycroft Holmes; they might just as well be Archie's, describing Nero Wolfe. Like Mycroft Holmes, Nero Wolfe has little energy. From year's end to year's end, he takes as little exercise as possible. For him, and for Mycroft, the art of the detective begins and ends in reasoning from an armchair. Wolfe will almost never visit the scene of a crime, nor will Mycroft Holmes—"a planet might as well leave its orbit." Both let others do any legwork that is required. Should there still be the slightest doubt in the reader's mind that Sherlock Holmes was Nero Wolfe's father, we

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call attention to a matter on which we earlier reserved information: the portrait which hangs in Wolfe's office under the wall clock, over Archie's desk, where Wolfe can see it at all times. It is the portrait of a man whose very person and appearance are such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer. In height he is rather over six feet, and so exceedingly lean that he seems to be considerably taller. His gray eyes are sharp and piercing, and his thin, hawklike nose gives his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, has the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. It is a portrait of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. It is significant to note that Rex Stout will neither confirm nor deny that Nero Wolfe's father was Sherlock Holmes. As the literary agent of Archie Goodwin [he wrote on June 14, 1935, in a letter to the editor of The Baker Street Journal], I am of course privy to many details of Nero Wolfe's past which to the general public . . . must remain moot for some time. If and when it becomes permissible for me to disclose any of those details, your distinguished journal would be a most appropriate medium for the disclosure. The constraint on my loyalty to my client makes it impossible for me to say any more now. With my best respects, sincerely, Rex Stout

10 Nero Wolfe, Secret Agent "I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I've got it in hand. I thought it romantic, when I was a boy, twentyfive years ago, to be a secret agent of the Austrian government." —Nero Wolfe, Over My Dead Body

It seems probable that Wolfe's relatives in Hungary secured for him his original position in the Austro-Hungarian civil service, which led, in 1913, to his enrollment in the intelligence service of the old Empire. Wolfe stated to the G-man Stahl that he had then joined the Montenegrin army. He was, he says, "still a boy"—always a highly elastic term with Wolfe. Later, in "Fourth of July Picnic," he says he was sixteen when he "decided to move around"—a ridiculous statement, since he must have been at least six years older. The year would seem to be 1916, which is also absurd, as Dr. Clark has pointed out before us: the Montenegrin army had been completely destroyed during the previous autumn. Nor can Wolfe have been an Austrian agent when he was (he says) thrown into jail in Bulgaria in 1916 (see below), since at that time Bulgaria had already joined Austria against Serbia. It seems far more likely that Wolfe switched loyalty from Austria to Montenegro in late 1914 or early 1915, and escaped 92

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or was released from jail soon enough to join the SerbianMontenegrin army before the battles of October and November which destroyed them. "How he escaped the debacle is doubtful," Dr. Clark writes, "but it seems likely that he was with refugees and was eventually evacuated to Corfu and then transferred to Salonika." Here is Wolfe's own account of this period in his life, as given to the G-man Stahl: "I then believed that all misguided or cruel people should be shot, and I shot some. I starved to death in 1916 when the Austrians came and we fought machine guns with fingernails. Logically, I was dead: a man can't live on dry grass. Actually I went on breathing." Why did Wolfe desert the service of Austria for Montenegro? Dr. Clark thinks that the desertion "may have been the result of an emotional shock . . . conceivably the result of an insulting remark made by an irritated officer about his Montenegrin origin. Or he may have been involved in one of the many minority independence movements that harassed the Empire." And here is the DeVoto Hypothesis: At some time between 1913 and 1916 Wolfe was involved in an episode of so desperate a nature, or involving such important international secrets, that connecting him with it must be forever impossible and his true identity must be forever concealed. Some danger of exposure still existed when Archie Goodwin went to work for him [in 1930]. Whatever the danger consisted of, it came to involve Archie as well as Wolfe. It continued for several years [after 1930] and then relapsed but something revived it briefly just after the end of World War II. On the assumption that there was such an episode, the record could be read in either of two ways: A. The episode occurred in Egypt in 1913 or shortly afterward, in which case it was in the service of Austria. Or, and this is more likely:

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B. The episode occurred . . . in the Balkans [in 1914 or 1915], in which case it was probably a betrayal of Austria. We do know that Wolfe, in 1913, went to Figueras in Catalonia "on a confidential mission for the Austrian government," and here he first tasted the sausage that Jerome Berin was to make internationally famous as saucisse minuit. "My quarry," Wolfe says, "made a dash for Port-Vendres, where he took a boat for Algiers"—and the chase eventually took Wolfe to Cairo. The reason for suspecting that the mysterious episode of the DeVoto Hypothesis may have taken place in Egypt is the conflict in statements about a house which Wolfe says he owns there. In 1933 Wolfe told Archie that he had never seen this house and that a man had given it to him a little more than ten years ago, that is, in 1922 or 1923. Three years later, however, talking to Helen Frost at the time of the Red Box affair, Wolfe described the Rhages and Vermaine tiles on the doorway and said, " I own a house in Egypt which I haven't seen in twenty years," that is, since 1916. Later, in Some Buried Caesar, Wolfe talked about his house in Cairo to Lily Rowan. That Wolfe was in the Balkans in 1915 ("The most remarkable case of self-control I ever saw was in Albania in 1915"—Black Orchids) does not necessarily preclude the possibility of his having made a trip to Egypt too, as the statement in The Red Box suggests that he did. From a remark made by Wolfe in 1937 ("Many years ago I handled some affairs with dark-skinned people in Egypt and Arabia and Algiers"—Too Many Cooks), we may infer that Wolfe went on from Egypt to Arabia. He later says—in "Fourth of July Picnic"—that at one time in his life he "became acquainted with most of Europe, a little of Africa, and much of Asia." Both Wolfe and Archie are completely silent about Wolfe's activities in the years 1922—1928. Sherlock Holmes had his "missing years," and these are Nero Wolfe's. Perhaps he trav-

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eled extensively at this time, and it may have been during this period that he added his knowledge of Asia to his already considerable knowledge of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Certainly he also took this opportunity to expand his knowledge of the United States. In one way or another, he amassed, during the 1922—1928 period, a considerable quantity of money and a considerable amount of weight. After his return to the Balkans in 1913 or 1914, more probably the latter year, it seems certain that he went to Bulgaria, and it was on this occasion that he was thrown into jail there ("Once when I was working for the Austrian government I was thrown into jail in Bulgaria"—Some Buried Caesar). If this statement is to be taken at its face value, Wolfe was still an Austrian agent. But by that time World War I had begun, and it seems far more probable that his loyalty to Montenegro had already asserted itself (it is, of course, a real possibility that Wolfe at this time was playing the dangerous role of a double agent). "My progress toward maturity got interrupted by the [First] World War and my experience with it," Wolfe says in Over My Dead Body. "War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread. Pfui!" When the AEF reached Europe (the First Division landed at St. Nazaire in late June 1917), Wolfe walked six hundred miles to join it, presumably making his way through the chaos of northern Italy to southern France. He was, he says, thinner in those days, and an athlete. Note that he is a veteran of the American army as well as of the Montenegrin army. He saw much action with the AEF, for he later told Theodore Horstmann that he had killed two hundred Germans. Most of this summary of Wolfe's military careers comes to us from his statement to the FBI agent Stahl. "After the war I was still lean and I moved around," Wolfe says in Over My Dead Body. He adds that at the end of the war (presumably having been discharged in France) he "re-

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turned to the Balkans, shed another illusion, and came back [note the "came back"] to America." His return to the Balkans may have been in 1919; at any rate, he told the girls who called themselves Carla Lovchen and Neya Tormic that he was in Montenegro in 1921 (he was also in Bari in that year, where Paolo Telesio killed two Fascisti who had Wolfe cornered). At that time, in Montenegro, he adopted a three-year-old orphan girl named Anna. "I did something else there, too, which advanced my maturity, but that has nothing to do with you," he said in Over My Dead Body. "The something else I did [was it to dispatch the wife, or woman, who had attempted to poison him?] finished Montenegro for me, and I left the girl, I thought, in good hands, and returned [again, note the "returned"] to America." Wolfe, we are told, left his adopted daughter in the care of Pero Brovnik and his wife of Zagreb, in Croatia, now Yugoslavia. It was in 1926, when Anna was eight years old, that the Brovniks, the couple with whom Wolfe had left her, were arrested as revolutionaries and shot. For three years Wolfe continued to send money to Zagreb for her support, but the money was appropriated in Brovnik's name. When Wolfe got suspicious and went over there, in 1929, "in spite of the fact that I was no longer lean," he got nowhere. He couldn't find the girl. He got no satisfaction about the money. He got put into jail again, and the American consul had to be called in to get him out. He was given ten hours to leave the country. Wolfe, as we have seen, states that he returned to the United States and entered into practice as a private detective in 1930. The girl we know later as "Carla Lovchen" was the orphan girl Anna. When the Brovniks were arrested, she was sent to an institution. A year later she was taken out by a woman named Mrs. Campbell, the English secretary to Prince Peter Donevitch of Zagreb. When Mrs. Campbell fled, Anna, or Carla, was left dependent on the Donevitch family.

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In 1938, when these facts came out, she was twenty years old. She had fine legs, Archie noted, and her face was rather sullen but well arranged, and her eyes with their long lashes were dark and beautiful. She spoke in a nice soft low voice, with an accent that reminded Archie of that used by Lynn Fontanne in Idiot's Delight. When she came to America in 1938 she worked at the dance studios and fencing salon of Nikola Miltan on Fortyeighth Street; the great Corsini of Zagreb himself had passed her with foils, epée, and saber. At the end of the case in which she was involved (Over My Dead Body) Wolfe suggested that she call herself Carla Wolfe. It was then her intention to remain in the United States. True, she had only a visitor's visa, but Wolfe's State Department connections would have enabled him to get her admitted permanently. She seems to have occupied the spacious South Room on the third floor for a time, but certainly not for long. She got a job with a Fifth Avenue travel agency, and within a year she had married its owner, William F. Britton. She then moved into an apartment at 984 Park Avenue (her telephone number was POplar 3-3043). No friction developed between Mr. and Mrs. William Britton and Nero Wolfe, because for friction you must have contact, and there was none. Twice a year, on her birthday and on New Year's Day, Wolfe sent her a bushel of orchids from his choicest plants, but that was all, except that he went to the funeral when Britton died of a heart attack in 1950. And now let us return to Irene Adler. It is clear that she did not remain long with her parents in Trenton, New Jersey, having outworn her welcome as a repentant and widowed 1 daughter, but returned with her child or children to Europe, either in order to resume her often-interrupted op1

Irene, before her liaison with Holmes in Montenegro, had been married to Godfrey Norton, a London barrister; see "A Scandal in Bohemia" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

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eratic career or to visit relatives living in Budapest. She may very well have married again (in our view, she did marry again, a man named Vukcic) and she may very well have had another child by this marriage, the half-brother or half-sister (in our view, a half-brother) of Nero Wolfe and Marko Vukcic, who produced, in turn, the nephew or niece who was living in Belgrade in 1936 (in our view, it was a nephew, whom we meet in The Black Mountain, Danilo Vukcic). Irene herself settled in Budapest; she was living there in 1935 (The Rubber Band), and Archie, on Wolfe's instructions, sent her a monthly remittance. She probably did not return to Montenegro, as Dr. Clark has made clear: there the institution of the blood feud was still very much alive. In Dr. Clark's view, she did not come closer to Montenegro than Zagreb, in the protectorate of Bosnia and Herzegovina, some 240 miles from the border of the principality of Montenegro. Wolfe and his full brother, Marko (if they were indeed twins), must have grown up in Budapest, with occasional visits to Zagreb and Albania. Wolfe refers to his "boyhood in Europe" in Some Buried Caesar. Later, "I was nine years old the first time I climbed the Black Mountain," he tells us in the adventure of that title. He adds that he herded goats on its slopes, and elsewhere that he had a dog, a small brown mongrel with a rather narrow skull. If Marko Vukcic was not Wolfe's twin brother—as we strongly suspect he was—Wolfe certainly knew him well during this period. In April 1937, when the Masters were meeting at Kanawha Spa, Wolfe remarked that he had "hunted dragonflies" with Vukcic "in the mountains"—a folk-saying or proverb? and in April 1950, when an encounter with the mysterious Arnold Zeck made it necessary for Wolfe to disappear for a while, Vukcic was specific. "We knew each other as boys in another country," he told Archie.

11 Portrait of Archie as a Young Man LILY ROWAN: " I S any of this straight?" ARCHIE GOODWIN: "NO, it's

firecrackers."

—Some Buried Caesar

The confusion deliberately created about the facts of Archie Goodwin's early life is too striking a parallel to the confusion deliberately created about the facts of Nero Wolfe's early life to be ignored. It seems certain that Archie went to work for Wolfe late in 1930, that he was born on a farm in Ohio, that his birthday is October 23, and that he has at least one living sister. But his age is flagrantly and repeatedly misstated in the record and there are conflicting statements about the town of his birth. In 1937 Mrs. Jasper Pine, who had the most unmistakable intentions in regard to Archie and who described herself as a very careful woman, undertook to investigate the facts. She hired a detective agency, but clearly it was one which Archie knew well enough, or had enough on, to get its report falsified. The report stated that he was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1914, that his mother's maiden name was Leslie, that his fa99

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ther was named James Arner Goodwin and was still alive, and that he had two brothers and two sisters. But this would require him to have begun working for Wolfe at the age of sixteen, which is enough of an absurdity in itself to discredit the entire report. A remark of his own, in Some Buried Caesar, would seem to indicate that Archie was born in 1910 or 1911. In March 1947 (Too Many Women), however, he claimed to be thirty-three, which would place his birthday in 1913 (if his birth month was indeed October). Again, in Over My Dead Body (1938), Archie says, "I'll count up to twenty-nine, one for each year of my life and one to grow on and one to get married on"—and this would seem to register another vote for 1911 as the year of Archie's birth. Our own view is that Archie was born in October of 1912 and that he went to work for Wolfe about eighteen years later, in the autumn of 1930. Once (in The Silent Speaker) Archie intimates that he was born in Zanesville, and at another time that the place of his birth was in or near Chillicothe (in The Final Deduction). Archie early tells us that his father and mother both died when he was "just a kid." Later he says, "I've got a mother and three aunts." One was an Aunt Anna who made wonderful chicken pie. In Some Buried Caesar he suggests that his father's name was Titus Goodwin—but this is followed by his remark to Lily Rowan about "firecrackers." There are a few items about his high-school years: he lived across the street from a character called Widow Rowley, and his ambition then was to become a second baseman for a major-league team. He was pretty good at football also, and he graduated from high school "with honor but no honors." Archie says in The Final Deduction that his mother was a born female tyrant. "There wasn't a single goddam thing, big or little, that I could decide on my own." So Archie, at the age

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of seventeen (he says), told his mother to go to hell. One nice June day, the day after he graduated from high school, he beat it. More firecrackers? Almost certainly, with perhaps a modicum of truth. Shortly after Archie volunteered this statement, Wolfe said to him slyly, "When your mother was in New York for a week last year, and dined here twice, and you spent some time taking her around, I saw no trace of animus." If we can credit what Archie tells us next, in "Fourth of July Picnic," he "went to college two weeks, decided it was childish, came to New York and got a job guarding a pier, shot and killed two men and was fired, was recommended to Nero Wolfe for a chore he wanted done, did it, and was offered a full-time job." So extended and thoroughgoing an effort to conceal the truth requires us to conclude that in some way Archie's birth and childhood are related to the mystery in Wolfe's own life, or have some bearing on it. To begin to unravel some of this mystery, if we can, let us first consider Wolfe's attitude toward Archie. It is almost paternal. Wolfe twits Archie, to be sure, but this is the attitude of a stern but loving father toward a somewhat wayward son. Time and time again, cheek by jowl with his twitting, Wolfe asks Archie anxiously, "Did you sleep well?" or "You did find time to eat?" Still, it is whimsical to suppose that Nero Wolfe is Archie Goodwin's father; the record contains nothing that connects Wolfe personally with either rural or metropolitan Ohio in the years necessary. Are Wolfe and Archie cousins, then? Holmes had no sister,1 and neither of Holmes's two brothers ever left England. Irene Adler, it is true, did have a sister, a thoroughly respectable sister, but her record is well documented and we must rule her out of the picture at once. 1

Although fanciful commentators have blessed him with one.

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Are Wolfe and Archie brothers, or half-brothers? The liaison between Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes produced, at most, twins, and Archie is certainly not the same age as Wolfe. Irene Adler's later history is known, in part, at least. There is no evidence that a soprano of her stature ever toured Ohio during the years required. Holmes, it is true, was in the United States during the period from 1912 to early 1914. "I started my pilgrimage at Chicago, graduated in an Irish secret society at Buffalo, gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbareen," he tells us in "His Last Bow." But Holmes was on a vital international mission; he had no time for dallying on a farm in Ohio, even if he had been so inclined. We must abandon the brother-half-brother relationship. But there remains a fourth possible relationship: that of uncle and nephew. Let us assume, as we have previously surmised, that Nero Wolfe and Marko Vukcic were brothers, twin brothers—not identical twins, to be sure, but twin brothers nonetheless. Let us further assume that Marko, who we may say with certainty chose the United States over Europe by 1927 at the latest, in truth made that choice some fifteen years earlier, taking as his surname that of his stepfather. We know that Vukcic was—in Sergeant Purley Stebbins' words—"a chicken-chaser." Let us further assume that choice or destiny took him to the American Midwest in general and the farm state of Ohio in particular in the year, say, 1911 or early 1912. This hypothesis would explain much of the carefully clouded relationship between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. For a relationship of some kind almost certainly exists. In A Right to Die, Paul Whipple, quoting his wife, says to Wolfe, " 'I wish he was a Negro.' " Wolfe grunted and said, "If I were, Mr. Goodwin would have to be one too." Other interpretations of this statement are of course possi-

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ble, but until the record is set straight once and for all, we for one will go on believing that Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are uncle and nephew. How sly, how in character, then, becomes Wolfe's remark to Archie in The Red Box: "Did you know that I am an uncle, Archie?"

12 A Fer-de-Lance and Some Frightened Men "My God. You are my only hope. I didn't realize it, but you are." —Andrew Hibbard to Nero Wolfe, The League of Frightened Men

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 4, 1933, Peter Oliver Barstow, fifty-eight-year-old president of Holland University, was playing golf on the links of the Green Meadow Club near Pleasantville, thirty miles north of New York City. The round was a foursome, Barstow playing with his son, Lawrence, his neighbor, E. D. Kimball the grain broker, and KimbaH's son, Manuel. As Barstow swung at the ball on his first drive, he uttered a little exclamation, with a startled look on his face, and began rubbing his belly. The others asked him what was wrong, and he said something about a wasp or a hornet and started to open his shirt. His son looked inside at the skin and saw a tiny puncture, almost invisible. Barstow insisted it was nothing, but thirty minutes later, on the fairway of the fourth hole, he suddenly collapsed on the ground, kicking and clutching the grass. He was still alive when his caddy seized his arm, but by the time the others reached him he was dead. 104

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So began the first recorded adventure of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin: the case Archie called Fer-de-Lance. Wolfe was drawn into the case on Wednesday, June 7; he concluded it successfully just two weeks later, on Wednesday, June 21. But there are hints aplenty of earlier cases. In 1927, for example, three years before Wolfe began his practice as a private detective, there was a clash of some kind between Wolfe and Cramer. Said Cramer: "Some day you're going to fall off and get hurt." (In 1935, Cramer said the same thing to Wolfe, during Wolfe's investigation of the Rubber Band case.) Was Wolfe, then, an amateur detective before getting his license? There was the Goldsmith case, perhaps the first case in which Archie assisted Wolfe. It was not a success: Fletcher M. Anderson, then an Assistant District Attorney of New York City, so turned it around that Wolfe got a nice black eye out of it instead of what was really coming to him. There was the Williamson kidnaping—definitely a success. Wolfe returned little Tommie Williamson to his parents safely, and Mr. and Mrs. Burke Williamson have dined with Wolfe and Archie on the anniversary of the restoration every year since. In 1930 came the Very Neat Blackmailing case. Since then Albert Wright, a vice president of Eastern Electric, like Burke Williamson, will do Wolfe a favor any time. And very well he should; he owes his wife and family to Wolfe. In 1931 Anthony D. Perry, president of the Seaboard Products Corporation, retained Wolfe for the first time, to investigate his competitors' trade practices, and objected to the size of Wolfe's bill. In early 1932 came the Banister-Schurman business, in which Dick Morley, of the District Attorney's office, would have lost his job, but for Wolfe pulling him out of a bad hole. We would place three other cases in these early years: the

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Moschenden case; the Diplomacy Club business, involving Nyura Pronn ("the best exhibition of squeezing a sponge dry" that Archie has ever seen); and the Pine Street case, about which all we know is that a taxi driver ran out on Wolfe and Archie. In late 1932 or early 1933 Wolfe solved what Del Bascom called the Hay Fever case and Archie called the case of Lon Graves and the satchel of emeralds. The clever Mr. Graves, it seems, had stolen the emeralds while the jewelry clerk was sneezing from hay fever. Wolfe wore Graves down and drove him half crazy in an afternoon, and Archie chased him from New Milford all over Pike County. Fer-de-Lance followed closely on the heels of another major case—that of the Fairmont National Bank, which Archie also called the Fairmont-Avery thing and the case of the bank president. Wolfe deliberately waited for twenty-four hours to close in on Pete Avery, the bank president, after he had him completely sewed up, just for the pleasure of watching Archie and Dick Morley play fox-and-goose with an old fool who couldn't find his ear trumpet; then Wolfe had the bank president pinched on "no other evidence whatever except the fact that the fountain pen on his desk was dry." Avery shot himself an hour later. We know also that this case earned Wolfe another enemy—Lanzetta of the DA's office. Between June 1933 and October 1934 came the case of the Whittemore bonds and the case of the Hardest Guy to Deal With. In the former, one of Wolfe's overseas connections, "a smart guy in Rome," turned in a good job; in the latter, the "hardest guy" was a perfume salesman in New Rochelle who used to drown kittens in the bathtub and one day got hold of his wife by mistake. October 1934 saw the case of the Highly Unremunerative Mission, which took Archie away from West Thirty-fifth Street for ten days and called for two young men to perform his duties during his absence.

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This was followed by the highly dramatic, not to say fantastic, affair of The League of Frightened Men, Wolfe's second recorded case. For Wolfe and Archie, the affair began on the afternoon of Friday, November 2, 1934 (it came to its startling conclusion on Monday, November 12), but actually it had begun in 1909, when Paul Chapin, the novelist, had been permanently crippled as the result of "a boyish prank" played on him by his Harvard classmates. The classmates formed a "League of Atonement" to help Paul, and all seemed to be going as well as possible under the circumstances until June 1934, when a crowd of them assembled at Fillmore Collard's place near Marblehead, Massachusetts. Judge Harrison had come East from Indiana for the commencement exercises at his son's graduation. They missed him that night, and the next morning they found his body at the foot of the cliff, beaten about among the rocks by the surf. To tragedy was added terror: soon thereafter each surviving member of the league had received a set of verses boasting of the judge's murder. These verses could have been written by only one man: Paul Chapin. Then Eugene Dryer, the art dealer, was poisoned, and Andrew Hibbard, the psychologist, disappeared. And in each case there was another set of taunting verses. . . .

13 A Rubber Band, a Red Box, Too Many Cooks, and a Buried Caesar "I never knew a plaguier case. We have all the knowledge we need and not a shred of presentable evidence." —Nero Wolfe, The Red Box

Ever since a certain unrecorded incident that occurred when Wolfe sent Archie on an errand in February of 1935, Archie automatically asks himself, when leaving the office on a business chore, "Do I take a gun?" There were fireworks in the next case, too—that of The Rubber Band. When it was all over, Wolfe had a bullet in his arm, and the killer of two men had one in his heart. But before the shoot-out in Wolfe's office, he and Archie had to break a mystery that stretched across forty years and five thousand miles, a4 mystery in which lynching and blackmail, a devilish alibi and a warrant for Wolfe's arrest all played a part. Anthony D. Perry came to Wolfe for help for the second time on Monday, October 7, 1935; Wolfe solved the complicated case only two days later, on Wednesday, October 9. Things were slow for Wolfe and Archie in late 1935 and early 1936. "We haven't had a case that was worth anything for nearly three months," Archie complained to Wolfe. 108

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Then Molly Lauck was poisoned (hydrocyanic) on Monday, March 23, 1936, at the offices of Boyden McNair, Incorporated, on Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue. A week later, on Monday, March 30, the theatrical producer Llewellyn Frost brought Wolfe into the case. It was one in which Archie rather enjoyed himself—the fashion models Boyden McNair employed were all very attractive girls—but Wolfe was miserable. Circumstances forced him to visit the scene of the crime, and none of the chairs at Boyden McNair fitted him; what's more, he despised the brand of beer sold at the nearest delicatessen. Perhaps because of his physical discomfort, Wolfe solved the case in close-to-record time—on Saturday, April 4. It was in April 1937 that Wolfe was to be the guest of honor at a dinner of the Fifteen Masters. The great chefs of the world met every five years on the home grounds of the oldest of their number, and that year their election of new members to replace those who had died during the past five years, held among a lot of cooking and eating and drinking, was to be at Kanawha Spa in West Virginia. Each Master Chef was allowed to bring one guest, and Wolfe was to be the guest of Louis Servan, in charge of cuisine at Kanawha Spa and oldest—over seventy—of the Fifteen Masters, an old friend of Wolfe's, who called Servan "gentle, generous, sentimental, and an artist—and also Latin." Wolfe could hardly refuse the invitation, even if it meant a taxing overnight trip by train, nor did he want to refuse it. He got Marko Vukcic, also one of the Fifteen Masters, to invite Archie as his guest, and the great expedition got under way. But Wolfe would probably never have accepted Servan's invitation if he had known in advance that he would have to exercise his brain, blow money on long-distance telephone calls and drinks for fourteen dark-skinned men, lose two nights' sleep, and get shot in the cheek—with nothing to

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show for it in the bank account. He did receive a fee of sorts, however, and one he valued highly—Jerome Berin's carefully guarded recipe for the world-famous saucisse minuit. Wolfe's next recorded case involved an expedition too, this time by car. On the second Monday in September—Monday, September 12, 1938—Wolfe and Archie arrived at Crowfield, in upstate New York, 245 miles northeast of Times Square, to attend the North Atlantic Exposition. Again it was one of Wolfe's personal enthusiasms that roused him out of the comforts of his beloved old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth street. Some of the most distinguished orchid-growers in the North American hemisphere were going to exhibit at Crowfield, and Wolfe wanted his own collection represented and personally supervised. He walked off with the medal and all three ribbons; he also solved three murders, one of them that of a prize-winning bull. That was the case Archie called Some Buried Caesar.

14 Bodies, Wills, Black Orchids, and a Cordial Invitation to Meet Death "I have never known a more objectionable way of committing murder, nor of an easier or simpler one." —Nero Wolfe, "Cordially Invited to Meet Death"

Two months after the return from Crowfield—in mid-November 1938—Wolfe and Archie tidied up the ComptonGore case. Then Wolfe refused nine cases in three weeks' time—not counting that of the poor little immigrant girl with a friend who liked diamonds. But then, he had recently raked in two fat fees and the bank account was bloated. It would take a great deal to get Nero Wolfe to go back to work, but the "great deal" was forthcoming—the case Archie called Over My Dead Body, which reunited Wolfe with his long-missing adopted daughter, Anna. Under another name, Anna was working as a dance and fencing instructor at a Manhattan salon operated by an extraordinary couple named Miltan. When one of the students there was run through the heart with a fencing foil, strangely tipped, Wolfe dispatched Archie; he raced back to West

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Thirty-fifth Street, pursued by the police, with the murder weapon in his pocket. Next came the Wetzler case, which Wolfe took at the urging of the State Department; we suspect that it involved counterfeiting. When that was solved to Wolfe's satisfaction —and the government's—he went in for a series of fantastic expenditures that left the bank balance at its lowest point in years. And the detective business was rotten. Then came the case of the legacies to the three famous Hawthorne sisters. Their millionaire brother, Noel, had willed a peach to April, a pear to May, and an apple to June. Eccentric of him, of course, but not disastrous for the girls; each was well-to-do in her own right. When the police discovered that brother Noel's death was no accident after all, Wolfe swung into action. The case gave him three problems to solve: the will of Noel Hawthorne, the murder of Noel Hawthorne, and the later murder of Naomi Karn. It also presented him with a warrant for his own arrest as a material witness; Archie keeps it to this day in a drawer of his desk as a reminder that Where There's a Will there's a way. We know only two things about the activities of the partnership in the year 1940: 1. Archie was lucky enough to shoot an automatic out of a man's hand just before he pressed the trigger, and as a result got his picture in the Gazette. 2. Wolfe's income tax for the year was $11,412.83, so he must have had a lot of remunerative cases, or a few that paid off beautifully. Nineteen-forty-one looked like another banner year. Since January 1, Wolfe and Archie had handled several lucrative cases, and even as early as March the budget was balanced for many months to come. Again this time, it would take more than money to get Wolfe to go to work, but the "more" was forthcoming: a chance to add the famous black orchids de-

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veloped by Lewis Hewitt to Wolfe's already unduplicated collection. The orchids earned, he sent eight of them to the funeral of Bess Huddleston, the New York upper brackets' most celebrated party-arranger. In August 1941 some malicious person was trying to ruin her by spreading hints that she was guilty of blabbing shameful secrets about the people she arranged parties for. Then she died by an unknown hand. Wolfe, with no commitment to the late Miss Huddleston, was through with it, or he would have been if Cramer hadn't kidnaped a dinner guest right from under his nose. It made Wolfe so damn mad he had to take Amphojel twice that evening, something he hadn't had to do in months.

15 Wolfe and Archie Go to War "I am going to kill some Germans. I didn't kill enough of them in 1918." —Nero Wolfe, Not Quite Dead Enough

When the war came, it was Major Archie Goodwin, United States Military Intelligence. His first assignment, early in 1942, was to straighten out a "mess down in Georgia," and he did pretty well at it, too, according to the department's top mackaroo. Army Intelligence wanted Nero Wolfe to go to work for them also, of course, in connection with undercover enemy activities in this country, but Wolfe had other plans and refused to cooperate. So Archie's next assignment was to convince him. Archie got the shock of his life when he walked into the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street in March 1942. In the office, stacks of unopened mail were spread all over Wolfe's desk. The desk itself hadn't been dusted for "years," and neither had Archie's. When he went to the kitchen, what he saw there convinced him that Wolfe and Fritz Brenner were both dead: the rows of pots and pans were as dusty as the desks in the office, and so were the spice jars. Archie opened a cupboard door and saw not a damn 114

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thing but a dish of oranges and six cartons of prunes. He opened the refrigerator, and there was nothing there but four heads of lettuce, four tomatoes, and a dish of applesauce. "Mr. Wolfe doesn't work with the plants any more," Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, told Archie sadly. "He only comes up here to sweat. He has to sweat all that he can in order to reduce his weight, and then he has to get hardened up, so he and Fritz go over by the river and walk fast. Next week they're going to start to run. He is dieting and he has stopped drinking beer. He won't buy any bread or cream or butter or sugar or lots of things and I have to buy my own meat." It was Wolfe's working hypothesis that two million Americans should kill ten Germans apiece, and he aimed to do his part. Archie will never forget his first sight of Wolfe under the new regime. He didn't exactly look smaller; he merely looked deflated. The pants he was wearing were his own, an old pair of blue serge. The shoes were strangers to Archie—rough, army-style brogues. The sweater was Archie's, a heavy maroon number he had bought once for a camping trip; it was stretched so tight that Wolfe's yellow shirt showed through the holes. Wolfe was finally persuaded to give up his mad scheme to kill Germans personally, of course, and he stopped dieting, dropped his ban on beer, abandoned his training program and his new hour for going to bed—nine o'clock sharp—and went to work for G-2. The first recorded case he and Archie shared together as wartime assistants to the military is described in Not Quite Dead Enough. It took place on a Monday to Wednesday in early March 1942, and it was followed in the next year by "Booby Trap." There were many other cases, certainly—cases Archie was much too busy to record—and Wolfe pretty much had to

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give up his private-detective business for the duration. He took no pay for his government work; the one thing he demanded from the army, and got, was enough gas for his car. He made other sacrifices for victory: he gave up his daily sessions with the orchids in his plant rooms on the roof whenever army work interfered. He broke his fixed rule to avoid the hazards of unessential movement, especially outdoors. And he bought less food. He and Fritz accomplished wonders with what they did buy, however, within the limitations of coupon fodder, and right there in the middle of New York, with black markets tipping the wink like floozies out for a breath of air on a summer evening, Wolfe's kitchen was as pure as cottage cheese. Archie's special assignment for most of the rest of the war was to assist Wolfe in the various projects entrusted to him by the army. This was not very much to his liking: three times he requested overseas duty, and three times he was turned down. He seems to have made a fourth appointment with General Carpenter in Washington just before the end of the war, but he evidently never had to keep it. As Archie put it at the time, "I want to get a look at a German. I would like to catch one, if it can be done without much risk, and pinch him and make some remarks to him. I have thought up a crushing remark and would like to use it."

16 Help Wanted (Male), Something Instead of Evidence, a Bullet for One, a Silent Speaker, Too Many Women, and a Man Alive "It was merely a job," Wolfe murmured, as if he knew what modesty was. —"Help Wanted, Male"

Wolfe's last recorded wartime job began on a Tuesday in May in 1944. Archie chose to call it "Help Wanted, Male." A couple of months before, Ben Jensen, publisher and politician, had been offered some inside army dope. Archie had a sneaking suspicion that Jensen would have bought it, too, if he had been able to figure a way of using it without any risk of losing a large hunk of his hide. But Jensen played it safe and cooperated with Wolfe like a good boy. Then Jensen received a note: "YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE— AND 1 WILL WATCH YOU DIE!" The next morning the papers headlined his murder. Solving it took guile—Nero Wolfe's kind of guile—and a classified ad that began: "WANTED A MAN . . ." 117

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Archie had been a civilian again for only a week on that Thursday afternoon in October 1945 when he and Wolfe were presented with the case Archie titled "Instead of Evidence." For ten years Conroy Blaney had been in business with Eugene R. Poor as a partner. They owned the firm of Blaney and Poor, manufacturers of novelties—things like matches that won't strike and chairs with rubber legs and bottled drinks that taste like soap. Now Gene Poor was convinced that his partner intended to murder him. Somebody certainly did, and in a particularly nasty way, with an exploding cigar, lethally loaded. It went off right in poor Poor's face. We can date the "Bullet for One" case to 1945 by the fact that Archie noted he had known Lily Rowan for "seven years." On a Tuesday morning in October, Sigmund Keyes, top-drawer industrial designer, had mounted his horse Casanova promptly at 6:30 and ridden into Central Park. Forty minutes later he had been seen by a mounted cop, in the park on patrol, down around Sixty-sixth Street. Twenty-five minutes after that, at 7:35, Casanova, with his saddle uninhabited, had emerged from the park uptown and strolled down the street to the Stillwell Riding Academy, where he was customarily stabled. In three-quarters of an hour a cop had found Keyes's body behind a thicket some twenty yards from the bridle path in the park, in the latitude of Ninety-fifth Street. Later, a .38-caliber bullet had been dug out of Keyes's chest. Sometime before The Silent Speaker (March-April 1946), Wolfe was involved in two other cases. One was the Chesterton-Best affair; that concerned a guy who burgled his own house and shot a weekend guest in the belly. The other was the Boeddiker case in Queens. Wolfe never even got started on that one, though, because Inspector Ash's abominable

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handling gave the prosecutor evidence to convict a murderer whose guilt was manifest. "A thousand people, all with motive and opportunity, and the means at hand!" Wolfe said in The Silent Speaker. The facts were these: Cheney Boone, director of the government's Bureau of Price Regulation, had been invited to make the main speech at a dinner of the National Industrial Association on a Tuesday evening at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. He had arrived at ten minutes to seven, before the fourteen hundred guests had gone to their tables, while everyone was still milling around drinking and talking. Taken to the reception room reserved for guests of honor, which as usual was filled with over a hundred people, most of whom weren't supposed to be there, Boone, after drinking a cocktail and undergoing a quantity of greetings and introductions, had asked for a private spot where he could look over his speech, and had been taken to a small room just off the stage. His wife, who had come with him to the dinner, had stayed in the reception room. His niece, Nina Boone, had gone along to the private spot to help him with the speech if required, but he had almost immediately sent her back to the reception room to get herself another cocktail and she had remained there. Shortly after Boone and his niece had departed for the murder room, as the papers called it, Phoebe Gunther had shown up. Miss Gunther was Boone's confidential secretary, and she had with her two can-openers, two monkey wrenches, two shirts (men's), two fountain pens, and a baby carriage. They were to be used as exhibits by Boone for illustrating points in his speech, and Miss Gunther wanted to get them to him at once, so she was escorted to the murder room, the escort, a member of the NIA, wheeling the baby carriage, which contained the other items, to the astonished amusement of the multitude as they passed through. Miss Gunther remained with Boone only a couple of minutes, delivering the exhibits, and then returned to the reception room for a

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cocktail. She reported that Boone had said he wanted to be alone. At 7:30 everybody in the reception room was herded out to the ballroom, to find their places on the dais and at the tables, where the fourteen hundred were settling down and the waiters were ready to hurl themselves into the fray. About 7:45 Mr. Alger Kates arrived. He was from the Research Department of the BPR, and he had some last-minute statistics which were to be used in Boone's speech. He came to the dais looking for Boone, and Mr. Frank Thomas Erskine, the president of NIA, told a waiter to show him where Boone was. The waiter led him through the door to backstage and pointed to the door of the murder room. Alger Kates discovered the body. It was on the floor, the head battered with one of the monkey wrenches, which was lying near by. The implication of what Kates did next was hinted at in some newspapers, and openly stated in others: namely, that no BPR man would trust any NIA man in connection with anything whatever, including murder. Anyhow, instead of returning to the ballroom and the dais to impart the news, Kates looked around backstage until he found a phone, called the hotel manager, and told him to come at once and bring all the policemen he could find. The case was obviously going to be a lulu, and Wolfe asked for a retainer of $10,000, the ultimate charge, including expenses, to be left open. His fee and expenses in the end came to $100,000. The last recorded case of 1946 ("Before I Die") involved Wolfe and Archie with the New York underworld. Dazy Perrit, one of its choicer specimens, offered Wolfe "fifty Cs, five grand," just "for a start." "I'm being blackmailed, and you've got to stop it," he told Wolfe. Archie always looked on the Too Many Women case, the first recorded case of the year 1947, as one of the most en-

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joyable in which he ever took part. Naylor-Kerr was a corporation where there was a strong preference for females who were easy to look at, and its troubles involved Archie, as "Peter Truett," in going to work there as a "personnel expert." The case was notable in another way: Archie and Wolfe suffered "the longest dry spell we have ever had on a murder case." In June of that same year, in the "Man Alive" case, Wolfe outsmarted himself. Not far from the top of the list of things he abhors is being a witness at a trial, and ordinarily he takes good care to handle things so that he won't get a subpoena. But Archie had the pleasure of sitting in the courtroom and watching him—and listening to him—in the witness chair. The District Attorney wasn't any too sure of his case, and on this one Wolfe couldn't shake him loose. It was a good thing for Cynthia Nieder that Wolfe didn't know what would happen at the time he and Archie sent her a bill, or she might have had to hock her half of the business to pay it. Wolfe got sore about it all over again when the papers informed him that the jury had stayed out only two hours and forty minutes before bringing in a first-degree verdict. That proved, he claimed, that his testimony hadn't been needed. The owners of Daumery and Nieder told Archie not only that he would be welcome at any of their fashion shows, front row seat, but that any number he wanted to pick out would be sent with their compliments to any name and address on his list.

17 Nero Wolfe versus Arnold Zeck "I have told you that I know X's name, but I have never seen him." —Nero Wolfe, The Second Concession

"I first got some knowledge of the man I choose to call X in 1938," Nero Wolfe told the Sperling family in The Second Confession, "when a police officer came to me for an opinion regarding a murder he was working on. "I undertook a little inquiry through curiosity, a luxury I no longer indulge in, and found myself on a trail leading onto ground where the footing was treacherous for a private investigator. Since I had no client and was not committed, I reported what I had found to the police officer and dropped it. I then knew there was such a man as X, and something of his activities and methods, but not his name. "During the following five years I saw hints here and there that X was active, but I was busy with my own affairs, which did not happen to come into contact with his." Then, on Wednesday, June 9, 1943—giving his name as "Duncan" and his telephone number as Midland 5-3748— X telephoned Wolfe for the first time, to give him some advice regarding a job that Wolfe was doing for General Carpenter of Army Intelligence. What this "advice" was, we do not know. 122

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In mid-January 1946, while Wolfe was engaged on a job for a Mrs. Tremont, he had another phone call. The voice of X—hard, slow, precise, and cold as last week's corpse— advised him to limit his efforts on behalf of his client. Wolfe replied that his efforts would be limited only by the requirements of the job he had undertaken to do. The voice insisted, and they talked some, but only to an impasse. "I have a strong admiration for you, but I admit I am much easier to get along with when I am pleased," X warned Wolfe. The next day Wolfe finished the job to Mrs. Tremont's satisfaction. But for Wolfe's own satisfaction, he felt that he needed some more information. Not wishing to involve the men he often hired to help him, and certainly not Archie, he got men from an agency in another city. Within a month he had all the information he needed for his own satisfaction: 1. X's name was Arnold Zeck. 2. He was a man of resource and imagination. 3. His considerable annual income came from crime and vice—some of the nastiest crimes and the most repulsive vices in the book. 4. He was reputed to own twenty Assemblymen and six district leaders. 5. Lon Cohen added that if a newspaperman printed something about Zeck that he happened to resent, the body was washed ashore at Montauk Point, mangled by sharks; there wasn't a word about Zeck in the "morgue" of the Gazette. 6. Zeck's luxurious country estate, Eastcrest, was on the highest hill in Westchester; he had also owned a yacht but had given it to the navy. Wolfe dismissed his men and destroyed their reports. He hoped that X's affairs and his own would not touch again. But touch they did. . . . They touched again in March 1948.

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That electric-company bird would have been good for at least a grand over and above expenses on his forgery problem, but Wolfe couldn't be bothered. Mrs. What's-her-name would have paid twice that, plenty, for the lowdown on that so-called musician, but Wolfe was too busy reading. That lawyer by the name of Clifford was in a bad hole and had to buy help, but he had dandruff, and Wolfe can't stand anybody who has dandruff. And the hell of it was that Wolfe, like everyone else in the upper brackets, was broke after paying his income tax. So he suggested, at last, that Madeline Fraser, the radio and television personality, should hire him for $20,000 to investigate the murder of Cyril Orchard, a man who sold tips on the horse races through the most expensive sheet in the business, The Track Almanac, price $10 a week. Orchard's murder had happened like this. On the morning of Tuesday, March 9, Miss Fraser had two guests on her program, broadcast from the FBC station in New York, WPIT. One of her guests was Orchard; the other was F. O. Savarese, an assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University and an expert on the law of averages. For forty minutes the program had gone smoothly; then the moment arrived for the product of one of the sponsors, Hi-Spot, the Drink You Dream Of, to be poured, drunk, and eulogized. Suddenly Orchard began to make terrible noises right into the microphone, and then he keeled over. Pretty soon he was dead, and he had got the poison right there on the broadcast, in his bottle of Hi-Spot, the Drink You Dream Of. Wolfe was in the middle of his investigation of the Orchard murder when that same voice called him on the phone and told him to drop it. X was not so talkative this time, perhaps because Wolfe let him know that he, Wolfe, could identify X as Arnold Zeck, which, Wolfe admitted, was childish of him.


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Wolfe ignored Zeck's ukase. It soon transpired that Mr. Orchard and a woman who had also been killed had both been professional blackmailers, using a method which clearly implied a large organization, ingeniously contrived and ably conducted. Wolfe managed to expose the murderer, who had been blackmailed by both Orchard and the woman. The day after the murderer was sentenced, another call came from X. "I am calling to express my appreciation of your handling of the Fraser case, now that it's over," Zeck said. "I am pleased and thought you should know it. I congratulate you on keeping your investigation within the limits I prescribed. It has increased my admiration for you." "I like to be admired," Wolfe said curtly. "But when I undertake an investigation I permit prescription of limits only by the requirements of the job. If the job had taken me across your path you would have found me there." "It is either my good fortune—or yours," Zeck said. And hung up. Wolfe turned to Archie. "If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him," Wolfe said, "I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work—and sleep and eat, if there is time for it—and stay there until I have finished with him."

That call came in May 1948. Thirteen months passed, bringing us to June 1949. In the interval Wolfe did not hear from X; he hadn't happened to do anything with which X had reason to interfere. That good fortune ended—as it was bound to end sooner or later, since both Wolfe and Zeck were associated with crime—in June. The condition of Wolfe's bank balance at the time did not

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require the use of any sales pressure to snare a client, but Wolfe could always use $5000, the retainer offered him by the Sperling family of Chappaqua. He sent Archie off to spend the weekend with the family at its country place, and stayed at home, as usual, in the office with his books, and in the plant rooms on the roof with his orchids. On Saturday, June 18, at 6:10 p.m., X phoned again. He was more peremptory than formerly and gave Wolfe an ultimatum with a time limit. He told Wolfe to cease forthwith any inquiries into the activities of Mr. Louis Rony, a friend of the Sperling family, and he gave Wolfe twentyfour hours to recall Archie from Chappaqua. Wolfe responded to X's tone as a man of his temperament naturally would—"I am congenitally tart and thorny"—and rejected X's ultimatum. But he was concerned. When Archie returned from his weekend, after midnight on Sunday, and gave Wolfe his report, Wolfe told him of the phone call. They discussed the situation at length. The two of them were still at it between two and three o'clock on the Monday morning when they heard an outlandish crash. Three men hired by X had mounted to the roof of the building directly across the street, armed with sub-machine guns and a tommy-gun, and fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition at Wolfe's plant rooms. That Theodore Horstmann was not killed was fortuitous; it took thirty men, working long hours for many days, to salvage and repair the damage. Wolfe estimated the cost of repairs and replacements at $40,000—"and some of the damaged or destroyed plants are irreplaceable." The gunmen were never found, of course. And what if they had been? It would be incorrect to say that they had been hired directly by X. They had been hired by a B or a C or a D—Wolfe thought most likely a C. Assuredly X was


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not on speaking terms with anyone as close to organized crime as a gunman. Wolfe, hopping mad, plunged right ahead and solved the problem of the Sperlings. But that didn't solve the problem of Arnold Zeck. It was in April 1950 that the two old antagonists clashed head on, when Mrs. Barry Rackham gave Wolfe $10,000 as a retainer and asked him to find out where her husband was getting his money from. Wolfe didn't like the assignment, but his bank balance had by no means fully recovered from the awful blow of March 15. Then Arnold Zeck telephoned for the sixth time. "Return her money and withdraw, and two months from today I shall send you ten thousand dollars in cash." Wolfe announced his "retirement" from the detective business on April 10, 1950, and disappeared. He went to Marko Vukcic and gave him a power of attorney so Vukcic could sign checks for Archie. Wolfe had also arranged for Fritz Brenner to go to work at Rusterman's restaurant; Theodore Horstmann would assist Lewis Hewitt in his greenhouses on Long Island. As for Archie, he opened up his own detective agency on the tenth floor of a building on Madison Avenue in the Forties. He was tempted to drop in at Macgruder's and blow a couple of thousand of his own money on office equipment, but instead he went to Second Avenue and found bargains on the forty-odd items he needed, from ashtrays to a Moorhead's Directory. With Fred Durkin, he finished up a poison-pen job that had been hanging fire. In June he spent two full weeks handling a hot insurance case for Del Bascom and damn near got his skull cracked for good. When Wolfe returned to New York—as the mysterious

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Mr. Roeder of Los Angeles—he had lost 117 pounds; his skin was pleated and wrinkled; he sported a pointed brown beard, and he talked through his nose. But he had managed to worm himself into Zeck's organization, and he was prepared to get Archie in too. Archie will never forget his first look at Arnold Zeck. At first he saw "nothing but forehead and eyes. It wasn't a forehead, actually, it was a dome, sloping up and up to the line of his faded thin hair. The eyes were a result of an error on the assembly line. They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless. They did not now look the same as shark eyes because Arnold Zeck's brain had been using them for fifty years, and that had had an effect." Archie was fully prepared to take care of Zeck once and for all, and all by himself, but he didn't have to. A certain highly unpleasant murderer did the job for him. Bending over Zeck's collapsed body, "He's gone," Zeck's bodyguard, Schwartz, said.

18 Backtrack: Omit Flowers, a Door to Death, a Gun with Wings, and a Disguise for Murder "That won't do. He's in jail, charged with murder. Danger is breathing down the back of his neck and he's nearly dead with fear." —Marko Vukcic to Nero Wolfe, "Omit Flowers"

It should not be thought that the only cases solved by Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin in the late 1940s concerned the mysterious Mr. Arnold Zeck. We shall have to backtrack a little here. In Archie's opinion it was one of Wolfe's neatest jobs, and he never got a nickel for it. Wolfe took it on merely as a favor to his old friend Marko Vukcic, although there may have been other factors. In his youth, Virgil Pompa, sixty-eight years old in July 1948, had been the best sauce man in France. He had also been Marko Vukcic's mentor. "He had genius," Marko said, "and he had a generous heart, and I owe him much." That was enough for Nero Wolfe, and he went to work. 129

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For Pompa, now the manager of the Ambrosia restaurant chain and H. R. Landy's trusted field captain and second in command, had been convicted of a brutal murder he did not commit. . . . It was on Sunday, December 5, 1948, that a telegram was delivered to the old brownstone house on East Thirty-fifth Street. It came from Illinois and it notified Theodore Horstmann, the tender and defender of Wolfe's orchids, that his mother was critically ill; Horstmann must come at once, and he would be gone—well, there was no way of telling. Wolfe needed a substitute orchid nurse, of course. On the recommendation of Wolfe's friend Lewis Hewitt, Wolfe and Archie motored up to Katonah to interview Andrew Krasicki, who had worked for Hewitt for three years and was as good as they come. And, at Katonah, they found a Door to Death. . . . In August 1949, Margaret Mion paid a call on Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. She opened the conversation by handing Wolfe a check for $5000. All she wanted for her five thousand was the moon. It seems that on a Tuesday evening in April, Alberto Mion, the opera singer, her husband, had been shot dead in their apartment on East End Avenue. Now she wanted Wolfe to investigate a four-month-old murder without letting on there had been one; to prove that neither she nor her lover had killed Alberto, which could only be done by finding out who had; and in case Wolfe concluded that one of them had done it, to file it away and forget it. But Nero Wolfe took the case. Six months later Bill McNab, the garden editor of the Gazette, suggested to Wolfe that the 189 members of the Manhattan Flower Club should be invited to drop in and

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look at Wolfe's orchids. In Archie's opinion Wolfe should have had his head examined for agreeing, but agree he did. Wolfe and Archie got no fee, but they did get lots of publicity and their pictures in the paper after they had ripped away a Disguise for Murder. And Inspector Cramer got his nose wiped.

19 Into the Fifties with Murders by the Books "I haven't the slightest notion who it is. But I am prepared to make an attack that will expose him—or her—and if it doesn't, I'll have no opinion of myself at all. Confound it, don't you know me well enough to realize when I'm ready to strike?" —Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin, "The Zero Clue"

The first half of January and February 1951 had been slow for Wolfe and Archie, except for routine jobs where all they had to do was superintend Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather, and for a little mix-up with a gang of hijackers during which Archie and Fred got shot at. Then a man named John R. Wellman phoned. His daughter Joan had been run over by a car in Van Cortlandt Park seventeen days ago. Wolfe asked him for a retainer of $5000 to find out who did it. At just about the same time Inspector Cramer came to Wolfe with a little point about a homicide. Leonard Dykes, forty-one, had been found banging up against a pile in the East River off Ninetieth Street on New Year's Day. For eight years he had been a clerk, not a member of the firm, in the law offices of Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin, and Briggs. 132

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Dykes had been unmarried, sober, trustworthy, and competent. No one discoverable had hated him or feared him or wished him ill. Who had killed Joan Wellman? Who had killed Leonard Dykes? And was there any connection between the two killings? That was the affair Archie called Murder by the Book. It was a crowded summer, that summer of 1951. Archie had just deposited a check from a big client named Pendexter, for polishing off a complicated infringement case, when a barber and his manicurist wife at the shop where Wolfe and Archie got their hair trimmed precipitated them into a case involving the killing of a cop. The little affair of the Squirt and the Monkey involved both Wolfe and Archie in the winter of 1951-1952. By the following June, however, Wolfe's bank account was at its lowest point in years, and he had still seen fit to turn down four offers of jobs in a row. Then Perry Helmar offered $5000 plus expenses if Wolfe would find a certain young woman—double that if he produced her alive and well in New York by the morning of June 30. The case—Archie called his account of it Prisoner's Base—offered several surprises: the wanted young woman was already sleeping in Wolfe's South Room, and before too long Archie Goodwin himself was Wolfe's client. In this period also (1952-1953) we must place the case of Archie's "Invitation to Murder," which opened when Mr. Herman Lewent of New York, Paris, Toulouse, and Rome called on Wolfe one Friday to offer him $1000 in cash. A few months before, Mr. Lewent explained, he had had three mistresses, and one of them had tried to poison him (Archie didn't believe he had it in him—the three mistresses, that is, not the poison). But that wasn't what was bugging Mr. Lewent. What was

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bugging him was that his sister Beryl had inherited all their father's money, and she was supposed to take care of him, and then she had gone and married Theodore Huck, and then she had gone and died and left all her money to her husband. What Lewent wanted to know was simply this: Which of three women, Huck's housekeeper, his nurse, or his so-called secretary, was hooking Huck? The situation in "This Won't Kill You" was complex and will have to be explained in some detail. It was a mess even before that World Series game between the New York Giants and the Boston Red Sox started. Pierre Mondor, owner of the famous Mondor's Restaurant in Paris, was visiting New York and was a house guest at the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street. He got the notion, God knows how or why, that Wolfe had to take him to a baseball game, and Wolfe's conception of the obligations of a host wouldn't let him use his power of veto. Tickets were no problem, since Emil Chisholm, oil millionaire and part owner of the Giants, considered himself deeply in Wolfe's debt on account of a case Wolfe and Archie had handled for him a few years back. So that October afternoon, a Wednesday, Archie got the pair of them, the noted private detective and the noted chef, up to the Polo Grounds in a taxi, steered them through the mob into the entrance, along the concrete ramps, and down the aisle to their box. It wasn't long after the game started that Wolfe and Archie were called to the clubhouse (an enthusiastic baseball-Wolfe fan shouted, "Go get 'em, Nero! Sick 'em!" as they left). There Archie opened the door to a closet and found Nick Ferrone, in uniform, on the floor with a baseball bat alongside of him and his head smashed in. The next caller was young Pete Drossos, one of the neighborhood boys. Pete was a client, he said: a woman with a

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man seated beside her in a Cadillac had mouthed at him soundlessly, "Help, get a cop." Then the woman herself had called on Wolfe and Archie. She had a scratch on her left cheek, on a slant down toward the center of her mouth, faint but noticeable on her smooth fair skin, and it was no wonder that Pete had taken in her golden spider earrings. Presently there was a murder, and Wolfe and Archie took the case for the smallest retainer in their history: $4.30. Some months later the president of a big corporation hired Wolfe to find out which member of his staff was giving trade secrets to a competitor. Archie was on another case at the time, and Wolfe put Orrie Cather on it. Orrie made a long job of it, and the first thing Wolfe and Archie knew they were told by the corporation president that he had got impatient and gone to Leo Heller, the probability wizard, with the problem, and Heller had cooked up one of his formulas and come up with the right answer. Now Heller's calculations had led him to suspect that a client of his might have committed a serious crime, and he wanted Wolfe and Archie to investigate. The only trouble was, someone bumped Heller off before Archie could interview him. But Heller had left on his desk a clue to his killer for Nero Wolfe to work on—a Zero Clue, Archie called it.

20 The Black Mountain —and Beyond Maybe I shouldn't have tried to tell it at all, but I hated to skip it. —Archie Goodwin, The Black Mountain

Nero Wolfe knew that his oldest and best friend, Marko Vukcic, was deeply interested and deeply involved in an underground Montenegrin nationalist movement, the Spirit of the Black Mountain. He knew, too, that Carla Britton, his adopted, now widowed daughter, shared Marko's interest and involvement. But that was their business. Wolfe had his own affairs to attend to—until Marko was shot down by an unknown hand and word came from Paolo Telesio in Bari that the murderer had returned to Montenegro. More, Carla had followed him there, and somewhere in that wild and mountainous country she too had been killed, murdered. Doubly motivated, Nero Wolfe moved. ("It's quite a shock to see a statue turn into a dynamo without warning," Archie complained.) Saul was signed up to hold down the office and sleep in the South Room; Nathaniel Parker was empowered to cash checks; Fritz was given authority to take charge at Rusterman's; Theodore was given bales of instruc136

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tions about the care of the orchids, which he didn't need in the least. Archie opened up his desk drawer and got out the Marley and two boxes of cartridges. "You're not taking that," Wolfe stated. "It may make trouble at the customs. Take it off." It was a command, and Wolfe was the boss, but Archie is stubborn. "I'm not going to try chasing a killer around a black mountain in a foreign land with nothing but some damn popgun I know nothing about." "Nonsense. It's time to go." "Go ahead." Archie crossed his legs. "Very well," Wolfe snapped. "If I hadn't let you grow into a habit I could have done this without you. Come on." Archie picked up a Colt .38 when he got there, and it was a good thing that he did. Back in the United States, in May, Wolfe and Archie had callers. Their names were Paul and Caroline Aubry, they said, and they had thought they were married, but it seemed that they weren't. In 1950 Caroline had married a very wealthy young man named Sidney Karnow. A year later he had enlisted in the army and was sent to Korea. A few months later she was officially informed that he had been killed in action. A year after that she had met Paul Aubry and fallen in love with him, and he with her, and three weeks after they had been married, Karnow turned up alive. But only briefly. . . . "The Next Witness"—the case took place in the late summer of 1954—was Nero Wolfe himself. He had been subpoenaed by the State of New York to appear in court and testify at the trial of Leonard Ashe for the murder of Marie Willis, and neither fee nor glory was in prospect. Wolfe was not going to sit still for that, of course: he arose, sidled past

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two pairs of knees to the aisle, and headed for the rear of the courtroom. Wolfe was off to solve the murder and get the agony over with. Later that year—or perhaps it was early in the spring of 1955—came the "Die like a Dog" case, in which a big black Labrador retriever named Bootsy led Wolfe and Archie on the blood-spattered trail of an artist's missing model. Then came the extraordinary case Archie called, with good

reason, Before Midnight. One of the biggest accounts at Lippert, Buff, and Assa, the advertising agency everybody called LBA, was Heery Products, Incorporated. One of the Heery products was a line of cosmetics they called Pour Amour. They introduced it years ago and it was doing fairly well. Then a young man on the LBA staff named Louis Dahlman conceived an idea for promoting it, and he finally succeeded in getting enough approval of the idea to have it submitted to the Heery people, and they decided they liked it, and it was scheduled to start on September 27, 1954. The idea was a prize contest, the biggest in history, with a first prize of $500,000 in cash, a second prize of $250,000, a third prize of $100,000, and fifty-seven smaller prizes. Each week for twenty weeks there appeared in newspapers and magazines a four-line verse describing "a woman recorded in non-fictional history in any of its forms, including biography, as having used cosmetics." You had to guess the name of each woman from the clues concealed in the verse. The deadline was February 14. There were over two million contestants, and Dahlman had trained three hundred men and women to handle the checking and recording. When they finished they had seventy-two contestants who had identified all twenty of the women correctly. Dahlman had more verses ready, and on March 28 he sent five of them to each of the seventy-two contestants—by air mail to those at a distance—and the answers had to be postmarked before mid-

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night April 4. It came out a quintuple tie. Five people correctly identified the five new women, and Dahlman telephoned them and arranged for them to come to New York. They would land the first three prizes, the big three, and also two of the $10,000 prizes. They came, and Dahlman had them to dinner in a private room of the Churchill. Talbott Heery of Heery Products was there, and so were Vernon Assa and Patrick O'Garro of LBA. Dahlman was going to give them five more verses, with a week to solve them, but a woman who lived in Los Angeles objected that she wanted to work at home and would have to take part of the week getting there, so it was arranged to stagger the deadlines for the postmarks according to how long it would take each one to get home. The meeting ended shortly before 11:00, and the contestants left and separated. Four of them, from out of town, had rooms at the Churchill. One, who lived in New York, presumably went home. Dahlman also presumably went home (he was a bachelor and lived alone in an apartment on Perry Street). A woman came at 7:00 in the morning to get his breakfast, and when she got there he was on the floor of the living room, dead, shot through the heart, from the back, by someone who had used a cushion from a divan to muffle the sound. No one knew the answers in that contest but Louis Dahlman. He had written all the verses himself, and he himself had checked the answers of the seventy-two who were in the first tie. With the third group, the five in the second tie, he guarded the verses themselves almost as strictly as he guarded the answers. There was supposed to be only one copy of those answers in existence, which Dahlman carried in his wallet. When Dahlman's body was found he was fully dressed and everything was in his pockets. Everything except one thing—his wallet. "Lippert, Buff, and Assa want you to find out which one of those five people took it," Rudolph Hansen, the attorneyat-law, told Nero Wolfe, "and before midnight April 20. . . ."

21 A Window for Death, Immune to Murder, and Too Many Detectives "The setup is marvelous and very democratic. You're just here as a cook, and look at this room you've got. Not a hardship in sight. Private bath. Mine is somewhat smaller, but I'm only the cook's assistant. I suppose I might call it culinary attaché." —Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe, "Immune to Murder"

Bertram Fyfe had hit a bonanza by finding and hooking onto a four-mile load of uranium ore near a place called Black Elbow, somewhere in Canada, and now, in August 1955, after an absence of twenty years, he had taken an apartment in the Churchill Towers and communicated with his family. He had also died promptly of pneumonia, and his older brother David wanted Wolfe to investigate. Wolfe asked the big question—why should the patient be nestled between empty hot-water bottles?—and turned up a murder weapon which conveniently, totally, and automatically disappeared. Wolfe and Archie were getting nowhere on that insurance case for Lamb and McCullough the following autumn, and 140

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Wolfe was plenty annoyed, when a phone call came from the State Department. A new ambassador from a foreign country with which the United States wanted to make a deal had been asked if he had any special personal desires, and he had said yes, he wanted to catch an American brook trout, and, what was more, he wanted it cooked fresh from the brook by Nero Wolfe. Would Wolfe be willing to oblige? Arrangements had been made for the ambassador and a small party to spend a week at River Bend, the sixteen-room mountain lodge belonging to O. V. Bragan, the oil tycoon, with three miles of private trout water on the Crooked River. If a week was too much for Wolfe, two days would do, or even one, or in a pinch just long enough to cook some trout. Wolfe asked Archie what he thought. Archie said they had to stay on the Lamb and McCullough job. Wolfe said his country wanted that ambassador softened up and he must answer his country's call to duty. Archie said nuts: if Wolfe wanted to cook for his country he could enlist in the army and work his way up to mess sergeant, but he would admit that the Lamb and McCullough thing was probably too tough for Wolfe. Days passed. It got tougher. The outcome was that they left the old brownstone house at 11:14 one morning and drove 328 miles in a little under seven hours, and there they were at River Bend. The next day the trout were striking, and so was a murderer. Wolfe made another pilgrimage from West Thirty-fifth Street in his next recorded case, the "Too Many Detectives" affair. It was shortly after New Year's Day, 1956, when the wiretapping scandals had called attention to various detectives, to wit, that there were 590 of them licensed by the Secretary of the State of New York; that 482 of the 590 were in New York City; that applicants for licenses took no written exami-

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nation and no formal inquiry was made into their backgrounds; that the State Department had no idea how many operatives were employed by the licensed detectives, since the employees weren't licensed at all; and a lot of so on and so forth. So the Secretary of State decided to inquire, and all of the 590 were summoned to appear for questioning. Wolfe and Archie both had licenses, of course, and were therefore summoned, and that was a nuisance to Nero Wolfe. But since the investigation was being shared by the other 588 he might have kept his reactions down to growls and grumbles if it hadn't been for two things: first, the inquiry was being held partly in New York and partly in Albany, and he and Archie had been summoned to Albany, and his request for a change had been ignored; and second, the only wiretapping operation he had ever had a hand in had added nothing to his glory and damn little to his bank account, and he didn't want to be reminded of it. That operation had begun on April 5, 1955, when a man called on Wolfe at his office and gave his name as Otis Ross and said he wanted to have his home telephone tapped. Wolfe told him he never dealt with marital difficulties. Ross said that his difficulty wasn't marital, that he was a widower, that he had diversified business and financial interests and handled them from his home, that he was away frequently for a day or two at a time, that he wanted to find out whether his suspicions of his secretary were warranted, and to that end he wanted his phone tapped. Wolfe and Archie accepted the assignment—and Wolfe, by his own admission, was "utterly flummoxed." The man who called himself "Otis Ross" was neither the real Otis Ross nor Otis Ross's secretary. In fact, Wolfe didn't find out who he really was until he was ordered to Albany, and "Otis Ross" got himself strangled with his own necktie. It was the first time Nero Wolfe had ever been jailed in the United States.

No Holiday for Nero Wolfe "I should explain, Mr. Wolfe, that I have come to you in this emergency because I have full confidence in your ability, your discretion, and your integrity." —Millard Bynoe, "Easter Parade" P.H. Your innocence is known and the injustice done you deplored. Do not let bitterness prevent the righting of a wrong. —Archie Goodwin

That was how the case Archie called Might as Well Be Dead started—just an innocent search for a missing person. Wolfe and Archie found him all right, in the death cell of a city prison, accused of murder. P.H. suspected his girl. She suspected him. He wouldn't even give his real name. Everybody was protecting someone, but, unwittingly, all of them were protecting the real murderer, who was walking the streets, ready to kill again. Archie called it "the screwiest case I'd ever worked on. Surprise is not an expression I expect from Nero Wolfe, but this time you could have knocked him over with a baby orchid." The following July Nero Wolfe went on a picnic, unlikely as that may seem. 143

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It came about when Felix Courbet, the maître d'hôtel at Rusterman's restaurant, asked Wolfe to make a speech at the Independence Day picnic of the United Restaurant Workers of America, the URWA. Wolfe not only grumbled but refused. But Felix came to the office one day with reinforcements: Paul Rago, sauce chef at the Churchill; James Korby, president of URWA; H. L. Griffin, a food and wine importer who supplied hardto-get items not only for Rusterman's but also for Wolfe's own table; and Philip Holt, URWA's director of organization. They also were to be on the program at the picnic, and their main appeal was that they simply had to have the man who was responsible for keeping Rusterman's the best restaurant in New York after the death of Marko Vukcic. Since Wolfe is as vain as three peacocks, and since he loved Marko if he ever loved anyone, that got him. There had been another inducement: Philip Holt agreed to lay off Fritz Brenner. For three years Fritz had been visiting the kitchen at Rusterman's off and on as a consultant, and Holt had been pestering him, insisting that he join URWA. You can guess how Wolfe liked that. And it was a good thing Wolfe finally agreed to go out to Culp's Meadows on Long Island, of course. Someone celebrated the Fourth of July holiday by plunging a carving knife clear to the handle in the back of Philip Holt. It was early in 1957 that word reached Wolfe—"I have it from Mr. Lewis Hewitt, who had it from his gardener, who had it from Mr. Millard Bynoe's gardener"—that Bynoe had produced a flamingo-pink Vanda, "both petals and sepals true pink, with no tints, spots, or edgings." Wolfe naturally wanted a look at it, and Bynoe was being difficult. But there was also rumor that Mrs. Bynoe would wear the orchid in the Easter Parade, and Wolfe wanted somebody to snatch it.

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Archie got hold of a character he called Tabby, baited him with two Cs, and was himself on hand in the guise of a press photographer to see the dirty work well done. Out came the worshipers from Saint Thomas's Church, among them Mrs. Millard Bynoe. It happened when they had gone some fifty yards along Fifty-fourth Street, about halfway to Madison. The throng wasn't as thick there as on Fifth Avenue, but it was still a throng. Tabby was almost directly behind the quarry, and Archie wasn't far off, when suddenly Mrs. Bynoe stopped short, grabbed her husband's arms, and said to him in a sort of half-strangled scream, "I can't stand it! I didn't want to—here on the street—I can't breathe! Mil, you—" She let go of his arms, straightened up, rigid, shuddered all over, and toppled. It was murder—but who and how? Wolfe's fee for finding out—in addition to Bynoe's check —was the flamingo-pink Vanda, and if you would like to see it, ring Archie. If he's not too busy he'll arrange it for you. "Get that snake out of my house!" raved Otis Jarrell, one of the richest men in the world, referring to his seductive daughter-in-law, Susan. Nero Wolfe didn't like the case Archie called / / Death Ever Slept, and he took it expressly to annoy Archie. But Wolfe got caught in his own trap when a corpse turned up with a bullet in its skull, and the cops hung the murder on Archie. In the fall of 1957 Kurt Bottweil had asked Wolfe and Archie to recover some tapestries which had been stolen from him; Wolfe and Archie obliged. Now, on Wednesday, December 20, 1957, Wolfe was furious with Archie. On the coming Friday, Wolfe wanted Archie to drive him to Lewis Hewitt's estate on Long Island to meet a Mr. Thompson, the best hybridizer of orchids in England. In-

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stead, Archie was going to a Christmas party at the Bottweil offices; and what was infinitely worse, Archie was threatening to marry Margot Dickey of the Bottweil group of interior decorators. Archie even showed Wolfe the marriage license, for which Archie had paid the going rate of two dollars. "My room could be our bedroom," Archie rhapsodized, "and the other room on that floor could be our living room." When Archie got to Bottweil's place in the East Sixties on Friday, the party was in full swing. Bottweil had even hired a Santa Claus, in mask and costume and white cotton gloves, to serve the champagne. "Merry Christmas, all my blessings! Merry, merry, merry!" Kurt Bottweil caroled, sipping the Pernod he preferred to champagne, and then he clutched his throat with both hands. "Get a doctor!" Archie yelled, but there was nothing to do to help Bottweil, and Archie knew it. What Archie needed to solve that mystery was a Santa Claus.

23 Eeny Meeny Murder Mo We know that one of three men had committed murder, and how and when. Okay, which one? —Archie Goodwin, "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo"

Bertha Aaron said to Archie, " I am private secretary of Mr. Lamont Otis, senior partner in the law firm of Otis, Edey, Heydecker, and Jett. Their office is on Madison Avenue at Forty-first Street. I'm worried about something that happened recently and I want Mr. Wolfe to investigate it." What was worrying Miss Aaron was that she had seen a member of her firm with his opponent in a very important case—"one of the biggest we've ever had"—at a place where they wouldn't have been if they hadn't wanted to keep it secret. Archie consulted Wolfe in the plant rooms; Wolfe would have nothing to do with it. "Send her away." But when Archie got back to the office, Bertha Aaron was dead on the floor, strangled with Wolfe's own necktie, which he had left on his desk to be cleaned. "This is insupportable!" Wolfe snapped. You just can't do things like that in Nero Wolfe's office, whoever you are, and expect to get away with it. 147

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Wolfe in nine days "a couple of years ago" had recovered about a million dollars' worth of rings and bracelets for Mrs. Robert Robilotti (his fee: twenty grand). Or, as Archie put it, "I did the job and she didn't like me. She resented a remark I made." Now her nephew, Dinky Byne, had Archie on the phone. "That won't matter," Dinky said. "She forgets remarks. I suppose you know about the dinner party she gives every year on the birthday date of my Uncle Albert, now resting in peace, perhaps?" Well, it was seven o'clock that very night, black tie. And Dinky Byne was to attend and couldn't because he had a fever. Would Archie go in his place? It seems that the late Mr. Albert Grantham—Mrs. Robilotti's first husband and Dinky's Uncle Albert—had spent the last ten years of his life doing Good Works with the three or four hundred million dollars he had inherited, and one of them was to improve girls who had babies but no husbands. A little group of the unwed mothers were to be the guests of honor at the dinner party Archie was to attend. And the party, when Archie got there, seemed to be going well. One of the unwed mothers, Faith Usher, a glamorous young lady indeed, particularly attracted Archie, and he was standing right beside her when it happened. It was poison, inserted in just one of the whole partyful of champagne glasses. How did the murderer make sure that among all the unwed pulchritude present the loaded glass reached the intended victim? The solution, Archie always felt, was one of Nero Wolfe's smartest brainchildren. One day in February 1958, Lewis Hewitt, the millionaire and orchid-fancier and Wolfe's good friend, told Wolfe and

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Archie about the Ten for Aristology, a group of ten men pursuing the ideal of perfection in food and drink. The Ten wanted Fritz Brenner to cook their annual dinner, to be given as usual on April 1, Brillat-Savarin's birthday, this year at the home of Benjamin Schriver, the shipping magnate. After a long argument about the correct meaning of the word "aristology," Wolfe gave Hewitt permission to ask Fritz to cook the dinner, and Fritz agreed, but only after he had personally inspected the Schriver kitchen. So that's where they all were on that Tuesday evening, April 1, 1958—Wolfe because he had been invited by Schriver, Archie because Wolfe insisted on it, Fritz, of course, because he was superintending in the kitchen, assisted by Felix Courbet and Zoltan Mahany from Rusterman's. One detail Wolfe didn't know until he got there: each guest at the table was to be personally waited upon by an especially attractive young woman, chosen from among New York's most beautiful models and aspiring actresses. All was going great until Vincent Pyle, a Wall Street character and a well-known theatrical angel, seated at Archie's right, made a face and dropped his fork and headed for the door to the hall. Mr. Vincent Pyle, it developed, had eaten arsenic. Wolfe found the answer in one of the most elaborate charades he has ever staged. "My rancor is appeased," he said at the end of it. Philip Harvey, author of Why the Gods Laugh, wanted to make an appointment to consult Nero Wolfe on behalf of the Joint Committee on Plagiarism of the National Association of Authors and Dramatists and the Book Publishers of America. It seems that in the past four years there had been five major charges of plagiarism, all highly suspicious. Would Wolfe investigate?

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Wolfe would, but he suggested that it might be a laborious and costly operation. He asked for an advance against expenses of $5000. More than plagiarism was involved, Wolfe and Archie were to learn: murder soon followed. "I opened the door of her apartment and stepped in," Archie wrote. "Everything was as it should be except she was dead. She was lying on her back on the floor, one of those good-looking legs sticking out crooked. There was a dark red stain where the knife had been plunged through her breast. I said aloud, 'The sonofabitch!' " It was strange but true that a children's book, The Moth That Ate Peanuts, should provide a vital clue to Wolfe's solution.

24 The Many Clients of 1960 "Some day you're going to fall off and get hurt, and this could be it. If and when you find it gets too hot to hang onto any longer, and you turn loose, and you have obstructed justice by not telling me now, I'll get your hide. Nothing and no one will stop me." —Inspector Cramer to Nero Wolfe, "Death of a Demon"

"That's the gun I'm not going to shoot my husband with," Lucy Hazen, Mrs. Barry Hazen, said. Archie hadn't expected their first client of i960 to put on an act. When she had phoned for an appointment she'd said that all she wanted was thirty minutes with Nero Wolfe, to tell him something confidential. She would pay $100 for the halfhour. In November and December 1959, when Wolfe's income had reached a point where out of $100 received he could keep only $20, he would have made an appointment only for someone or something pretty special, but this was January i960, no big fee was in prospect, and even a measly C would help in the upkeep of his old brownstone house. Mrs. Hazen simply wanted Wolfe to promise that, if her husband was shot and killed, Wolfe would tell the police about her coming to West Thirty-fifth Street and what she'd said.

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"You'll be in a pickle," Wolfe warned her. "Not if I didn't do it." "Pfui. Of course you will, unless the culprit is soon exposed." That noon the radio news announced that the body of Barry Hazen had been found in an alley between two buildings on the lower West Side of Manhattan. He had been shot in the back, and he had been dead for some hours. Thomas G. Yeager simply didn't have the air of a client who might make a sizable contribution to Nero Wolfe's bank balance, which at that moment in May i960 was down to $14,194.62. But it soon developed that Mr. Yeager was executive vice-president of Continental Plastic Products, with offices in the Empire State Building. Mr. Yeager thought he was being followed, and he wanted to make sure, and if he was, he wanted Archie Goodwin to find out who was doing the following. That was kindergarten stuff, and Archie told him so, but after all he and Nero Wolfe hadn't had a client worth a damn for nearly six weeks. Well, Yeager never showed up at the rendezvous from which he was to be tailed by Archie, and when Archie rang his house he recognized the voice that answered. It was that of Purley Stebbins, Homicide Sergeant. Then Archie telephoned Lon Cohen. Yeager's body had just been discovered in an excavation on West Eighty-second Street. When that affair of the too many clients was all wound up, Wolfe said to one of them, "As for my fee, do you question my evaluation of my services at fifty thousand dollars?" Once more the bank balance was as obese as Nero Wolfe himself. When Lily Rowan learned that Harvey Grève was coming to New York for a "World Series" rodeo, she decided to throw a party, including a roping contest. A cowboy would

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ride a horse along Sixty-third Street, and other cowboys would try to rope him from the terrace of Lily's penthouse, a hundred feet up. Then Lily thought it would be nice to feed her guests young blue grouse. In late August—which it was—the baby blue grouse of Montana are around ten weeks old, and their main item of diet has been mountain huckleberries. In Archie's opinion, they are tastier than any bird Fritz Brenner has ever cooked, even quail or woodcock. "It's too bad you and Lily don't get along," Archie told Wolfe. "Ever since she squirted perfume on you." "I have no animus for Miss Rowan," Wolfe replied, passing his tongue over his lips. "But I would not solicit an invitation." "Of course not. You wouldn't stoop. I don't—" "But you may ask if I would accept one." "Would you?" "Yes." "Good," said Archie. "She asked me to invite you, but I was afraid you'd decline and I'd hate to hurt her feelings." So Wolfe and Archie were both there, and of course that was a very good thing. Because there was no use in taking the pulse of Wade Eisler, the rodeo's chief backer, when Archie found him. He was dead. Thoroughly. Somebody had roped him around the neck a dozen or more times. At the moment Archie Goodwin was unemployed. During the years he has worked for Nero Wolfe and lived under his roof, Archie has quit and been fired about the same number of times, say thirty or forty. And that evening in September i960 Archie was really fed up. This time he meant it. But then, as he pulled the door open to leave West Thirtyfifth Street forever, a female was coming up the seven steps to the stoop. Her name was Mira Holt and she was young

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and she was attractive and she had a story to tell that was both a lulu and a loony. To win a bet she had borrowed a taxicab from a friend who was one of the ninety-three women drivers then operating in New York City. And she had simply no idea how that dead woman had gotten into the back of the cab. Archie took the case, for a retainer of $50. "Give me half that fifty," Wolfe snapped. Archie raised a brow. "For what?" "To pay me. You have helped me with many problems; surely I can help you with one. I have never tried to do a job without your help; why should you try to do one without mine?" Archie Goodwin wanted to grin, but Wolfe might have misunderstood him. Three days a week—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays —around noon, when Pete Vassos had finished his rounds in an office building on Eighth Avenue, he used to trudge up the seven steps to the stoop of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street to give Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe a shoeshine. But that Monday morning in December 1960, when he showed up an hour early, Pete didn't give Archie the usual polite grin. "Today you must excuse me," Pete said. "Why I came early, something happened. I go in a man's room, Mr. Ashby, a good customer, two bits every day. Room empty, nobody there." Mr. Ashby, it seemed, had hurled himself out of his office window and landed on the pavement, ten stories down. Then Cramer got rough with Pete's daughter, Elma, and Wolfe sued everybody in sight with the help of Nathaniel Parker, and established Elma in the South Room, and proceeded to solve another tangled case.

Gambits "Is there anything you can't do? Aren't you a genius? How did you get your reputation?" —Althea Vail to Nero Wolfe, The Final Deduction

She said her name was Hattie Annis, that she wanted to see Nero Wolfe, and that she didn't have an appointment. She certainly didn't look as if she could pay Wolfe anything, but she claimed there would be a reward and that she'd split it with him. Archie wouldn't let her in until a quarter to eleven—he was on his way to the bank and Wolfe was up in the plant rooms for his two-hour morning session with the orchids— but he accepted the package she pushed at him. There had been nothing doing for more than a week, since Wolfe and Archie cleaned up the Brigham forgery case for a fee of $7417.65, and then came the call from Hattie Annis, the woman with the button off her coat. When Archie got back from the bank, the second visitor of the morning was waiting on the stoop. This one he let in; unlike Miss Annis, she was exactly the kind of female Wolfe expects to see when Archie takes one in to see him. Her name was Tamiris (Tammy) Baxter, and she was an actress, or wanted to be. And it turned out that Hattie Annis was her 155

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landlady. And Miss Baxter was worried because Miss Annis seemed worried and was going to consult Nero Wolfe. Miss Annis had a right to be worried. She was coming back to West Thirty-fifth Street when somebody in a car came right up on the sidewalk in a try at running her down. What's more, the little package she had found behind some books in the parlor of her rooming house contained a stack of twentydollar bills—$10,000, more or less. And all of them counterfeit. Like Hattie Annis, Althea Vail, Mrs. Jimmy Vail, had made no appointment. Like Hattie Annis, she had a problem—a $500,000 problem. A man who called himself Knapp wanted the $500,000 as ransom for her husband. Wolfe began his investigation by inserting an advertisement in all the evening newspapers: TO

MR.

KNAPP

The woman whose property is now in your possession has engaged my services. She is now in my office. She has not told me what you said to her on the phone Monday afternoon, and she will not tell me. I know nothing of the instructions you gave her, and I do not expect or care to know. She has hired me for a specific job, to make sure that her property is returned to her in good condition, and that is the purpose of this notice. For she has hired me for another job should it become necessary. If her property is not returned to her, or if it is damaged beyond repair, I have engaged to devote my time, energy, and talent, for as long as it may be required, to ensure just and fitting requital; and she has determined to support me to the full extent of her resources. If you do not know enough of me to be aware of the significance of this engagement to your future, I advise you to inform yourself regarding my competence and my tenacity. NERO WOLFE

And Jimmy turned up safe and sound at the Vail country place.

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And just about the same time the New York State Police found a dead body, a woman, run over by her own car. She was Althea Vail's secretary, Dinah Utley. Wolfe netted $99,925 for solving the Vail case, after paying Archie's bail. Having reached that bracket by the first of May, he relaxed and stayed relaxed. "If you offered him ten thousand bucks to detect who swiped your hat at a cocktail party yesterday he wouldn't even bother to glare at you," Archie complained. Indeed, for all that Archie tells us of Wolfe's activities in that summer of 1961, he seems to have stayed relaxed until the corn-on-the-cob season. By an arrangement with a farmer named Duncan McLeod up in Putnam County, every Tuesday from late July to midOctober sixteen ears of just-picked corn—eight for Wolfe, four for Archie, four for Fritz—were delivered at the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street to be roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, buttered, and salted. But that Tuesday in October no corn arrived. McLeod supplied corn to Rusterman's restaurant too. And that day at a quarter past five the dead body of Kenneth Faber, the young man who did the delivering, was found in the alley back of the restaurant. He had been hit on the back of the head with a piece of iron pipe. Wolfe was at the front-room fireplace, burning his copy of the third edition of Webster's New International Dictionary —in his opinion a "subversive and intolerably offensive" book—and he was in no mood to listen to a woman. But Sally Blount was in his office, and her father, Matthew Blount, president of the Blount Textile Corporation, was in prison, charged with the murder of Paul Jerin. Two weeks before, on Tuesday evening, January 30, 1962, Jerin had died after an exhibition at the Gambit, a chess

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club with two floors in an old brick building on Twelfth Street. Jerin, in a room by himself, the library, was performing the considerable feat of playing simultaneous blindfold games with twelve of the Gambit's best players, including Blount, who sat at boards in a big room on the ground floor. Then Jerin asked for a pot of hot chocolate. The chocolate was poisoned, and Jerin died at St. Vincent's Hospital at twenty past three that morning. Blount, it later developed, had come up with a fiendishly ingenious plan for beating Jerin at chess. It was up to Wolfe and Archie, for $22,000, to prove that Blount's plan hadn't included murder. Lucy Valdon, widow of Richard Valdon, one of whose books Wolfe liked, with reservations, wanted to consult him about something very personal and extremely confidential. The something was a baby. It was a baby boy, and it had been left on Lucy Valdon's doorstep with a note: MRS. RICHARD VALDON THIS BABY IS FOR YOU BECAUSE A BOY SHOULD LIVE IN HIS FATHERS HOUSE

Was Richard Valdon the baby's father? And if so, who was the baby's mother? She could have been any one of 148 women; Richard Valdon had really gotten around. And the one person who knew for sure was dead. Still, Nero Wolfe had a bizarre clue: four buttons from the baby's Cherub-brand overalls, surely not mass-produced. Were they homemade of white horsehair, perhaps? And by whom? It was addressed to Archie—an elegant outsize creamcolored envelope with the return address engraved in dark brown:

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JAMES NEVILLE VANCE

Two Nineteen Horn Street New York 12, New York Archie had never heard of him. Inside the bulky envelope was a necktie, a four-in-hand, long, narrow, certainly silk, a twenty-buck item. But James Neville Vance should have sent it to the cleaners instead of to Archie, because it had a spot, a big one two inches long, near one end. And the spot was a bloodstain. Then James Neville Vance telephoned Archie. "Please burn the tie," he said. "I intended—but what I intended doesn't matter now. I'm sorry to have bothered you." But Archie Goodwin is forever curious—or, as Wolfe put it later in the Blood Will Tell case, "He is inquisitive, impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful"—so he paid a call on James Neville Vance. And that gentleman claimed that he had sent Archie Goodwin nothing, nor had he telephoned him. Neither Nero Wolfe nor Archie Goodwin recognized him. Then he started to make a speech. "The agreements of human society embrace not only protection against murder, but thousands of other things, and it is certainly true that in America the whites have excluded the blacks from some of the benefits of those agreements. It is said that the exclusion has sometimes even extended to murder—that in parts of this country a white man may kill a black one, if not with impunity, at least with a good chance of escaping the penalty which the agreement imposes. That's deplorable, and I don't blame black men for resenting it. But how do you propose to change it? . . ." It was the speech Nero Wolfe had made years before to the cooks and waiters and busboys at Kanawha Spa in West Virginia, the speech that had persuaded one of them to divulge

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the vital piece of information that finally enabled Wolfe to solve the Too Many Cooks case. The divulger had been Paul Whipple, then a twenty-oneyear-old student at Howard University, and their visitor now was the same Paul Whipple, assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Paul Whipple's twenty-three-year-old son, Dunbar, worked for ROCC, the Rights of Citizens Committee. And Dunbar wanted to marry a white girl, Susan Brooke, also a worker for ROCC, and Whipple Senior and his wife were dead set against it. Then Susan Brooke's corpse was found in a room on the third floor of a walk-up on 128th Street—by Dunbar Whipple. Inspector Cramer thought he had his case against Dunbar all sewed up. Until Nero Wolfe, reflecting on a diphthong, uncovered the true motive for the crime—certainly one of the most unusual motives in the annals of murder.

26 A Doorbell Rings, and a Doxy Dies "I want you to do something that perhaps no other man alive could do." —Rachel Bruner to Nero Wolfe, The Doorbell Rang

In the considered opinion of many of Nero Wolfe's admirers, the case Archie Goodwin called The Doorbell Rang represents the private detective's finest hour. It all began when Rachel Bruner handed Nero Wolfe a check for $100,000. Mrs. Bruner wanted to know if Wolfe had read a book entitled The FBI Nobody Knows. Wolfe had. The book had impressed Mrs. Bruner so strongly that she bought ten thousand copies of it and sent them to members of the Cabinet, the Supreme Court justices, governors of all the states, all senators and representatives, members of state legislatures, publishers of newspapers and magazines, and editors, heads of corporations and banks, network executives and broadcasters, columnists, district attorneys, educators, and chiefs of police. Now she, her son, her daughter, her secretary, and her brother were being followed night and day. And she thought their telephones were tapped. And her privacy was being invaded in countless other ways. And she was sick of it, and she wanted Nero Wolfe to stop this constant harassment. 161

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For a retainer of $100,000, the largest Wolfe had ever been asked to take. Wolfe took it. Then Cramer told Archie about the strange case of Morris Althaus, shot in the chest. No gun. No bullet. A damned neat murder. And it seemed that Althaus for weeks had been collecting material for an article on the FBI for Tick-Tock magazine. And there wasn't a sign of it in his apartment. Cramer added that about eleven o'clock on the night Althaus was killed three FBI men had left his apartment house at 63 Arbor Street in Greenwich Village. "I've seen plenty of murderers I could name," Cramer said, "but so what, if I couldn't prove it. And I'm hogtied." But Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin weren't hogtied. Orrie Cather, part-time assistant to Nero Wolfe, was going to marry a charming little airline stewardess named Jill Hardy. But Orrie was also being friendly, very friendly, with a doxy named Isabel Kerr. And Archie Goodwin had discovered Isabel's shapely body in the boudoir of her East Side apartment, her smartly coiffed head bashed in with a marble ashtray. When an official search of the apartment turned up the dead girl's diary, it revealed that Orrie Cather was the only man she had ever loved, and the father of the baby she expected in seven months. Now Orrie, not surpisingly, was being held without bail on the suspicion of murder. Nero Wolfe knew Orrie hadn't done it, but there was only one way to prove that—find the real murderer. There was no lack of suspects, no lack of motives. Only a clue was missing. Wolfe found it in a letter—a mystifying note written by an obscure mathematician, long dead.

Part Three: From the Files of Archie Goodwin "God knows you're full of material." —Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe, The Rubber Band

27 The Philosophy of Nero Wolfe "I am a philosopher." —Nero Wolfe, numerous occasions

Nero Wolfe on Authorship: "Nothing corrupts a man as deeply as writing a book; the myriad temptations are overpowering." On Bravado: "There are two distinct types: one having as its purpose to impress outside spectators; the other being calculated solely for an internal audience. The latter is bravado of the psyche; it is a show put on by this or that factor of the ego to make a hit with all the other factors."

On Competence: "Competence is so rare that it is a temptation to cling to it when we find it." On Courtesy: "Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life." 165

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On Culture: "Culture is like money; it comes easiest to those who need it least." On Debts: "All debts are preposterous. They are the envious past clutching with its dead fingers at the throat of the present." On Dignity: "To assert dignity is to lose it." "There is nothing in the world as indestructible as human dignity." On Elimination in Art: "One of the deepest secrets of excellence is a discriminating elimination." On Emotions and Desserts: "I favor the Anglo-Saxon theory of the treatment of both: freeze them and hide them in your belly." On Employees: "Anyone can be faithful to an employer; millions are, daily, constantly; it is one of the dullest and most vulgar of loyalties." On Friendship: "It is said that two sure ways to lose a friend are to lend him money and to question the purity of a woman's gesture to him." On Freedom: "Only men who are willing to die for it have any chance of living for it."

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On Gallantry: "Gallantry is not always a lackey for lust." On Hospitality: "To me the relationship of host and guest is sacred. The guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality. The host is king—and should not condescend to a lesser role." On Humanity: "Few of us have enough wisdom for justice, or enough leisure for humanity." "By all means cling to any battered shreds of it that are left to you; there are many of us in that respect quite unclothed." On Impetuosity: "Impetuosity is a virtue only when delay is dangerous." On the Income Tax: "A man condemning the income tax because of the annoyance it gives him or the expense it puts him to is merely a dog baring its teeth, and he forfeits the privileges of civilized discourse. But it is permissible to criticize it on other and impersonal grounds. A government, like an individual, spends money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to, because it wants to, or simply because it has it to spend. The last is much the shabbiest. It is arguable, if not manifest, that a substantial portion of the great spring flood of billions pouring into the Treasury will in effect get spent for that last shabby reason." On Inertia: "It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia. It is the greatest force in the world."

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On Innocence: "Innocence is negative and can never be established; you can only establish guilt." On the Law and Lawyers: "The law is an envious monster. It can't tolerate a decent and swift conclusion to a skirmish between an individual and what it calls society, as long as it has it in its power to turn it into a ghastly and prolonged struggle; the victim must struggle like a worm in its fingers, not for ten minutes, but for ten months. I don't like the law. It was not I, but a great philosopher created by a novelist, who said the law is an ass." "Bad blood is for lawyers what a bad tooth is for a dentist." "Very few people like lawyers. I don't. They are inveterate hedgers. They think everything has two sides, which is nonsense. They are insufferable word-stretchers." On Learning: "Only the man who knows too little knows too much." On Life: "There is no moment in any man's life too empty to be dramatized." "All life is a mad and futile ferment of substances meant originally to occupy space without disturbing it. But alas, here we are in the thick of the disturbance, and the only way that has occurred to us to make it tolerable is to join in and raise all the hell our ingenuity may suggest." On Lightning: "We cannot protect from lightning, we can only observe it strike." On Luck: "We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits."

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On Lying: "No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully." On Millionaires: "Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth." On Nonsense: "A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses." On the Obvious and the Subtle: "Nothing is obvious in itself. Obviousness is subjective. Three pursuers learn that a fugitive boarded a train for Philadelphia. To the first pursuer it's obvious that the fugitive has gone to Philadelphia. To the second pursuer it's obvious that he left the train at Newark and has gone somewhere else. To the third pursuer, who knows how clever the fugitive is, it's obvious that he didn't leave the train at Newark, because that would be too obvious, but stayed on it and went to Philadelphia. Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it." On Offending: "Anyone has the pleasure of offending who is willing to bear the odium." On Poverty: "To be broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe." On Requests: "The least offensive way of refusing a request is not to let it be made."

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On Resentment: "Personal resentment of a general statement is a barbarous remnant of fetish-superstition." On Sainthood: "The essence of sainthood is expiation." On Secrets: "The only safe secrets are those you have yourself forgotten." On Skepticism: "Skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off." On Snobbery: "When a man of a certain type is forced into drastic financial retrenchment, he first deserts his family, then goes naked, and then gives up his club." On Style: "It is easier to recognize a style from a sentence than from a single word." On the Subconscious: "The subconscious is not a grave; it is a cistern." On Wills: "Wills are noxious things. It is astonishing, the amount of mischief a man's choler may do long after the brain-cells which nourished that choler have rotted away."

28 The Library of Nero Wolfe "Okay, so you've read ten thousand books." —Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe, Before Midnight

If Nero Wolfe ever had a day of formal schooling in his life, neither he nor Archie Goodwin ever mentions it. Wolfe, apparently, is self-taught—and he obviously had an excellent teacher. For here is a man who quotes, makes reference to, discusses, or otherwise shows his familiarity with the life or works of men and women who span the centuries: Galba (3 B.C.—A.D. 69); Vitellius (15-69); Tacitus (c. 55-c. 117); Confucius (551479); Montaigne (1533-1892); Greene (more probably Robert, 1558?-1592, than Graham, 1904—); Shakespeare (15641616), to a point where he questioned A. L. Rowse's dating of Cymbeline; Webster (i58o?-i625?); Pascal (1623-1662); Dorothy Osborne (1627-1695); Bunyan (1628-1688); Voltaire (1694—1778); The Thousand and One Nights (first English translation, 1704-1717); Franklin (1706-1790); Casanova (1725-1798); Gibbon (1737-1794); Lamb (1775-1834); Cornwall (1787-1874); Ranke (1795-1886); Hugo (1802-1885); Nietzsche (1844-1900); Veblen (1857-1929); Yeats (18651939); Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Wolfe once admitted, however, that he was unfamiliar with 171

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John Harington's Alicia; years ago, he said on another occasion, he had read Narboisin, but didn't keep his books. Some will deplore his violent distaste for Browning. "Which Wolfe loves most, food or words, is a tossup," Archie Goodwin told Sally Blount in Gambit. "I read a lot of books," Wolfe himself remarked to Inspector Cramer in Over My Dead Body—and he does. While Wolfe is not a fast reader, he is a consistent reader, often reading three books at a time, taking turns with them, reading twenty or thirty pages in each at a time. This always annoys Archie because it seems to him ostentatious. Given a book, Wolfe always rubs the cover caressingly with his palm. He doesn't seem to mind marking a line or a paragraph, however, and he will even dog-ear the pages of books he doesn't intend to keep. If they are to be retained on his shelves, however, he holds his place with the thin gold bookmark given to him by a grateful client. The bookshelves in Wolfe's office contain twelve hundred or so books which he thinks highly enough of to keep. Five versions of the Bible in four different languages stand on the second shelf from the top near the left end. All twenty-four volumes of the Britannica have a place on Wolfe's shelves, and he frequently takes out a volume and reads an article at random. He owns a superb set of Shakespeare. His copy of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar is dark blue, tooled, bound "in this city by a Swedish boy who will probably starve to death during the coming winter." "I have met Franz Boas," Wolfe says in Too Many Cooks, "and have his books autographed." There are bound copies of Lindenia. Wolfe has a whole shelf of books on toxicology and at least one book on prison reform. Here too is Henderson's United Yugoslavia. Wolfe buys his books from Murger's, which supplied Paul

Chapin's novels in The League of Frightened Men and copies of Metropolitan Biographies—"all years available"—in The Red Box.

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These same shelves probably contain Why the Gods Laugh, by Philip Harvey, and His Own Image, by Richard Valdon. We suspect the presence of Alice in Wonderland and possibly The Wind in the Willows. We know there is Hogben's Mathematics for the Millions. Over the years Wolfe has read, if not kept, hundreds of books. In The League of Frightened Men he finishes The Native's Return, by Louis Adamic, and goes on to Outline of Human Nature by Alfred Rossiter. In The Red Box he is reading T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for the third time. In Too Many Cooks he is deep Inside Europe with John Gunther. While Wolfe by no means disdains fiction and poetry, the bulk of his contemporary reading is nonfiction, as the following checklist clearly shows: Under Cover by John Roy Carlson ("Booby Trap") The Sudden Guest by Christopher La Farge; Love from London by Gilbert Gabriel; A Survey of Symbolic Logic by C. I. Lewis (Too Many Women) A book of poems by Mark Van Doren (And Be a Villain) A book by Laura Z. Hobson (The Second Confession) The lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein (Murder by the Book) Power and Plenty by Thomas K. Finletter ("Immune to Murder") But We Were Born Free by Elmer Davis (The Black Mountain) Beauty for Ashes by Christopher La Farge, and Party for One by Clifton Fadiman (Before Midnight) A Secret Understanding by Merle Miller (Might as Well Be Dead) The Fall by Albert Camus ("Fourth of July Picnic") World Peace through World Law by Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn (Champagne for One) Inside Russia Today by John Gunther ("Method Three for Murder")

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An Outline of Man's Knowledge of the Modern World edited by Lyman Bryson (Too Many Clients) The Lotus and the Robot by Arthur Koestler (The Final Deduction) African Genesis by Robert Ardrey (Gambit) Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (The Mother Hunt) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer ("Kill Now—Pay Later") My Life in Court by Louis Nizer, and The Coming Fury by Bruce Catton ("Murder Is Corny") The Minister and the Choir Singer by William Kunstler, and Science: The Glorious Entertainment by Jacques Barzun (A Right to Die) The Treasure of Our Tongue by Lincoln Barnett (The Doorbell Rang) Invitation to an Inquest by Walter and Miriam Schneir (Death of a Doxy) In the last-named book Wolfe also returned to an old favorite, Kipling's The Jungle Book. Another favorite book is, of course, the dictionary—Webster's Second—and Wolfe goes to it often to check his use of a word. "My only excuse for labeling you an unscrupulous blackguard is the dictionary," he mutters in Some Buried Caesar.

But the most consulted book in Wolfe's vast collection is surely his atlas, a Gouchard, the finest to be had. Wolfe loves to pore over it, unfolding the maps and burying himself in South America or the Orient or Arabia or Australia. Says Archie in The Red Box: "If we ever get an international case, we would certainly be on familiar ground, no matter where it took us to." Wolfe reads magazines as well as books (he allots twenty minutes a week to studying the advertisements), and he scans the newspapers, as we have seen. They are kept in the open

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175

for three days to a week and then stored on a shelf in the office for a month or more. Wolfe reads a newspaper only one way, holding it out and wide open, no folding, with his arms stretched. Archie has never tried to get him to do it more intelligently because it is the only strenuous exercise Wolfe ever gets. "I understand you're a great reader," Julian Haft, the publisher, said to Nero Wolfe in The Mother Hunt. Julian Haft couldn't have been more right.

29 Wining and Dining with Nero Wolfe "Of course I knew you made a living of detective work, everybody knows that, but to me your glory is your great contributions to cuisine—your sauce printemps, your oyster pie, your artichauts drigants." —Paul Rago to Nero Wolfe, "Fourth of July Picnic"

Although Mr. Nero Wolfe keeps a full cellar for his guests and his clients, he himself drinks only beer and wine. "There is available," he once said, "a fair port, Solera, Dublin stout, Madeira, and more especially a Hungarian vin du pays which comes to me from the cellar of the vineyard." He once served with lunch a '28 Marcobrunner; another time, it was a Château Latour '29 ("It would soothe a tiger"). For women he recommends a Pasti Grey Riesling, although he personally does not care for it. Wolfe hates to have anybody, even a policeman, even a woman, ask for something in his house that he hasn't got. In Before Midnight, for example, he served to his guests and clients: eight brands of whisky, two of gin, two of Cognac, a decanter of port, cream sherry, Armagnac, and four fruit brandies; plus a wide assortment of cordials and liqueurs. 176

Wining and Dining with Nero Wolfe /

177

The dry sherry was in the refrigerator, as were the cherries, olives, lemon peel, and other accessories. With his coffee, in the office, Wolfe—especially if he has a guest—will indulge himself in a little Remisier brandy; in 1948 there were only nineteen bottles left in the whole United States, and they were all in Wolfe's cellar. Alone, or with Archie only, he occasionally sips his Remisier between bites of Fritz's apple pie. In the earliest days of the partnership, as recounted by Archie, Wolfe's beer was Remmers; he does not, and never did, care for Schreirer's. Wolfe's beer should be chilled, of course, but he likes a head on it; it must not be too cold. Wolfe pours, waits until the foam has settled exactly a quarter of an inch below the rim of the glass, and drinks. He puts the glass down empty (Wolfe usually empties a glass in five gulps), then uses his tongue on his upper lip first and then his handkerchief. When company is present he omits the tongue part. In 1934 Wolfe was drinking six quarts of beer a day, but he felt that he should "cut down" on this to five quarts; to Wolfe five quarts equals twelve bottles ("There's not a pint in a bottle"). Of these twelve bottles, Wolfe consumes some half in the daylight hours: after eleven in the morning, when he comes down from the plant rooms on the roof, and between six (when he again comes down from the plant rooms) and dinnertime. After dinner he drinks the other six, although he tried at one time to hold his after-dinner consumption to five. But when he is particularly vexed about a case, Wolfe may drink seyen or even eight. When he feels that he is ahead of his "quota," whatever it may be at the time, Wolfe sometimes drops his empty bottle into the wastebasket instead of leaving it on a tray with his glass. But he is always square with his bottle caps; he faithfully puts every one of them in the top drawer of his desk,

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and he counts them from time to time, making blistering remarks if there are too many. Wolfe occasionally enjoys il pesto with his beer; his favorite recipe is Canestrato cheese mixed with anchovies, pig liver, black walnuts, chives, sweet basil, garlic, and olive oil. "The occasions have been rare when I have known the pressure of business to cause Wolfe to accelerate the tempo of a meal," Archie says. As for skipping a meal, "In the midst of the most difficult and chaotic problems, I never missed a meal," Wolfe himself told Lew Bennett in Some Buried Caesar. "A stomach too long empty," he added, "thins the blood and disconcerts the brain." Only two kinds of guests ever dine at Wolfe's table: (a) men for whom Wolfe has personal feelings—there are eight altogether, and only two of them live in or near New York1 •—and (b) people who are involved in his current problem. With both kinds he makes a point of steering the table talk to subjects that he thinks the guests will be interested in. These may be rock gardens or Tammany Hall, folk dances or Egyptian tiles, dogs or Yugoslav politics, refrigerators or Republicans, the Dead Sea Scrolls or the mechanism of money, cosmetics or the game of polo, the use of a camel's double lip or the theory that England's colonizing genius was due to her repulsive climate. The one topic Wolfe will not discuss at table is business, his own or his client's; that is an inflexible rule. When there is company Archie sometimes serves, but more often there are just Wolfe and Archie, and then Fritz serves and Wolfe and Archie help themselves from the serving dishes. There is very little in the way of food, properly prepared, that Wolfe does not care for. "Unquestionably, Nero Wolfe has to eat," Archie once said. 1

"The editor of the Gazette dines with me once a month," Wolfe said in Where There's a Will.


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On one occasion, at least, Wolfe's breakfast consisted of orange juice, eggs au beurre noir, two slices of broiled Georgia ham, hashed brown potatoes, hot blueberry muffins, and a pot of steaming cocoa (as previously noted, Wolfe never drinks coffee or tea at breakfast). A typical lunch might be sweetbreads in béchamel sauce with truffles and chervil, beet and watercress salad, Brie cheese. A typical dinner, as described by Archie: clam cakes with chili sauce, beef braised in red wine, squash with sour cream and chopped dill, avocado and watercress salad with black-walnut kernels, Liederkranz cheese, coffee. Wolfe sometimes starts his lunch or dinner with anchovies and celery and carries on from there. On other occasions he may have soup—a somewhat exotic chestnut soup or turnip soup, for example, or something more staple like onion soup. He is also fond of fruit in season as an appetizer—peaches or melon or fresh pineapple with cottage cheese, the whole soaked in white wine. To Nero Wolfe, a meal without meat is an insult. There may be veal birds or mock terrapin (made from calf's liver), fillets of beef with sauce Abano or fresh pork tenderloin, with all the fiber removed, done in a casserole, with a sharp brown sauce moderately spiced. Or there may be lamb kidneys, perhaps with green peppers, perhaps served mountain-style with dumplings2 and burnt sugar, perhaps prepared à la Fritz: skewered to keep them open, doused in olive oil seasoned with salt, pepper, thyme, dry mustard, and mace, broiled five-andthree—five minutes on the outside and three minutes on the cut side—and brushed twice with deviled butter. Or there may be Georgia ham from pigs fed on peanuts and acorns, or a sausage with ten kinds of herbs in it (Wolfe gets it several times a year from a Swiss up near Chappaqua who prepares 8

Dumplings are one of the few dishes with which Archie can stay neck and neck with Wolfe clear to the tape. Fritz makes them of chopped beef marrow with breadcrumbs, parsley or chives, grated lemon rind, salt, and eggs; he boils them four minutes in strong meat stock.

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it himself from pigs he raises and slaughters himself), or a shish-kebab. To cook shish-kebab Wolfe's way you marinate thin slices of tender lamb for several hours in red wine and spices: thyme, mace, peppercorns, garlic, but no pimiento; Wolfe prefers those yellow Anguino peppers. Archie once complained that he never got corned beef in any form at the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, but that was before Wolfe learned the secret of cornedbeef hash from Maryella Timms. The secret is fresh pig chitlins fried in shallow olive oil with onion juice. These are to tone down the corned flavor and yet preserve its unique quality, to remove the curse of dryness without making the hash greasy. Each year around the middle of May, by arrangement, a farmer who lives near Brewster shoots eighteen or twenty starlings, puts them in a bag, and gets in his car with it and drives to New York. It is understood they are to be delivered to Wolfe's door within two hours after they are winged. Fritz dresses them and sprinkles them with salt, and at the proper moment brushes them with melted butter, wraps them in sage leaves, grills them, and arranges them on a platter of hot polenta, which is a thick porridge of fine-ground yellow cornmeal with butter, grated cheese, and salt and pepper. It is an expensive meal, but one that Wolfe always looks forward to, although he wants sage in it and Fritz prefers to prepare it with much fresh tarragon and just a touch of saffron. Wolfe always invites two guests to his starling supper. Tennessee opossum or a squirrel stew may also appear on Wolfe's menu, and one of his favorite tidbits (he customarily takes three helpings) is squab marinated in light cream, rolled in flour seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, clove, thyme, and crushed juniper berries, sautéed in olive oil, and served on toast spread with red-currant jelly, with Madiera sauce poured over. Wolfe has also spoken of his delight in a four-month-old


181

cockerel trained to eat large quantities of blueberries since infancy, and cooked with mushrooms, tarragon, and white wine, or made into a chicken-and-corn pudding with onion, parsley, and eggs. Eels are perhaps the only kind of seafood that Nero Wolfe does not care for; he once made a disastrous experiment with them. Shad roe, which he consumes in enormous quantities during the season, is one of the few dishes on which he and Fritz Brenner have a difference of opinion that has never been resolved. They are agreed on the larding, the anchovy butter, the chervil, shallots, parsley, bay leaf, pepper, marjoram, and cream: the argument is the onion. Fritz is for it, Wolfe dead against. Other favorites are oyster pie, terrapin stewed with butter and chicken broth and sherry, Lobster Newburg, Philadelphia snapper, flounder with cheese sauce, scallops, and bouillabaisse. Wolfe ate Marseilles bouillabaisse in his youth, but regards it as mere belly fodder, ballast for a stevedore, compared with New Orleans bouillabaisse. And of course we must not forget Wolfe's famous trout Montbarry. He prepares it with parsley, onions, chives, chervil, tarragon, fresh mushroms, brandy, breadcrumbs, fresh eggs, paprika, tomatoes, and cheese. Brazilian lobster salad is one of Wolfe's favorite hotweather meals. As edited by Wolfe, this consists of eight baby lobsters, eight avocados, and a bushel of young leaf lettuce, the whole introduced to the proper amount of chives, onions, parsley, tomato paste, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, paprika, pimientos, and dry white wine. Wolfe follows this with deepdish blueberry pie smothered in whipped cream. Sometimes Wolfe settles for an omelet à la Fritz, which may consist of four eggs, salt, pepper, one tablespoon tarragon butter, two tablespoons cream, two tablespoons dry white wine, one-half teaspoon minced shallots, one-third cup whole almonds, twenty fresh mushrooms; Fritz has been

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known to consider folding in some apricot jam at the last minute. And very rarely vegetables provide the main dish— what Fritz and Wolfe call cassoulet Castelnaudary, for example, which Archie calls boiled beans. Wolfe is also exceptionally fond of fritters—rice and mushroom fritters with black-currant jam, for example, or corn fritters served with autumn honey, sausages, and a bowl of salad. While Wolfe, as we have seen, is a master of foreign cookery, he very cleverly confined himself to the American form of the art when it came to supervising his dinner for the great chefs of the world. Here is the menu he ordered served, with claret, to the Fifteen Masters assembled at Kanawha Spa on the night of Thursday, April 8, 1937: OYSTERS TERRAPIN

BAKED

PAN-BROILED RICE LIMA

CROQUETTES

BEANS

IN

PINEAPPLE

THE

SHELL

BEATEN YOUNG WITH

JELLY SALLY

LUNN

TODHUNTER

SHERBET

DAIRY

BISCUITS

TURKEY

QUINCE

CREAM AVOCADO

WISCONSIN

IN

MARYLAND

CHEESE

SPONGE BLACK

CAKE COFFEE

30 A Wolfean Guide to the Orchidaceae That day, in the cool room, long panicles of Ondontoglossums, yellow, rose, white with spots, crowded the aisle on both sides; in the tropical room, Miltonia hybrids and Phalaenopsis splashed pinks and greens and browns clear to the glass above; and in the intermediate room the Cattleyas were grandstanding all over the place as always. —Archie Goodwin, Champagne for One

The reader who shares—or who would like to share—with Nero Wolfe a passion for the Orchidaceae will find much to interest him in a volume called Orchids: Their Botany and Culture, by Alex D. Hawkes (1961). With the kind permission of the publishers, Harper and Row, we bring you here a genus-by-genus description of the Orchidaceae mentioned in our own text. While no notes on culture are included here, this subject is dealt with most thoroughly in Mr. Hawkes's instructive book. Brassavola (brah-5«/z-voe-lah): The Brassavola, numbering about fifteen species, are justly popular orchids, with flowers that are usually abundant and 183

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showy. The genus extends from Jamaica and Mexico to Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. Most species have cylindrical, stemlike pseudobulbs topped by solitary, also cylindrical, fleshy leaf. These easy-to-grow orchids should form an integral part of every collection. Brassocattleya A cross between Brassavola (above) and Cattleya (below). These fine, spectacular forms are known horticulturally as Brassocattleya but scientifically as Rhyncholaelia (rin-koelye-\ee-ah), commonly as Brassavola, in which genus they were formerly included. In the wild, they usually inhabit smallish trees in relatively dry regions in Mexico and Central America. There are two known species, both of which have been used to a tremendous extent in the production of hybrids. Cattleya (kat-lee-yah): To the public, Cattleyas are certainly the best known of all orchidaceous plants, and, with their innumerable allied genera and hybrid groups, are the ones most frequently encountered in collections. About sixty-five species comprise the genus, which is distributed from Mexico to Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, with centers of development in the Andes and Brazil. The flowers are among the most magnificent of any found in the family, and are so well known that a description is superfluous here. They vary considerably in color—often within a single species or variant—but generally bear a tubular lip and spreading enlarged sepals and petals, thus forming a blossom of startling beauty and often huge dimensions. Coelogyne (seh-/aw-ji-nee): This is a genus of upward of 150 species, widespread in the Asiatic tropics from China to New Guinea and the Fiji Is-

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lands. Coelogyne is a popular group in orchid collections, with several particularly handsome hybrids on record. The flowers, often produced in large numbers, are rather waxy in texture, and occur mostly in shades of brown, yellow, or green. They are frequently very fragrant and last for a long period. The most common of the so-called "black" orchids belong to this genus—C. pandurata. Cymbidium (sim-bid-ee-um): This genus is made up of about seventy species of plants found in the Asiatic tropics and subtropics and the nearby insular areas. The plants typically have short pseudobulbs and long ribbon-shaped leathery leaves. They bear erect or pendulous racemes of small to very large flowers. The blossoms are highly variable and are found in a multitude of hues from white or yellow to dark purple-maroon. The members of this genus are among the most popular and widely cultivated of all orchids, with even an international Cymbidium Society being devoted to their study. Dendrobium (den-droe-bee-um): This is among the largest of all orchid genera, with in excess of 1500 species widely distributed in the Asiatic tropics and adjacent insular areas, eastward to the Fiji Islands. Many of the Dendrobiums are extremely popular with orchidists, because of the handsome flowers, which are usually produced in very large numbers. Generally the plants possess thickened pseudobulbs bearing alternate, more or less succulent leaves, which are rather frequently deciduous, and either racemes or clusters of showy flowers from near the apex of the growths. The blossoms are spreading, and have the lateral sepals joined to form a more or less prominent spurlike chin. The lip is often highly colored and larger than the other floral segments. Many of the species bear notably fragrant flowers, and an impressive number of hybrids is on record. Dendro-

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bium nobilius, specifically mentioned in our text, is native to the Indo-Burmese area. Laelia (lie-lee-ah): Laelia is among the most popular of all orchids, with seventy-five or more species. It extends from Mexico to Cuba to Argentina, with the center of development in Brazil. The plants mostly resemble Cattleya in habit and flowers, though the petals are typically more narrowed than in that group, and the lip less ornate. Several of the species are dwarf plants bearing tall spikes of brilliant orange or yellow blossoms of great beauty, while others attain prodigious dimensions, with inflorescences sometimes ten feet or more in length. Laeliocattleya (lie-lee-ah-kat-lee-yah) : A bigeneric cross between Laelia and Cattleya. Miltonia (mil-fow-nee-ah): Miltonia is found in about twenty species, ranging for the most part from Costa Rica to Brazil, centering in the Andes. The genus consists of two basic groups, those from high elevations being extremely popular with collectors (and being called, as an aggregation, the "Pansy Orchids," because of the shape and marking of the flowers), while the warmer-growing, mostly Brazilian, species are only now making their appearance as common inhabitants of our greenhouses. The flowers of Miltonia are borne single or in multiflorous racemes from the bases of the most recently formed pseudobulbs. In the Andean species they are usually white or pinkish, often with central blotches of vivid crimson or magenta, while in the Brazilian kinds they rather resemble certain types of Odontoglossum, a genus to which they are closely related; these have starlike segments, colored yellow or greenish, more or less barred or otherwise marked with brown, purple, or magenta-red.

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Oncidium (on-sid-ee-um): This genus contains an estimated 750 different kinds of orchids, which are widespread in the Americas from south Florida and Mexico to Argentina. A large number of these plants are present in collections today, and are among the most highly prized and showy orchids. Their flowers—generally yellow and brown in color—are relatively similar in superficial appearance. The form and tremendous quantities of these blossoms have earned the common names of "Dancing Ladies" and "Golden Showers" for this genus. Odontoglossum (oh-don-toe-g/o55-um) : This is an extremely diversified genus of upwards of three hundred species, extending from Mexico to Bolivia and Brazil, with the majority of the known entities in the high Andean regions of South America. These are justly popular orchids. The inflorescences are produced from the base of the often prominent pseudobulbs and bear from one to several dozens of mostly rather large and spectacular flowers. These blossoms vary in color from pure glittering white (often spotted or blotched with other hues) through a series of yellow tones to chestnut-brown. Paphiopedilum (paf-ee-oh-ped-i-lum): This genus, with about fifty known species, is most remarkable for its many handsome and tremendously popular hybrids. The genus is widespread over a large region extending from China to the Himalayas throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia to New Guinea. Its members are commonly called "Lady's-Slippers"; as a result, they are confusingly known by many orchidists under the name Cypripedium, which applies to a totally distinct group of this alliance. Many thousands of artificially induced hybrids have been made in this genus, and these form an important part of the smallest collection of orchids today.

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Phalaenopsis (fal-eye-wop-siss): The fabulous "Moth Orchids"—as members of this genus are commonly called—are extremely popular both with hobbyists and with commercial growers. The number of hybrids is astronomical, and many kinds are grown in great quantities for the cut-flower trade, the white forms being especially valued for wedding bouquets. About seventy species are known, with a range extending from the Himalayas through Malaysia to Indonesia, and from Formosa through the Philippines to New Guinea and Queensland. The genus has short stems bearing only a few leathery leaves that are often huge. The inflorescences, set with one to several dozen intricate, spectacular flowers, mostly of long-lasting qualities, are sometimes abbreviated, sometimes elongate. Van da (van-àah)\

More than seventy species of Vanda are known, and—together with the thousands of magnificent hybrids made both within this genus and with allied groups—these form a most important part of every present-day orchid collection. They occur over a broad region extending from China and the Himalayas throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia to New Guinea and northern Australia. The Vandas are highly diverse in appearance, but most have large, abundant, longlasting blossoms. Zygopetalum (zye-goe-p^/z-tah-lum): This orchid genus contains about twenty-five species of handsome plants ranging from Venezuela and the Guianas to Brazil, where most of them occur. These plants produce extremely lovely and fragrant, vividly colored blossoms on erect spikes from the base of the medium-sized pseudobulbs. The flowers, often in shades of brilliant green, blue, or purple, are excellently suited for corsages or cut material, and for this reason one of the species, Z. intermedium, is rather widely grown by commercial establishments.

31 The Fiscal Nero Wolfe "You like money." —District Attorney James Colvin to Nero Wolfe, "Immune to Murder"

It takes a gross of at least $10,000 a month to keep the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street going, and Nero Wolfe, as a necessary result, charges high fees. "I do not soil myself cheaply," he said in Too Many Cooks. In Over My Dead Body he said to Inspector Cramer, "As you know, when I accept a commission, I like to get paid. I try to stop this side of rapacity, but I like to collect, even when, as in this case, I have furnished more will than wit." And in that same adventure Rudolf Faber said to Wolfe, "You're expensive. What you want is money." Wolfe replied, " I like money, and I use a lot of it." "It takes a fillip in the flank for my mare to dance," Nero Wolfe says, and the fillip is more often than not a fee for $10,000. Sometimes it is much higher: for his work in the case of the Fer-de-Lance, Wolfe was paid $60,000, $50,000 of which was the rewTard offered by Mrs. Barstow for the discovery and righteous punishment of the murderer, and $10,000 the result of a wager lost to Wolfe by his old enemy, Fletcher M. 189

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Anderson, then the District Attorney of Westchester County. Wolfe hit The League for Atonement for $56,915, of which, by our reckoning, he collected $49,915. He pocketed a check for $55,000 from the Sperling family in The Second Confession and one for $100,000 from the NIA in The Silent Speaker. If Wolfe watches the income with an eagle's eye, he is no less concerned about the outgo. He claims not to be a generous man. "Use money as necessary, but avoid extravagance," he once warned Archie. Again, in The Golden Spiders, he said, "I don't ask you to be niggardly in your expenditures, but I must forbid any prodigality." Yet Wolfe makes his contributions for freedom, as he said in The Black Mountain. "They are mostly financial— through those channels and agencies that seem to me the most efficient." He contributed to the Loyalists in Spain, and he sends money from time to time to the League of Yugoslavian Youth. He sent a man-size check to a World Government outfit in 1948. He makes small but monthly contributions to ROCC, the Rights of Citizens Committee. In Fer-de-Lance Wolfe did not quibble when Archie suggested $1000 instead of $100 as the proper amount due to Anna Fiore. He paid Farrell, the out-of-work architect, $20 a day in depression times for a token job of investigation in The League of Frightened Men. He donated a check for $16,666.67 t o Johnny Keems's widow and one for the same amount to Ella Reyes's mother in Might as Well Be Dead. At the end of the Rubber Band case he told Archie, "Your salary is raised ten dollars a week, beginning last Monday." "Fifteen," said Archie. Wolfe sighed but agreed. "Confound you! All right. Fifteen." What was Archie's salary in those days? Well, he tells us that it was "roughly three times" what he earned as a major in the United States Army Intelligence

The Fiscal Nero Wolfe

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Service. In March 1942 no additional pay was authorized for this type of duty. A major's annual base pay with less than three years' service was $2400 a year (since Archie had or has no dependents, he qualified for a rental allowance of $60 a month and a subsistence allowance of $18 a month, although he unquestionably did not draw these when he was living—> as he was for most of World War II—with Wolfe). Later, of course, Archie made more. In 1947 Wolfe suggested a salary of $200 weekly when Archie went to work as a "personnel expert" at the Naylor-Kerr Corporation. And Wolfe added, " I suggested the same salary as you receive from me."

w

West Thirty-fifth Street W Front door

W

W

Front room D

Dining room

D Bath- W room

D D D

7

Office

W

Elevator

AG's desk

Stairs up

NW's desk

W

Pantry-

Stairs down Mill

JT_

D

Alcove

W

Kitchen

W

Dto garden

W

Ground Floor of Nero Wolfe's House

W

A Chronology of Nero Wolfe "To Whom It May Concern: I hereby state and acknowledge that on Saturday, January 29, 1966 . . ." —The Killer, Death of a Doxy

Late 1892 or early 1893

Nero Wolfe and his twin brother, Marko, born in Trenton, New Jersey.

Late 1890s or early 1900s

Wolfe's mother returns to Europe, taking Nero and Marko with her. She settles in Budapest, with occasional trips to Zagreb and Albania, marries a man named Vukcic, has a third child. Nero and Marko herd goats, "hunt dragonflies" in the mountains.

Late 1911 or early 1912

Marko, after working in Paris, returns to the United States.

Wednesday, October 23, 1912

Archie Goodwin born on a farm in Ohio.

19*3

Wolfe is given a position in the Austro-Hungarian civil service. He soon enters the intelligence service of the Empire, goes to Catalonia on a confidential mission; the chase

194 /

Chronology eventually takes him to Algiers, Egypt, and Arabia.

1914-1915

Wolfe becomes involved in a desperate episode in the Balkans, is jailed in Bulgaria, switches his allegiance to Montenegro, joins the Montenegrin army.

1916

Wolfe "starves to death" when the Serbo-Montenegrin army is wiped out, "fighting machine guns with fingernails."

1917-1918

The AEF lands in Europe and Wolfe walks 600 miles to join the American troops. He claims to have killed 200 Germans during this period. He is honorably discharged from the American forces, probably in France.

1918-1920

Wolfe "moves around." He eventually returns to the Balkans, where he "sheds another illusion."

1921

Wolfe, now in Montenegro, adopts the three-year-old orphan girl, Anna. Thinking he is leaving her in good hands, he returns to the United States.

1922-1928

For Wolfe, these are the Missing Years, those in which he may have journeyed much, read a great deal, and generally improved his knowledge of the world. He returns eventually to the United States. In 1927, even before he goes into prac-

Chronology /

195

tice as a private detective, he has a clash of some kind with Inspector Cramer. Marko, who during this period married and lost Dina Rossi in London, returns to the United States and establishes Rusterman's restaurant in New York City. 1929

Wolfe goes back to Europe, visits Zagreb to learn the whereabouts of Anna, gets thrown into jail again, is given ten hours to leave the country. He returns to the United States.

1930

Wolfe buys the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, hires Archie Goodwin as his assistant, enters upon his career as a private detective.

1930-1933

The Longren case. The Fashalt case. The Goldsmith case. The Williamson kidnaping. The Very Neat Blackmailing case. The Moschenden case. The Diplomacy Club business. The Pine Street case. The case of the Guy Named Hallowell.

1931

The first Anthony D. Perry case.

Late 1932-early 1933

The Bannister-Schurman business. The Hay Fever case.

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Chronology

Wednesday, June 7-Wednesday, June 21, 1933

The Fairmont National Bank case. Fer-de-Lance, Nero Wolfe's first recorded case, published in book form in 1934.

June 1933-October 1934

The case of the Whittemore Bonds. The case of the Hardest Guy to Deal With. The case of the Highly Unremunerative Mission.

February 1935

The Unrecorded Incident That Convinced Archie He Should Always Carry a Gun.

Friday, November 2-Monday, November 12, 1934

The League of Frightened Men, published in book form in 1935The Rubber Band, published in book form in 1936.

Monday, October 7-Wednesday, October 9, 1935 Monday, March 30-Saturday, April 4, 1936 Monday, April April 9, 1937

5-Friday,

The Red book form Too Many book form

Box, published in in 1937. Cooks, published in in 1938,

July 1937

Inspector Cramer solves his own case in Red Threads, published in book form in 1939.

Monday, September 12-Thursday, September 15, 1938

Some Buried Caesar, published in book form in 1939.

November 1938

The Crampton-Gore case. Wolfe during this year gets his first knowledge of X.

November 1938

Over My Dead Body, published in book form in 1939.

Late 1938-early 1939

The Wetzler case.

Chronology

/

197

Friday, July 14-Sunday, July 16, 1939

Where There's a Will, published in book form in 1940.

1940

Another Missing Year. in

Black Orchids, published in book form in 1942.

Monday, August 18-Wednesday, August 27, 1941

"Cordially Invited to Meet Death," published in book form in Black Orchids, 1942.

Early 1943

Archie, now Major Goodwin, straightens out the mess down in Georgia.

Monday-Wednesday in early March 1942

Not Quite Dead Enough, published in book form in 1944.

Wednesday, June 9, 1943

X telephones Wolfe for the first time.

Monday, August g-Tuesday, August 10, 1943

"Booby Trap," published in book form in Not Quite Dead Enough, 1944.

Tuesday-Friday in May 1944

"Help Wanted, Male," published in book form in Trouble in Triplicate, 1949.

Thursday-Saturday in October 1945

"Instead of Evidence," published in book form in Trouble in Triplicate, 1949.

A Tuesday in October 1945

"Bullet for One," published in book form in Curtains for Three, 1950.

Before March 1946

The Chesterton-Best affair. The Boedikker case.

Tuesday, March 26-Saturday, April 6, 1946

The Silent Speaker, published in book form in 1946.

April 1946

The Fremont case, and X's second phone call to Wolfe.

Thursday and March 1941

Friday

198 /

Chronology

Monday, October 7-Tuesday, October 8, 1946

"Before I Die," published in book form in Trouble in Triplicate, 1949.

Tuesday, March 18-Saturday, April 5, 1947

Too Many Women, published in book form in 1947.

Monday, June June 10, 1947

9-Tuesday,

"Man Alive," published in book form in Three Doors to Death, 1950.

Saturday, March 18-Saturday, April 3, 1948

And Be a Villain, published in book form in 1948; X telephones Wolfe twice.

Tuesday, July 6-Thursday, July 8, 1948

"Omit Flowers," published in book form in Three Doors to Death, 1950.

Sunday, December 5-Tuesday, December 7, 1948

"Door to Death," published in book form in Three Doors to Death, 1950.

Thursday, June 16-Monday, June 27, 1949

"The Gun with Wings," published in book form in 1949. X telephones again, blasts Wolfe's plant rooms.

Sunday, August 14-Wednesday, August 17, 1949

"The Gun With Wings," published in book form in Curtains for Three, 1950.

Thursday, April 6-Friday, September 8, 1950

In the Best Families, published in book form in 1950. Archie, solo, finishes up the Poison Pen job, handles the Hot Insurance case. When Wolfe returns to New York, Arnold Zeck dies.

Monday-Wednesday in March 195O

"Disguise for Murder," published in book form in Curtains for Three, 1950.

January or early February 195 1

The Little Mix-Up with a Gang of Hijackers.

Chronology /

199

Monday, February 19-Monday, March 12, 1951

Murder by the Book, published in book form in 1951.

Tuesday, July 3 i-Monday, August 6, 1951

"Home to Roost," published in book form in Triple Jeopardy, 1952.

Summer 1951

The Pendexter case. "The Cop-Killer," published in book form in Triple Jeopardy, 1952.

Monday-Wednesday in the winter of 1951-1952

"The Squirt and the Monkey," published in book form in Triple Jeopardy, 1952.

Monday, June 24-Monday, June 30, 1952

Prisoner's Base, published in book form in 1952.

A Friday in the latter half of 1952

"Invitation to Murder," published in book form in Three Men Out, 1954.

A Wednesday in October 1952

"This Won't Kill You," published in book form in Three Men Out, 1954.

Tuesday, May 19-Friday, May

The Golden Spiders, published in book form in 1953.

A Wednesday in the latter half of 1953

"The Zero Clue," published in book form in Three Men Out, 1954-

Thursday, March 1 i-Friday, March 19, 1954

The Black Mountain, published in book form in 1954.

Tuesday-Wednesday in May 1954

"When a Man Murders," published in book form in Three Witnesses, 1956.

Summer 1954

"The Next Witness," published in book form in Three Witnesses, 1956.

2oo /

Chronology

Wednesday—Thursday in late 1954 or early 1955

"Die Like a Dog," published in book form in Three Witnesses, 1956.

Tuesday, April 12-Tuesday, April 19, 1955

Before Midnight, published in book form in 1955.

Saturday, August 6-Thursday, August 11, 1955

"A Window for Death," published in book form in Three for the Chair, 1957.

Autumn 1955

The Lamb and McCullough insurance case. "Immune to Murder," published in book form in Three for the Chair, 1957. early

"Too Many Detectives," published in book form in Three for the Chair, 1957.

g-Monday,

Might as Well Be Dead, published in book form in 1956.

Wednesday, July 4-Thursday, b> *956

"Fourth of July Picnic," published in book form in And Four to Go, 1958.

Tuesday-Monday spring of 1957

the

"Easter Parade," published in book form in And Four To Go, 1958.

Monday, May 20-Tuesday, June 4, 1957 October 1957

// Death Ever Slept, published in book form in 1957.

Wednesday, December 20Saturday, December 23, 1957

"Christmas Party," published in book form in And Four to Go, 1958.

Monday, January 5-Tuesday, January 6, 1958

"Eeny Meeny Murder Mo," published in book form in Homicide Trinity, 1962.

Monday-Tuesday

Monday, April April 16, 1956

in

in

The Stolen Bottweil Tapestries.

Chronology Tuesday-Sunday in

/

201

March

Champagne for One, published in book form in 1958.

Tuesday, April i-Thursday, April 3, 1958

"Poison à la Carte," published in book form in Three at Wolfe's Door, i960.

Monday, May 18-Wednesday, June 3, 1959 Tuesday-Wednesday in January i960

Plot It Yourself, published in book form in 1959. "Death of a Demon," published in book form in Homicide Trinity, 1962.

Monday, May 9-Saturday, May 14, i960 Monday-Wednesday in late August i960

Too Many Clients, published in book form in i960.

Monday-Tuesday in September i960

"Method Three for Murder," published in book form in Three at Wolfe's Door, i960.

Monday-Friday in December i960

"Kill Now—Pay Later," published in book form in Trio for Blunt Instruments, 1964.

Monday-Tuesday in the winter of 1960-1961

"Counterfeit for Murder," published in book form in Homicide Trinity, 1962.

Tuesday, April 25-Monday, May 1, 1961

The Final Deduction, published in book form in 1961.

Tuesday, September 12-Friday, September 15, 1961

"Murder Is Corny," published in book form in Trio for Blunt Instruments, 1964.

Monday, February 12-Friday, February 16, 1962

Gambit, published in book form in 1962.

Tuesday, June 5-Monday, July 9, 1962

The Mother Hunt, published in book form in 1963.

"The Rodeo Murder," published in book form in Three at Wolfe's Door, i960.

2O2 /

Chronology

Tuesday, August 7-Thursday, August 9, 1962

"Blood Will Tell," published in book form in Trio for Blunt Instruments, 1964.

Monday, February 24-Friday, March 13, 1964 Tuesday, January 5—Friday, January 15, 1965

A Right to Die, published in book form in 1964. The Doorbell Rang, published in book form in 1965.

Saturday, January 29-Monday, February 7, 1966

Death of a Doxy, published in book form in 1966.

Thursday, August 17-Friday, September 8, 1967

The Father Hunt, published in book form in 1968.

(To be continued)

Apologia and Acknowledgments Few are better aware than the author of the lacunae that exist in this first account of the life and times of Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street. For example, we should like to know more, much more, about that first meeting between Wolfe and Archie. Mr. Wolfe refuses to discuss it. Archie Goodwin changes the subject. Rex Stout pleads "the interest of his client." But we have the feeling that the story will some day be told. Meanwhile, these grateful acknowledgments: To the late Bernard DeVoto, for founding a new branch of the Higher Criticism. To Dr. John D. Clark, expert on rocket fuels, authority on the Hyborian civilization, and fellow member of the Baker Street Irregulars, for allowing me to quote so generously from his preliminary investigations into the paternity of Mr. Nero Wolfe. To Alex D. Hawkes and his publishers, Harper and Row, for their previously acknowledged guidance on the Orchidaceae of Nero Wolfe. And finally, of course, to Rex Stout.

203

Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street

Nero Wolfe Contro L'FBI

Nero Wolfe, Difenditi!

Nero Wolfe Contro L'FBI

The Complete Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe, Difenditi!

Nero Wolfe Contro L'FBI

Nero Wolfe, Difenditi!

The Nero Wolfe Cookbook

Stout, Rex - Nero Wolfe - The Third Nero Wolfe Omnibus

Nero Wolfe - Silver Spire

Quella Bomba Di Nero Wolfe

Quella Bomba Di Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe 09 - Black Orchids

Black Orchids (Nero Wolfe Mysteries)

Nero Wolfe 35 - Final Deduction

Nero Wolfe Fa La Spia

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Nero Wolfe 41 - Death of a Doxy

Death of a Doxy (Nero Wolfe Mysteries)

Before Midnight (Nero Wolfe Mysteries)

Nero Wolfe 25 - Before Midnight

Quella Bomba Di Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe: Too Many Women

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Nero Wolfe - 4th Of July Picnic

The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe

The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe 43 - Death of a Dude

Nero Wolfe 38 - The Mother Hunt

Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street

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Nero Wolfe, Difenditi!

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The Complete Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe, Difenditi!

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Nero Wolfe, Difenditi!

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Stout, Rex - Nero Wolfe - The Third Nero Wolfe Omnibus

Nero Wolfe - Silver Spire

Quella Bomba Di Nero Wolfe

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Nero Wolfe 09 - Black Orchids

Black Orchids (Nero Wolfe Mysteries)

Nero Wolfe 35 - Final Deduction

Nero Wolfe Fa La Spia

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Nero Wolfe 41 - Death of a Doxy

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Before Midnight (Nero Wolfe Mysteries)

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Quella Bomba Di Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe: Too Many Women

Nero Wolfe Fa La Spia

Nero Wolfe - 4th Of July Picnic

The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe

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Nero Wolfe 43 - Death of a Dude

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