Anybody here a fan of Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout?

[raccoon]

I just finished FER-DE-LANCE, which I read for a book club. I'm inspired to read some more of them.

[earthside]

1. Nero Wolfe is great!

I've read almost all the Nero Wolfe books.

Make sure and look for the A&E television series with Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin and Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe ... they are very well done and true to the Rex Stout vision of Wolfe.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

2. Those books are wonderful ......

What a grand thing for you to have discovered. Rex Stout - I wonder if that was his real name? - made magic with the Nero Wolfe character. I grew up with them, strange reading for a little girl, but I was a strange little girl, I guess. They were in the house, and I read everything.

You're going to have a ball. They really are wonderful, all of them.

And, here's some information about Rex and Nero - fun stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe

[Jackpine Radical]

4. Rex Stout was one of us! (From Wikipedia:)

Raised with liberal sensibilities, Stout served on the original board of the American Civil Liberties Union and helped start the radical magazine The New Masses, which succeeded the Masses, a Marxist publication, during the 1920s. During the Great Depression, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Deal.

During World War II, he worked with the advocacy group Friends of Democracy and figured prominently on the Writers War Board, particularly in support of the embryonic United Nations. He lobbied for Franklin D. Roosevelt to accept a fourth term as President. When the war ended, Stout became active in the United World Federalists.

Stout was active in liberal causes. When the anti-Communist era of the late 1940s and 1950s began, he ignored a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the McCarthy era.

In later years Stout alienated some readers with his hawkish stance on the Vietnam War and with the contempt for Communism expressed in certain of his works. The latter viewpoint is given voice most notably in the 1949 novel, The Second Confession. In this work, Archie and Wolfe express their dislike for "Commies," while at the same time Wolfe arranges for the firing of a virulently anti-Communist broadcaster, likening him to "Hitler" and "Mussolini." Thus Stout in this book stakes his ground as an anti-communist Leftist, perhaps something like George Orwell who seems to have occupied a similar position.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. As one of my friends pointed out, Wolfe is a stickler for not letting the police

into his house without a warrant.

[prairierose]

3. Yes, I think that I have read all of them...

and loved all of them. The A&E series is quite good too. Enjoy. :toast: Nero did love his beer each evening.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

5. Big-time fan, and Fer de Lance is one of the weakest so you're in for a treat

The brilliance of the series is melding the hard-boiled detective genre and the armchair detective genre.

It's tricky, and didn't really come together at first. Stout dialed down the hard-boiled as it went along, making Archie and Nero more sophisticated.

So, for instance, Archie's crude jingoism disappears.

I don't know of a better mystery series, ever. Read every one of them at least tree times over the years--they are soothing books in tough times.

The recent A&E TV series is incredibly faithful to the stories, BTW.

[On the Road]

6. I Love the Nero Wolfe Series

Have read all of them I could get my hands on. There are something like 47 books, some with multiple stories, so you have a lot to look forward to.

IMO What Stout did was to combine elements of American Black Mask crime drama with elements of English parlor mysteries. It took a while to get used to because I expected there to be a succession of clues that if interpreted correctly would reveal the correct suspect, but that is not true of all his books. Some of them are more like "true crime" adventures than traditional murder mysteries.

Unlike a lot of series, where the sidekick is just there as a mute sounding board for the protagoninst, Archie is just as important a character in the books as Nero. The interaction of their personalities is wonderful. Personally, I could just read exchanges between Archie and Nero ad infinitu without there even being a mystery.

This is an interesting bit from the Wikipedia article which explains a lot about Nero's character:

"I got the idea of making Wolfe a Montenegrin from Louis Adamic," Stout told McAleer. Everything Stout knew about Montenegrins he learned from Adamic's book The Native's Return (1934), or from Adamic himself, McAleer reported.

"Adamic describes the Montenegrin male as tall, commanding, dignified, courteous, hospitable," McAleer wrote. "He is reluctant to work, accustomed to isolation from women. He places women in a subordinate role. He is a romantic idealist, apt to go in for dashing effects to express his spirited nature. He is strong in family loyalties, has great pride, is impatient of restraint. Love of freedom is his outstanding trait. He is stubborn, fearless, unsubduable, capable of great self-denial to uphold his ideals. He is fatalistic toward death. In short, Rex had found for Wolfe a nationality that fitted him to perfection."

Now you've interested in the books again. Will have to locate a few used copies. And once you run out of Rex Stout, Robert Goldsborogh had an amazing talent for recreating Sout's style.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. Someone missed a great casting opportunity in the 1960s-70s

Orson Welles would have been a great Nero Wolfe, and Alan Alda would have been a perfect Archie Goodwin.

Now Welles is dead, and Alda is too old, but when I read the Wolfe stories (narrated by Archie), I can hear Alan Alda in Hawkeye mode.