And I've loved them all. I watched the Timothy Hutton series on A&E years ago and really liked it and that was the extent of my Nero Wolfe knowledge. Downloaded Fer-De-Lance, published in 1934, and was hooked instantly.
Granted I'm reading the books using Timothy Hutton and Murray Chaykins voices but I think the plots are clever, the dialogue is fun. Rex Stout has taken the wise-cracking tough guy PI like Mike Hammer and combined him with a refined cultured detective like Hercule Poirot. I also feel Stout does a good job in building the world of Archie Goodwin's New York City no matter what decade the book is set in. He brings that world to life.
Interesting note for me was that Wolfe is described as hugely fat. Immense. Requiring special built furniture and restricted in movement. His weight? 278 lbs. I was expecting at least 400 with the way he was described.
Overall, it's a fun series of crimes. Stout wrote 45 Wolfe novels and died in 1975. There has been a recent continuation of the series by Robert Goldsborough.
by lawstandaloan
4 Comments
> There has been a recent continuation of the series by Robert Goldsborough
Not all that recent. And to make them readable you really have to invest them with your memories/consciousness of the characters from Stout’s work. There is fan fiction around, some of which have their fun moments (Archie has an affair with Ann Coulter, Nero Wolfe discovers plot to nuke NYC).
> I’m reading the books using Timothy Hutton and Murray Chaykin’s voices
Hutton’s irreverent and humorous “tone” is OK, though there’s a lack of serious menace, ruthlesness (Archie killed a man as a teenager). Stout saw and heard Archie more as a Humphrey Bogart version of Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep). Chaykin’s voice is fine for Wolfe 90% of the time, but Wolfe could stop a freight train with a quiet understated rebuke full of underlying fury. Maury couldn’t get that and he had to yell. Not Wolfe at all. Orson Welles would have been a perfect Nero Wolfe and projects were toyed with over the years but never came to anything. Thayer David, though visually wrong, did a decent version in a film I thought was pretty decent but was poorly regarded even by its producer (ABC TV) and not even shown until years later, and by that time David had died and the series couldn’t be continued anyway. Sydney Greenstreet did an excellent Wolfe on the laughably bad radio series, though he had a tendency to mumble. But as far as Chaykin, get yourself a different Wolfe voice.
Italian TV did an eight-episode [Nero Wolfe series](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2164423/) in 2012. It’s on DVD; I borrowed them from my local library. The plots are based on actual Rex Stout stories although severe liberties are taken, since the premise of the series involves Wolfe having moved to Italy to escape from unnamed mobsters he’d encountered in NYC. It’s in Italian with English subtitles.
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