The very first Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance, was published in 1934, and the upcoming Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana (October 15-18) will celebrate this auspicious seventy-fifth anniversary and will feature a Friday evening Wolfean-themed banquet.
Long before cozy culinary mysteries were in vogue, Rex Stout’s readers were treated to cooking tips, food lore and gastronomical miscellanea. Besides orchids, the mainstay of his detective Nero Wolfe's leisurely existence was the enjoyment of good food. Wolfe (frequently described as weighing "a seventh of a ton") dined on three generous meals a day.
Wolfe had an unquenchable thirst for beer, usually downing at least 6 quarts per day. In a foreshadowing of the Weight Watchers counting points system, he kept the bottle caps in one of his desk drawers to track his daily/weekly consumption.
Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the detective’s cases in 33 novels and 39 short stories over a forty year period from the 1930s to the 1970s, and most of them are set in New York City where the detective resides in a brownstone on West 35th Street.
There are a number of related works, including The Nero Wolfe Cookbook (1973), which contains 237 recipes and a wealth of pertinent quotes from the books and is smartly illustrated with vintage New York City photographs.
Wikipedia has an exhaustive entry on Nero Wolfe that includes a section on my favorite topic – Wolfe’s origins. In 1956 a theory emerged that Wolfe was the offspring of an affair between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, although there is not a hint of it in any of the stories aside from the painting of Holmes that hangs over Goodwin's desk in Wolfe's office. There is, however, the curious coincidence of the same vowels appearing in the same order in the names "Sherlock Holmes" and "Nero Wolfe” as noted in 1957 by Ellery Queen.
Some have suggested Mycroft Holmes as a more likely father for Wolfe, and yet another camp came up with the French thief Arsène Lupin, citing that Lupin resembles the French word for wolf(e), loup.
Enjoyable speculation!
For even more information visit The Wolfe Pack, the official website of the Nero Wolfe Society. They are headquartered in Manhattan and host a variety of fabulous programs throughout the year, many of which are open to the general public.
If you are a fan, you might want to join the Usual Suspects next Sunday, March 15th, for a discussion of The Golden Spiders, published in 1953. The group meets at 2 p.m. in the Seminar Room at the end of the hall on the top floor.
New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.
