The hard boiled side of Nero Wolfe

 I have been reading a lot of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe this year. It has been an insane, stressful year for the entire world. Sometimes, it’s been hard to focus enough to read but Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin have been reliably able to decompress me. Even so, I have focused much more on the novellas than the book-length works. 

Trouble in Triplicate, a collection of the novellas, particularly struck me. Maybe because I’ve read so many this year. However, it was one of the most hard boiled Nero Wolfe pieces I’ve read.

Mind you, Nero Wolfe always has one foot firmly in the hard boiled detective genre. Archie Goodwin serves as a relentlessly snarky narrator who is good with his fists and the ladies. If he wasn’t working for Wolfe, he’d be a one-room, walk-up office, scraping the name Archer off the glass. And they have the traditional, tumultuous relationship with the cops.

However, their comfortable, luxurious lifestyle is definitely at odds with hard-boiled flavor. Archie is a failure at being a raging alcoholic. And they almost always end in a parlor scene because Heaven forbid Nero Wolfe leave his office. Nero Wolfe is an elitist. Really, so is Archie, who is a gourmet and botanical expert by association.

The genteel elements are as much a part of the mysterious chemistry of Nero Wolfe as the hard-boiled elements. But the hard-boiled elements are on particularly strong display in this book. Particularly in the first story, Before I Die which features  a mobster getting blackmailed and folks getting gunned down in the street and Archie stuck dodging bullets.

And it works. It’s still Nero Wolfe. Like I said, it’s not much of a stretch. 

I found myself thinking of The Big Four by Agatha Christie, the one where Hercule Poirot takes on Fu Manchu. It’s pulp fiction and bad enough that I like to pretend the whole thing is a nightmare Hastings is having after eating too much Welsh rarebit. 

It’s not a fair comparison. Trouble in Triplicate sticks it’s pinky toe in slightly different water. The Big Four, thrown together when Christie desperately needed money, hops into a spaceship and takes off into the stratosphere of another genre.

Of course, even in these more action field stories, Nero Wolfe continues to be a arrogant, obstinant genius who desperately needs his snarky assistant to get anything done. Fundamental elements haven’t changed.

(By the way, after a year of constant reading, I’ve come to think of Nero Wolfe as being less misogynistic than chauvinistic, womanizing Archie. Wolfe may not like being around women but seems to respect them more. And there are plenty of men he doesn’t want to be around either)

Going back to the start of Nero Wolfe

I was in the mood for some Nero Wolfe and Fer-de-Lance was one of the only books that was available digitally from the local library. I had read it before years ago but I decided to give it another read.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the Nero Wolfe books. As such, the formula had not been fully developed. I am a big fan of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books and the magic doesn't come from the plots. It is entirely built around the personalities of the characters in how they intersect/clash.

Stout brilliantly blended together the worlds of the classic European detective and the American hard-boiled detective. Nero Wolfe is literally an armchair detective who can't be bothered to do things like with the house or stand up. (OK, that's kind of an exaggeration. He does end up getting hauled out of his house enough that it starts to feel like a cliche) His assistant and partner in all but name, Archie Goodwin, is the snarky hard-boiled detective who near it's the stories and actually has to go out and get all the clues.

The mysteries are pretty good and even tend to be nicely grounded without too many outlandish coincidences or gimmicks. But the real reason I read the books is for Wolfe and Archie's bickering.

Fer-de-Lance is not one of my favorite books in the series. Stout was still developing the characters, although Wolfe starts off as eccentric as he would ever be. 

When I first read the book, not quite twenty years ago, two things in particular struck me about the book that I did not like.

The first was the murder weapon. A poison dart that is shot out of the handle of a golf club when it hits the ball. That seemed pretty far-fetched, particularly in comparison to a lot of the later books. And I'm still not a fan of that.

Second is the climax of the investigation. Which, I'm going to partially spoil, by saying that Wolfe gives the heads up to the murderer, giving them the chance to commit a murder-suicide instead of getting arrested. Archie gave the explanation, which I initially accepted at face value, that he did it to get out of having to be a witness at the trial.

However, rereading the book, I realized that Fer-de-Lance is more

of a noir work than most of the Nero Wolfe books. The ending fits the dark and gritty and cynical sense of justice of a noir work and makes it clear that Wolfe's motivations are far more complex than just wanting to stay at home.

Fer-de-Lance still far from my favorite book in the series. It is also not a book I would recommend for someone who has read the series. However, my realization that it harkens towards a different genre has made me appreciate the book more the second time around.