Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective created by American author Rex Stout in the 1930s and was featured in dozens of novels and novellas for more than 40 years.

In the stories, Wolfe is one of the most famous private detectives in the United States. He weighs "a seventh of a ton" (about 286 pounds or 130 kg) At the time (1934), this was intended to indicate extreme obesity, especially by the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In the 1953 book In the Best Families, Wolfe temporarily returns to "normal" body weight, using the description in that book, by losing about 50 pounds., in Archie Goodwin's words, and is 5'11" tall. He raises orchids in a roof-top greenhouse in his New York City brownstone on West 35th Street near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, helped by his gardener, Theodore Horstmann. Wolfe drinks beer throughout the day and is a gourmand. He employs a Swiss French live-in chef, Fritz Brenner, with whom he confers frequently about up-coming meals. He is multilingual and brilliant, though apparently self-educated, with reading being his third passion after food and orchids. He works from his book-lined office on the ground floor of his brownstone and almost never leaves home, even to pursue the detective work that finances his expensive lifestyleHis orchid raising could also be a business, considering that several stories in the books attach great cost to repairing just the damage to a few of them, but Wolfe steadfastly refuses to sell orchids, although he is not averse to Archie using them to gain the cooperation of women in their investigations, a technique used to great effect in the early Wolfe book The Red Box and much later in Murder by the Book. The orchids are also much admired by Archie's "companion" (the books never quite specify their relationship) Lily Rowan, a fact that Nero Wolfe uses in the story Not Quite Dead Enough when Lily and Goodwin are having a tiff to calm the situation because in that particular situation Lily, as in a few other stories, is central to the mystery itself . Instead, his leg work is done by another live-in employee, Archie Goodwin, who is also the first-person narrator of the Wolfe adventures. While both Wolfe and Goodwin are licensed detectives, Goodwin is more of the classic fictional gumshoe, tough, wise-cracking, and skirt-chasing.Archie's rough edges become less and less evident over the years. In a heated exchange with Wolfe near the beginning of one of the early novels, he pointedly insists on his right to use a very long list of racially charged words such as "kike" and "wop". By the time that A Right to Die was published in the mid-1960s, all that has disappeared from his language, along with colloquial slang. Archie's literary style (in which the books are written) has markedly improved, even occasionally using rather than disdaining some of the longer words that his boss likes. He tells the stories in a breezy semi-hard-boiled styleSome commentators saw this as a conscious device by Stout to fuse the hard-school of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade (1930) with the urbanity of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot (1920). In fact, sole operative Tecumseh Fox, who is perhaps a fusion of the best qualities Wolfe and Goodwin into a real person without Wolfe's collection of idiosyncracies, is arguably a better and more effective fictional character, as evidenced in the novel The Broken Vase, but that was never translated into commercial success, and only 3 books with this character were written, one of which was later adapted in a Wolfe story at the urging of Stout's publisher..

Wolfe was born in 1892 or 1893 in MontenegroThis is inferred from assorted information in the earlier stories but never stated. In point of fact, as the years went by, Stout pointedly allowed Wolfe and Archie's ages to advance much less than real time, if at all, except as in the case of the books A Right To Die or The Black Mountain, the books are sequels to books written many years before.. He is reticent about his youth, but clearly was slim, fit, and daring. Before World War I, he spied for the Austrian Empire, but had a change of heart when the war began. He joined the Montenegrin army and fought the Austrians and Germans in some of the grimmest combat of the war. After time in Europe and North Africa, he came to the United States.

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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth. -- Nero Wolfe
webgeekcom (web-geek.com) Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:20:46 -0000
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth. -- Nero Wolfe
@saulrubinek Oops. *So* Many Miracles. (I guess I read too many of the Too Many ____ Nero Wolfe books)
Monty918 (Monty) Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:22:35 -0000
@saulrubinek Oops. *So* Many Miracles. (I guess I read too many of the Too Many ____ Nero Wolfe books)
@saulrubinek beautifully written, very moving book -- given to me by a fellow "Nero Wolfe" fan a few years ago
mynameswhatisay (carla lovchen) Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:21:17 -0000
@saulrubinek beautifully written, very moving book -- given to me by a fellow "Nero Wolfe" fan a few years ago
Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) On Rapidshare [RS] http://bit.ly/6WKeKT
rapidshare_vids (Rapidshare Movies) Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:40:24 -0000
Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) On Rapidshare [RS] http://bit.ly/6WKeKT
"I am nobody's friend. How much can you pay?" -Nero Wolfe
JillEdmondson (Jill Edmondson) Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:20:50 -0000
"I am nobody's friend. How much can you pay?" -Nero Wolfe
"I have no talents. I have genius or nothing" -Nero Wolfe in The League of Frightened Men, by Rex Stout.
JillEdmondson (Jill Edmondson) Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:12:41 -0000
"I have no talents. I have genius or nothing" -Nero Wolfe in The League of Frightened Men, by Rex Stout.

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