Although the Nero Wolfe stories take place contemporaneously with their writing and depict a changing landscape and society, the principal characters
do not age. According to a memo prepared by Rex Stout in 1949, Nero Wolfe's age is 56, although this is not explicitly stated in the stories. According to the same memo, Wolfe's height is and his weight is . Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories, frequently describes Wolfe as weighing "a seventh of a ton" (equivalent to about 286 pounds). This was intended to indicate unusual obesity at the time of the first book (1934), especially through the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In a single short story written in 1947, Archie writes, "He weighs between 310 and 390, and he limits his physical movements to what he regards as the irreducible essentials." "Wolfe's most extravagant distinction is his extreme antipathy to literal extravagance. He will not move," wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in ''At Wolfe's Door: The Nero Wolfe Novels of Rex Stout'': In
The Black Mountain Wolfe leaves not only the brownstone but the United States to avenge the murder of his oldest friend. Despite his physical bulk, he engages in strenuous outdoor activity in mountain terrain.
Origins The corpus implies or states that Nero Wolfe was born in
Montenegro, with one exception: In the first chapter of
Over My Dead Body (1939), Wolfe tells an
FBI agent that he was born in the United States – a declaration at odds with all other references. Stout revealed the reason for the discrepancy in a 1940 letter cited by his authorized biographer, John McAleer: "In the original draft of
Over My Dead Body Nero was a Montenegrin by birth, and it all fitted previous hints as to his background; but violent protests from
The American Magazine, supported by Farrar & Rinehart, caused his cradle to be transported five thousand miles." For Archie, Chief A.G Goodwin, an officer who recovered Rex Stout's stolen record collection, served as a model. Wolfe's mother is mentioned only twice in Stout's stories: the first novel,
Fer-de-Lance (1934), and the third,
The Rubber Band (1936) — both mention that she lives in
Budapest, and the former adds that Wolfe sends her a monthly check. Some
Wold Newton theorists have suggested the French thief
Arsène Lupin as the father of Nero Wolfe. They note that in one story Lupin has an affair with the queen of a Balkan principality, which may be Montenegro by another name. Further, they note that the name Lupin resembles the French word for wolf,
loup.
Brownstone Wolfe has expensive tastes, living in a comfortable and luxurious New York City
brownstone on the south side of West 35th Street. The brownstone has three floors plus a large basement with living quarters, a rooftop greenhouse also with living quarters, and a small elevator, used almost exclusively by Wolfe. Other unique features include a timer-activated window-opening device that regulates the temperature in Wolfe's bedroom, an alarm system that sounds a gong in Archie's room if someone approaches Wolfe's bedroom door or windows, and climate-controlled plant rooms on the top floor. Wolfe is a well-known amateur
orchid grower and has 10,000 plants in the brownstone's greenhouse. He employs three live-in staff to see to his needs: Archie Goodwin (assistant), Fritz Brenner (chef), and Theodore Horstmann (orchidist). The front door is equipped with a chain bolt, a bell that can be shut off as needed, and a pane of
one-way glass, which enables Archie to see who is on the
stoop before deciding whether to open the door. The front room is used as a waiting area for visitors while Archie informs Wolfe of their arrival, and also as a place for Archie to hide one visitor from another. Wolfe's bedroom is on the second floor of the brownstone, and Archie's is on the third. Each of these floors also includes one spare bedroom, used on occasion to house a variety of clients, witnesses, and sometimes even culprits. Wolfe takes pride in being able to offer such assistance and once remarked, "The guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality". Wolfe's office becomes nearly soundproof when the doors connecting it to the front room and the hallway are closed. There is a
small hole in the office wall covered by what Archie calls a "trick picture of a waterfall". A person in an alcove at the end of the hallway can open a sliding panel covering the hole, so as to see and hear conversations and other events in the office without being noticed. The chair behind Wolfe's desk is custom-built, with special springs to hold his weight; according to Archie, it is the only chair that Wolfe really enjoys sitting in. Near the desk is a large chair upholstered in red leather, which is usually reserved for Inspector Cramer, a current or prospective client, or the person whom Wolfe and Archie want to question. In the short story "
The Squirt and the Monkey", Wolfe and Archie have a hidden tape recorder and microphone installed in the office, with controls in the kitchen. In the story "
Eeny Meeny Murder Mo", the system is modified to transmit sound to a speaker in the front room. The brownstone has a back entrance leading to a private garden, as noted in
Champagne for One (chapter 10) and elsewhere, from which a passage leads to 34th Street—used to enter or leave Wolfe's home when it is necessary to evade surveillance. Archie says that Fritz tries to grow herbs such as chives in the garden. "That readers have proved endlessly fascinated with the topography of Wolfe's brownstone temple should not be surprising", wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in ''At Wolfe's Door'': It is the center from which moral order emanates, and the details of its layout and its operations are signs of its stability. For forty years, Wolfe prepares menus with Fritz and pots orchids with Theodore. For forty years, Archie takes notes at his desk, the client sits in the red chair and the other principals distribute themselves in the yellow chairs, and Wolfe presides from his custom-made throne. For forty years, Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins ring the doorbell, enter the office, and explode with indignation at Wolfe's intractability. The front room, the elevator, the three-foot globe—all persist in place through forty years of American history. ... Like Holmes's 221B Baker Street, Wolfe's West Thirty-Fifth Street remains a fixed point in a turning world. On the "Literary Map of Manhattan", the brownstone is numbered 58 and is placed in the middle of the Hudson River. It is described in the opening chapter of
The Second Confession as being on West Thirty-Fifth Street "nearly to 11th Avenue", which would put it in the 500 block. Writing as Archie Goodwin,
Ken Darby suggests that "the actual location was on East 22nd Street in the
Gramercy Park District. ... Wolfe merely moved us, fictionally, from one place to the other in order to preserve his particular brand of privacy. As far as
I can discover, there never
were brownstone houses on West 35th Street." He knows enough about fine cuisine to lecture on American cooking to Les Quinze Maîtres (a group of the 15 finest chefs in the world) in
Too Many Cooks and to dine with the Ten for
Aristology (a group of epicures) in "
Poison à la Carte". Wolfe does not, however, enjoy visiting restaurants (with the occasional exception of Rusterman's, owned for a time by Wolfe's best friend Marko Vukčić and later subject to Wolfe's trusteeship). In
The Red Box (chapter 11), Wolfe states, "I know nothing of restaurants; short of compulsion, I would not eat in one were
Vatel himself the chef." Wolfe appears to know his way around the kitchen; in
Too Many Cooks (chapter 17), he tells Jerome Berin, "I spend quite a little time in the kitchen myself." In
The Doorbell Rang, he offers to cook
Yorkshire Buck and, in "
Immune to Murder", the State Department asks him to prepare
trout Montbarry for a visiting dignitary. In
The Black Mountain, Wolfe and Goodwin stay briefly in an unoccupied house in Italy on their way to Montenegro; Wolfe prepares
a pasta dish using
Romano cheese that, from "his memory of local custom", he finds in a hole in the ground. During the short story "
Murder Is Corny", he lectures Inspector Cramer on the right and wrong ways to cook corn on the cob, insisting that it must be roasted rather than boiled in order to achieve the best flavor. (The 1940 story "
Bitter End" suggests the contrary view that Wolfe was unable to prepare his own meals; Fritz's illness with the flu causes a household crisis and forces Wolfe to resort to canned liver pâté for his lunch.) Wolfe's meals generally include an appetizer, a main course, a salad served after the entrée (with the salad dressing mixed at tableside and used immediately), and a dessert course with coffee. (After-dinner coffee, however, is often taken by Wolfe and Archie in the office rather than the dining room.) Many of the dishes referred to in the various Nero Wolfe stories and novels were collected and published, complete with recipes, as
The Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout and the Editors of the Viking Press, published in 1973. All recipes are prefaced with a brief excerpt from the book or story that made reference to that particular dish.
Beer '' Nero Wolfe's first recorded words are, "Where's the beer?" The first novel,
Fer-de-Lance, introduces Wolfe as he prepares to change his habits. With
Prohibition at an end, he can stop buying kegs of
bootleg beer and purchase it legally in bottles. Fritz brings in samples of 49 different brands for him to evaluate, from which he ultimately selects Remmers as his favorite. Several times during the story, Wolfe announces his intention to reduce his beer intake from six quarts a day to five. "I grinned at that, for I didn't believe it", Archie Goodwin writes.
Reading Reading is central to Nero Wolfe's life, and books are central to the plots of many of the stories. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining Wolfe's office contain some 1,200 books —the size of Stout's own library. was incorporated with contributions from others into an annotated reading list created by Winnifred Louis.
Orchids Known for rigidly maintaining his personal schedule, Nero Wolfe is most inflexible when it comes to his routine in the rooftop plant rooms. Ever day except Sunday, from 9:00 to 11:00 in the morning, and from 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon, he looks after his orchid collection alongside his employee Theodore Horstmann, the "best orchid nurse alive". (Horstmann himself is said to spend up to 12 hours a day in the plant rooms.) "Wolfe spends four hours a day with his orchids. Clients must accommodate themselves to this schedule", wrote Rex Stout's biographer John J. McAleer. "Rex does not use the orchid schedule to gloss over gummy plotting. Like the disciplines the sonneteer is bound by, the schedule is part of the framework he is committed to work within. The orchids and the orchid rooms sometimes are focal points in the stories. They are never irrelevant. In forty years Wolfe has scarcely ever shortened an orchid schedule." "If Wolfe had a favorite orchid, it would be the
genus Phalaenopsis", Robert M. Hamilton wrote in his article, "The Orchidology of Nero Wolfe", first printed in
The Gazette: Journal of the Wolfe Pack (Volume 1, Spring 1979).
Phalaenopsis is mentioned in 11 Wolfe stories, and
Phalaenopsis aphrodite is named in seven—more than any other species. Wolfe personally cuts his most treasured
Phalaenopsis aphrodite for the centerpiece at the dinner for the Ten for
Aristology in "
Poison à la Carte". In
The Father Hunt, after Dorothy Sebor provides the information that solves the case, Wolfe tells Archie, "We'll send her some sprays of Phalaenopsis Aphrodite. They have never been finer." In the earlier works, Wolfe doesn't sell his orchids—"I do not sell orchids", Wolfe tells Archie in chapter 7 of
Murder by the Book (1951). In
The Silent Speaker (1946), Wolfe complains to Archie about the difficulty of the case, saying "I was an ass to undertake it. I have more Cattleyas than I have room for, and I could have sold five hundred of them for twelve thousand dollars." However, he does give them away. Four or five dozen are used to advance the investigation in
Murder by the Book, and Wolfe refuses to let Archie bill the client for them. In
The Final Deduction,
Laelia purpurata and
Dendrobium chrysotoxum are sent to Dr. Vollmer and his assistant, who shelter Wolfe and Archie when they have to flee the brownstone to avoid the police. As the series progresses, Wolfe seems to be more comfortable selling his orchids. In 1957's
If Death Ever Slept (chapter 11), Archie describes Wolfe as "a practicing private detective with no other source of income except selling a few orchid plants now and then". By the time of Stout's short 1963 piece "Why Nero Wolfe Likes Orchids", Archie notes that Wolfe "hasn't bought a plant from a commercial grower for 10 years, but he sells some—a hundred or more a year." In
The Second Confession, the orchid rooms are torn apart by gunfire from across the street. The shooters are in the employ of crime boss
Arnold Zeck, who wants Wolfe to drop a case that could lead back to him. Wolfe and Archie call men to take care of the plants and repair the windows before notifying the police.
Eccentricities for
The American Magazine, March 1938). Wolfe has pronounced eccentricities and strict rules concerning his way of life. Their occasional violation adds spice to many of the stories. Despite Wolfe's rule never to leave the brownstone on business, the stories find him leaving his home on several occasions. At times, Wolfe and Archie are on a personal errand when a murder occurs, and legal authorities require that they remain in the vicinity (
Too Many Cooks,
Some Buried Caesar, "
Too Many Detectives" and "
Immune to Murder", for example). In other instances, the requirements of the case force Wolfe from his house (
In the Best Families,
The Second Confession,
The Doorbell Rang,
Plot It Yourself,
The Silent Speaker,
Death of a Dude). Nevertheless, Wolfe is usually able to justify the travel associated with these cases as still being within the limits of his self-imposed "no leaving the house on business" rule, often by noting that there was a personal non-business related reason to make the journey. Although he occasionally ventures by car into the suburbs of New York City, he is loath to travel, and clutches the safety strap continually on the occasions that Archie drives him somewhere. He does not trust trains to start or to stop. As Archie says of Wolfe in
The Doorbell Rang, "he distrusted all machines more complicated than a wheelbarrow." And yet, in
In the Best Families, Wolfe displays no noticeable reticence whatsoever concerning travel in an automobile. Wolfe maintains a rigid schedule in the brownstone. He has breakfast in his bedroom while wearing yellow silk pajamas; he hates to discuss work during breakfast, and if forced to do so insists upon not uttering a word until he has finished his glass of orange juice (
Murder by the Book). Afterwards, he is with Horstmann in the plant rooms from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Lunch is usually at 1:15 p.m. He returns to the plant rooms from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Dinner is generally at 7:15 or 7:30 p.m. (although in one book, Wolfe tells a guest that lunch is served at 1 o'clock and dinner at 8). The remaining hours, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., and after dinner, are available for business, or for reading if there is no pressing business (even if, by Archie's lights, there is). Sunday's schedule is more relaxed; Theodore, the orchid-keeper, usually goes out. '', chapter 14 Wolfe is loath to exercise, but in
The Rubber Band he is sufficiently concerned about his weight that he adds a workout to his daily routine. From 3:45 to 4 p.m., he throws yellow-feathered
darts (which he calls "javelins") at a poker-dart board that Fritz hangs in the office. Archie joins him, using red-feathered darts, but quits when he loses nearly $100 to Wolfe in the first two months; he resumes playing only after Wolfe agrees to raise his salary. "There was no chance of getting any real accuracy with it, it was mostly luck", Archie writes. Other surprising examples of Wolfe's athleticism occur in "
Not Quite Dead Enough" and
The Black Mountain. Wolfe does not invite people to use his first name and addresses them by honorific and surname. Aside from his employees, one of the only two men whom Wolfe addresses by their first names is his oldest friend, Marko Vukčić; Marko calls him Nero. In
Death of a Doxy Julie Jaquette refers to Wolfe as Nero in a letter to Archie; and
Lily Rowan has addressed Wolfe using an assumed first name. But these are exceptions. In "
The Rodeo Murder" Wolfe finds it objectionable when Wade Eisler addresses him as Nero; and in "
Door to Death" Sybil Pitcairn's disdainful use of his first name makes Wolfe decide to solve the case. Men nearly always address him as Wolfe, and women as Mr. Wolfe. He is extremely fastidious about his clothing and hates to wear, even in private, anything that has been soiled. The short story "
Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" opens with an example of this habit, in which Wolfe removes his necktie and leaves it on his desk after dropping a bit of sauce on it during lunch. The tie is later used to commit a murder in his office. Beyond that, Wolfe has a marked preference for the color yellow, habitually wearing shirts and silk pajamas in this color and sleeping on yellow bedsheets. He restricts his visible reactions: as Archie puts it, "He shook his head, moving it a full half-inch right and left, which was for him a frenzy of negation." Wolfe states that "all music is a vestige of barbarism" and denies that music can have any intellectual content. He takes a dim view of television, but TV sets did find their way into the brownstone in the later stories. Archie notes in
Before Midnight, "It was Sunday evening, when he especially enjoyed turning the television off." Wolfe's attitude toward television notwithstanding, the TV set in Fritz's basement quarters proved handy in
The Doorbell Rang, when the volume was turned up to foil potential eavesdroppers. Wolfe displays a pronounced, almost pathological, dislike for the company of women. Although some readers interpret this attitude as simple
misogyny, various details in the stories, particularly the early ones, suggest it has more to do with an unfortunate encounter in early life with a
femme fatale. It is not women themselves that he dislikes: rather, it is what he perceives as their frailties, especially a tendency to hysterics—to which he thinks every woman is prone. "In the all-male Wolfe household that is an apparent bulwark of men's-club solidarity, Wolfe's misogyny is part pose, part protection, but above all, a shrewd tool of detective strategy", wrote critic
Molly Haskell. "Archie does the romancing while Wolfe prods and offends, winnowing out the traitorous and brattish women and allowing the cream, the really great women, to rise to the top. ... We deduce from the glow of those special women who do earn the detective's good will just how discriminating and interested an observer of womankind the author is." These women include Clara Fox (
The Rubber Band), Lily Rowan (introduced in
Some Buried Caesar), Phoebe Gunther (
The Silent Speaker) and Julie Jaquette (
Death of a Doxy). In
The Rubber Band, Wolfe says, "It has been many years since any woman has slept under this roof. Not that I disapprove of them, except when they attempt to function as domestic animals. When they stick to the vocations for which they are best adapted, such as chicanery, sophistry, self-adornment, cajolery, mystification and incubation, they are sometimes splendid creatures." That Wolfe disapproves of women is well established, but Archie claims that there are nuances: "The basic fact about a woman that seemed to irritate him was that she was a woman; the long record showed not a single exception; but from there on the documentation was cockeyed. If woman as woman grated on him you would suppose that the most womanly details would be the worst for him, but time and again I have known him to have a chair placed for a female so that his desk would not obstruct his view of her legs, and the answer can't be that his interest is professional and he reads character from legs, because the older and dumpier she is the less he cares where she sits. It is a very complex question and some day I'm going to take a whole chapter for it." Wolfe has an aversion to physical contact, even shaking hands. Early in the first novel Archie explains why there is a gong under his bed that will ring upon any intrusion into or near Wolfe's own bedroom: "Wolfe told me once ... that he really had no cowardice in him, he only had an intense distaste for being touched by anyone ..." When Jerome Berin, creator of
saucisse minuit, repeatedly taps Wolfe on the knee, Archie grins at "Wolfe, who didn't like being touched, concealing his squirm for the sake of sausages." In ''
Prisoner's Base'', Wolfe speaks coldly as he tells the DA and Inspector Cramer that the despised
Lieutenant Rowcliff "put a hand on me. ... I will not have a hand put on me, gentlemen. I like no man's hand on me, and one such as Mr. Rowcliff's, unmerited, I will not have." Wolfe's prejudices make it all the more surprising when, in "
Cordially Invited to Meet Death", Archie finds Wolfe in the kitchen with a woman who has solved the problem of preparing corned beef hash: "Standing beside him, closer to him than I had ever seen any woman or girl of any age tolerated, with her hand slipped between his arm and his bulk, was Maryella." Wolfe likes to solve the crossword puzzle of British newspapers in preference to those of American papers, and hates to be interrupted while so engaged. Wolfe is very particular in his choice of words. He is a
prescriptivist who hates to hear language being misused according to his lights, often chastising people who do so. One example is his dislike of the word "contact" being used as a verb; when Johnny Keems says that "contact"
is a verb, transitive and intransitive, Wolfe replies "Contact is not a verb under this roof". One of his most severe reactions occurs in the first chapter of
Gambit, when he burns ''
Webster's Third New International Dictionary'' in the front room fireplace because it states that the words "imply" and "infer" can be used interchangeably. Wolfe generally abhors slang (though in "
Murder Is Corny" he says "There is good slang and bad slang") and expects Archie to avoid slang and other language he disapproves of when speaking to him. However, as with other worldly concerns, he sometimes relies on Archie's greater familiarity with slang when business demands it. In nearly every story, Wolfe solves the mystery by considering the facts brought to him by Archie and others, and the replies to questions he himself asks of suspects. Wolfe ponders with his eyes closed, leaning back in his chair, breathing deeply and steadily, and pushing his lips in and out. Archie says that during these trances Wolfe reacts to nothing that is going on around him. Archie seldom interrupts Wolfe's thought processes, he says, largely because it is the only time that he can be sure that Wolfe is working.
Fictional entities The books frequently mention brands that do not exist: for instance, Wolfe owns a Heron automobile, which Archie drives, and Wethersill automobiles are also mentioned. A Marley revolver (also Carley, in
Die Like a Dog) is Archie's weapon of choice. A semi-fictional revolver brand is the
Haskell (mentioned in
A Right to Die). The Rabson lock likewise does not exist; the name was borrowed by
Lawrence Block and used in his
Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries. Wolfe serves Remisier brandy or Follansbee's gin to guests and drinks Remmers' beer. Archie goes dancing at the Flamingo Club, which is now the name of more than one place in the New York City area, but the one in the books antedates them. Archie also frequently goes to Manhattan addresses that do not exist, for instance, 171 East 52nd Street in
Might as Well Be Dead. Wolfe's address, as mentioned above, is also fictional. (Stout initially used many real brands: Archie drives a
Ford, carries a
Colt pistol or revolver, and uses an
Underwood typewriter. Stout was bothered when his
stationer mentioned that, every time Stout mentioned Underwood's in a story, sales of that brand went up – and so switched to fictional brands.
Ian Fleming, a fan of Stout, borrowed the technique for the
James Bond novels, both fictional and real.) On the other hand, real names and places also occur in the text, presumably for verisimilitude; Wolfe serves
Bar-Le-Duc to a visitor on one occasion. The "Churchill Hotel" (officially the Hotel Churchill), mentioned many times, is a real hotel in Manhattan, and
Sardi's is a real restaurant. Real people, for example,
J. Edgar Hoover (notably in
The Doorbell Rang),
Walter Winchell and
Texas Guinan are also mentioned. ==Narrator==