Fer-de-Lance (novel)

[1] In the opening chapter, Wolfe decides to give up drinking bootleg beer and sends Fritz to purchase samples of every legally available brand (49 in all) so he can select a replacement.

Wolfe and Goodwin soon learn that Carlo's disappearance somehow involves the death of a college president while playing golf in Westchester County, New York.

As the first novel in the series, Fer-de-Lance introduces Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Orrie Cather and other characters who recur throughout the entire corpus.

Likewise, the characters have slightly different personalities: Wolfe's manner of speaking is notably more baroque and long-winded than in later stories, and Archie is generally coarser and less polished in this work than in later Stout volumes, even using racial epithets at times (something that would continue into the late 1930s before being eliminated).

In Fer-de-Lance, Stout reused a key plot point relating to the murder weapon that he had used in his early mystery The Last Drive, which was serialized in Golfers Magazine in 1916.

Wolfe learns from her that Carlo had clipped a story from a copy of The New York Times about the sudden death (apparently by stroke) of Peter Oliver Barstow, president of Holland College.

From reading the account of Barstow's death, which occurred during a round of golf, Wolfe conjectures that one of his clubs may have been altered to fire a poisoned needle into his belly.

's accounts of his past in Argentina, leads Wolfe and Archie to conclude that Manuel had intended to kill his father, not Barstow, in revenge for the death of his mother years earlier.

and Manuel a chance to end their lives without any sense of bitterness or despair, but Archie notes that it has also kept Wolfe from having to leave his comfortable house in order to testify at a murder trial.

[13] In 2002 Scarlet Street magazine revisited the film—little seen in the years after its release — finding it neither the travesty it is sometimes thought to be, nor a faithful recreation of the world of Nero Wolfe.

Produced by Casanova Multimedia and Rai Fiction, the eight-episode first season opened with "La traccia del serpente," an adaptation of Fer-de-Lance set in 1959 in Rome, where Wolfe and Archie reside after leaving the United States.

Additional cast include Andy Luotto as Wolfe's chef, Nanni Laghi; Giulia Bevilacqua as reporter Rosa Petrini; and Dajana Roncione as Anna Fiore.

A watercolor illustration depicts two men standing behind a desk. Their eyes are intent upon the center drawer. The desk chair is overturned. The larger of the two men holds a brown bottle aloft in his right hand, preparing to strike downward. A younger, slender man leans backward warily, and extends a curved walking stick toward the desk drawer.
Illustrator Fred Ludekens created the first visual interpretation of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin for the abridged version of Fer-de-Lance that appeared in The American Magazine (November 1934)
A brown, orange and white book cover. Calligraphic lettering reading "A Mercury Mystery" appears above a calligraphic dagger. Below is stencil-like type that identifies the book as "Meet Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout," and a line drawing of a large seated man. A promotional quote from the New York Daily News reads, "Nero Wolfe is an absolute knockout. The plot is fool-proof and the writing above par." Below is the book's price of 25 cents.
Legendary book designer George Salter produced hundreds of covers for the digest format paperbacks published by Lawrence E. Spivak 's The American Mercury . One of the earliest is an abridged version of Fer-de-Lance titled Meet Nero Wolfe (A Mercury Book No. 37, undated), which utilizes the title of the 1936 Columbia Pictures adaptation of the novel.