Nero Wolfe supporting characters
Later, the plant rooms are said to take up the entire third floor, and Fritz's living quarters are in the basement of Wolfe's brownstone; here he keeps 294 cookbooks on 11 shelves, the head of a wild boar he shot in the Vosges, and busts of Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin as well as a cooking vessel thought to have been used by Julius Caesar's chef.
The notoriously finicky Wolfe has even gone so far as to refuse to eat one of Fritz's dishes when he used tarragon and saffron instead of sage to season starlings.
However, when the new client does arrive, Fritz is singularly uninterested in the details of the mystery, being supremely confident that Wolfe will solve it and duly collect his fee.
In the Columbia Pictures feature film Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), the character of Fritz was transformed into a Scandinavian cook named Olaf, played by John Qualen.
This is as good a time as any to tell you that you remind me of sour milk.Theodore Horstmann is a world-class orchid expert who assists Wolfe in the plant rooms.
Later, the plant rooms are said to take up the entire top floor, and by the time of 1946's The Silent Speaker, Archie's commentary flatly states that Theodore has separate living arrangements outside the house, noting that Wolfe is not letting Horstmann in on a complex deception he has orchestrated because Horstmann might accidentally let slip the truth when away from Wolfe's home[4]).
He is regularly mentioned as being present in the brownstone, and Wolfe is seen speaking to him on the house phone on occasion, but the character himself is never seen or heard on screen.
Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather are collectively known as the 'teers, the three freelance detectives who make up the extended professional family.
Although he possesses a formidable memory, Archie begins chapter 7 of A Family Affair (1975) – reporting a meeting of Saul, Fred, and Orrie in Wolfe's office – by writing, "I forget who once called them the Three Musketeers."
[6] Saul has an eidetic memory, which Archie frequently comments is better than his own, and an uncanny ability to connect people's names and identities permanently with their faces in his mind, even with only a glance.
He has not entirely given up the idea that someday my desk and chair will be his for good, and he likes to practice sitting there when I am not present.Orrie Cather is a handsome, personable detective, someone people want to tell things – but he can be too full of himself.
In chapter 16 of The Golden Spiders (1953), clothing store owner Bernard Levine states that he was shown "a New York detective license with his picture on it and his name, Orvald Cather."
In chapter 3 of If Death Ever Slept, Archie calls the office and Orrie answers the phone, "Nero Wolfe's residence.
And, thinking he was clarifying the matter, Rex Stout's biographer John McAleer asked the author, "Is Orrie Cather's given name Orrin?"
The cigar had a specific function, the idea being that with his teeth closed on it he couldn't speak the words that were on his tongue, and that gave him time to swallow them and substitute others.Inspector Cramer, head of the New York Police Department's Homicide Division, is Wolfe's main foil.
In return, Wolfe holds the inspector in high regard, admiring his tenacity and preferring to deal with him than any other member of the police force.
For example, speaking of Cramer, Wolfe says, "By luck I had made a hole in the wall and I've let him through, and if you knew him as I do you would realize that he can't be chased out again.
Cramer often ends his visits to Wolfe's office by angrily throwing his chewed cigar at the wastebasket, usually missing the target.
This novel does not feature Wolfe or any of his employees, but does have appearances from some tertiary series characters like Police Commissioner Humbert and District Attorney Skinner.
In Champagne for One, Stebbins' keen observation of the behavior of a group of murder suspects earns a comment of admiration from Wolfe.
Whether or not the connection between the real and fictional Rowcliffs was known contemporaneously, clearly the source of Stout’s obnoxious cop suffered no ill effects professionally: Gilbert Jonathan Rowcliff went on to a distinguished naval career spanning both world wars, at sea as an honored commander and in Washington as judge advocate general, a position he assumed in June 1936, shortly after his namesake was introduced in The Rubber Band.
Lon's actual job duties later become central to the story line in Robert Goldsborough's novel Death on Deadline.
I'm the only woman in America who has necked with Nero Wolfe.Lily Rowan, heiress and socialite, often appears as Archie Goodwin's romantic companion, although the relationship is not an exclusive one.
Subsequently, she appears in several stories (and is mentioned in passing in others) and provides needed assistance on occasion (see, particularly, In the Best Families and A Right to Die).
[34] Sally Corbett is played by Manon von Gerkan in Motherhunt, part of the second season of the A&E original series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2001–2002).
Narcotics, smuggling, industrial and commercial rackets, gambling, waterfront blackguardism, professional larceny, blackmailing, political malfeasance – that by no means exhausts his curriculum, but it sufficiently indicates his character.
He has, up to now, triumphantly kept himself invulnerable by having the perspicacity to see that a criminal practising on a large scale over a wide area and a long period of time can get impunity only by maintaining a gap between his person and his crimes which cannot be bridged; and by having unexcelled talent, a remorseless purpose and a will that cannot be dented or deflected.
"I was thrilled when Wolfe finally encountered his own Moriarty in the archvillain Arnold Zeck," wrote Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post.
[37] British author and literary critic David Langford and others have compared the relationship between Zeck and Wolfe to that of Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes.
[38] As described in "In the Best Families", Zeck operates virtually unseen, out of an underground base which has several layers of security, and even his own gang mostly have no access to his presence.
