Review: Fer de Lance by Rex Stout

Fer de Lance by Rex Stout

This is the first Nero Wolfe adventure and it is packed with the things that make Wolfe stories so much fun to read while still showing that Stout was getting a feel for the supporting cast. I’ve been told that Nero Wolfe is reported to be the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. He certainly lives up to that parentage in this novel, although in truth he acts more like Mycroft Holmes than the more active Sherlock.

 

In this novel, Nero Wolfe is uncharacteristically driven to do a favor for the friend of one of his operatives. The favor is to find out what happened to her brother who has disappeared. And he makes a leap from this seemingly smalltime investigation to flamboyant push for a criminal investigation into the recent death of a university president on a White Plains golf course. The flamboyance—betting the district attorney in White Plains $10,000 that he will find a needle in the abdomen of the dead man (who reportedly died of natural causes) leads to the exhumation of the body but not to Wolfe’s involvement in the investigation. That comes when the dead man’s widow offers $50,000 to the person who provides the evidence to bring her husband’s murderer to justice.

 

And so we’re off on a crazy journey in which we learn all about Nero Wolfe and his main assistant, Archie Goodwin. Nero is an overweight man with a love of orchids and food, a grave fear of leaving his house, and a keen disinclination to do hard work. In fact, he’s only driven to conduct an investigation when his bank account gets dangerously low. (Fine dining and orchids cost a lot of money.) Archie is his capable hands and feet. He’s smart too, but not anywhere near Nero Wolfe smart. The stories are told by him and that gives we the readers our in as well. We know everything that Archie knows, but not necessarily everything that Nero Wolfe knows.

 

In an Ellery Queen style story, all of the information needed to solve the crime is made available to the reader. That is not always true in a Nero Wolfe mystery. But then, Nero Wolfe is always more interested in earning his fee than in justice. He’s also highly interested in his own comfort. So, watching Wolfe bring about the big reveal at the end of the story is always a pleasure and in this case it also offers special insight into the man called Wolfe.