Talk:Nero Wolfe

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Contents 1 One Seventh of a Ton 2 Mycroft Wolfe? 3 Second Best known? 4 Consulting Detective? 5 Summaries 6 Small changes 7 Aristologist 8 Accuracy 9 Dinnertime 10 Women 11 Yellow PJs 12 Bibliography - book summaries and individual articles 13 Longer-term plans

[edit] One Seventh of a Ton

Just out of curiosity, does anyone else find this sum inadequate by today's standards? Rex Stout, by his pictures, was fairly skinny. The entire American population was smaller back in the mid-20th century. Philip Marlowe and other heroes were in the 180 lb range, and this was considered somewhat formidable. I realize this is not a chat room, but it just seems like a discrepancy in the overall gestalt of the series. Needless to say I am a fan... Guernseykid 04:46, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

When I was a kid, more than half a century ago, I was fascinated by the question of Wolfe's weight. 286 didn't seem grotesquely fat to me, but it sure seemed adequately fat. Particularly for a guy who was probably about 5'10". You gotta remember that people in the 1930s-1950s who weighed 285 weren't necessarily built like today's NFL linebackers on steroids and weight training. Today there are probably lotsa football players who are 5'10 and 285 and who *aren't* fat. But in Wolfe's day, that was fat. Or so I still believe. It all depends on how we're built and how we train. Pancho Gonzales and Arthur Ashe, the great tennis players, were probably around 6'1 and anywhere from 160 to 185 lbs, depending on when you weighed them. They were *strong*, powerful guys, but slim. Add 100 lbs to them and it would be *flab* -- they would be *fat*, like Wolfe. So I think that for his day and age, weighing in at "a seventh of ton", makes Wolfe a genuine fatty.... Hayford Peirce 05:27, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Thanks! Guernseykid 11:08, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mycroft Wolfe?

Don't know if Stout took inspiration from Doyle, but he could have: Holmes quips, if it were possible to be a detective without leaving his club, Mycroft could be the greatest detective in all England. Can anybody verify & include? Trekphiler 17:49, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Second Best known?

"Nero Wolfe is probably the second best-known consulting detective after Sherlock Holmes" What about Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot? Or Sam Spade from the Maltese Falcon? I suppose it is a matter of opinion/personal experience, but a statement like that is difficult to qualify. I'm gonna make that statement less specific. Great Green Arkelseizure 05:01, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Consulting Detective?

Wolfe is a private detective, not a consulting detective. The first sentence reads as if if Sherlock Holmes might be an American.

I agree on both points. The editor above you was trying to clartify this, but it seems more confusing now than before. Kafziel 05:41, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Summaries

Lately, I have been creating plot summaries of Wolfe novels: very brief descriptions on the Nero Wolfe page, and more extensive descriptions in individual articles. I'm unlcear whether people would favour brief descriptions, just enough to whet their appetite to read the book, or a more extensive summary. Also, the Wolfe books are of uneven quality, and so maybe others want to help ... Modus Vivendi 12:01, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I think they might be useful, depending on how they're written. I would definitely avoid the gushy "One of Wolfe's finest efforts, Archie is in danger as never before!" blurb-type fan-talk. Anything else would probably be interesting. And it's not as if Wiki doesn't have enough space for it. Go for it! Hayford Peirce 18:10, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

See Nero Wolfe novels category and the Nero Wolfe category. Modus Vivendi 20:32, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I thought you meant those 1-line summaries that follow a couple of the items listed in *this* article, not the others. The other summaries look pretty good to me. Keep it up! Hayford Peirce 22:39, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Small changes

Just changed "Serbia-Montenegrin army" to "Montenegrin army". Montenegro was an independent kingdom at the time, forcebly annexed by its own ally, Serbia, after WWI. There was no such thing as "Serbian-Montenegrin" army in that particular period in history. Nor would Wolfie like to hear that: in "Fer-de-Lance" and "Over My Dead Body", Wolfie makes bitter allegories against the serbian dynasty ( Karadjordjevic dynasty ), which destroyed an allied nation.

[edit] Aristologist

I removed the reference to Wolfe being an "aristologist". In "Poison à la Carté", he is invited to dinner by the group "Ten For Aristology", but is not a member (and is unaware of the group's current status a few years later in "The Doorbell Rang"). Wolfe's dictionary apparently defined "aristology" solely as "the science of dining", and he called the group "witlings", since dining was an art. Even with a definition of "art or science", presumably Wolfe would still have disliked the term! David Oberst 00:24, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Accuracy

I just stumbled onto this article, and I'm struck both by the erudition of its contributors and by the small errors that are sprinkled throughout. (BTW, I absolutely agree with contributors who have objected to the overblown blurb-speak that has been used here and there. It's jarring as hell.)

One difficulty posed by a series as long-lived as the Wolfe corpus is the presence of inconsistencies in the original source. Cramer's first name, for example, is given as Fergus early on but there's the problem of LTC in The Silent Speaker (Bantam page 4), and he's called "Lionel" in TV credits. (According to McAleer, Stout attributed that particular inconsistency to "laziness.") So I think that some extra care is needed in editing existing contributions. For example, one contributor, according to a History comment, apparently struck out a reference to Horstmann's status as a live-in employee. I think that an early book suggests that Horstmann sleeps elsewhere, but the majority of the books that refer to the matter at all have him sleeping in a small room attached to the greenhouse. (I've restored the "live-in.")

Even within a particular book there are inconsistencies; page 59 of the Bantam edition of And Be A Villain gives Nancylee Shepherd "light yellow hair and gray eyes" but by page 81 she has "lots of medium-brown hair . . . and blue eyes."

So let's try not to be quite so cavalier in our edits -- it's easy to be misled when the source material stretches over so many pages and so many years.

And greater care is needed with very specific references, because specific errors jump out at the reader. For example, in the reference discussion of Wolfe's weight, I saw it mentioned that he lost "about 50 pounds" during his metamorphosis into Roeder in In The Best Families. But on page 149 of my Bantam edition, shortly after Archie recognizes Roeder, Wolfe says "I've lost a hundred and seventeen pounds." AFAIK, this is the only reference to the amount of weight that Wolfe lost, but it's certainly possible that Stout cited it elsewhere as 50 pounds. (I changed "about 50" to "117".) Xlmvp 15:33, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dinnertime

>>(no, dinner is at 7:15, not 6:00 -- that's just when Wolfe comes down from the plant room) Thank you, Hayford. I searched for that reference and simply couldn't find it. 6:00 didn't feel right, but I couldn't find it even in the Nero Wolfe Cookbook's commentary. Xlmvp 23:28, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Strange, it must be mentioned in about every book -- but, of course, that doesn't necessarily make it easy to find when you want to.... Hayford Peirce 23:34, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I've changed the eating hours a little, based on both my memories and Baring-Gould's book. Hayford Peirce 22:49, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

In an early novel, I believe speaking to Andrew Hibbard in The League of Frightened Men but am not certain, Wolfe tells a guest who is going to be resident in the brownstone for awhile that "lunch is at one o'clock and dinner at eight." Those times changed in later stories, as noted in your food section I expanded today as well as in another portion of the article.

At a Wolfe Pack meeting once, we were asked to come up with a list of questions that could not be answered from the books. One of the favorites was "Where does Theodore eat?" Newyorkbrad 06:38, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Women

Someone has badly screwed up the "Wolfe's attitude towards women" section. He/she did a rewrite of what was there a month or so ago, and has really loused it up. In fact, it makes no sense. I am feeling grouchy these days about dumb Wiki edits and don't feel like taking the time to repair it myself, but it would be nice if someone in a calmer state of mind would do so. Hayford Peirce 23:34, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Yellow PJs

Yes, Wolfe definitely wears yellow PJs. I was about to add "silk" to the description when I sudden began to wonder if it were his sheets that were yellow silk. Or are both his PJs and his sheets yellow silk? Hayford Peirce 22:35, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, on at least one occasion it was black sheets on his bed. Hayford Peirce 22:49, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bibliography - book summaries and individual articles

Hi there. I've been busily creating an individual article for each of the Rex Stout NW titles that hasn't had one up until now. I'm about 18 titles shy of finishing this endeavor, and then I'll link the unlinked titles in this bibliography to those individual articles, for further development. Each article has a consistent (I hope) structure, including an infobox that describes the first edition and provides the ISBN, and there's room for an image of the first-edition jacket; I found one on The Black Mountain page, and that got me going.

In creating the article, I've either copied the text (The League of Frightened Men, for example) from this bibliography, or come up with something on my own, as a point of departure for anyone who cares to jump in.

Once all the articles are created and linked from here, it's a matter of deciding whether to continue with the brief summaries on this page, or whether the bibliography should revert to a simple chronological list that links to the individual articles. I'm of two minds, because some of these brief summaries (Some Buried Caesar) are different and decidedly pithy. Not all of the titles have a summary, though, and the article is getting rather long; but being new here I'm not sure whether that's a big deal or not. I hesitate to whack anything of any substance here without checking with those of you who have contributed so much here already. Please ponder and comment if you like. WFinch 15:55, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I think it's a fine project that you have underway. But why don't we wait until you've finished with all the individual titles before we worry about where all the info should go. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to have the same info (more or less) in two related articles. So keep up the good work! Hayford Peirce 03:35, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm interested in this subproject as well. If you want to "assign" me a few books/stories to write up, I'll be glad to help out. Newyorkbrad 03:36, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, and it's good to hear from you both. I'll keep plugging away and finish with the separate titles (only 18 to go!), and we'll see what's what after that. Once all of the individual pages are in position it'll be easier to whittle here and add there to balance things out. I agree, it's nice to see a small summary next to the title -- I get these stories mixed up, to tell the truth, and can use something to jog my memory. And it was very good to see that section "Wolfe's home" added today -- that's an important one. So, onward.WFinch 00:30, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Longer-term plans

We seem to have three editors (including myself) committed to working on this and related articles. What do you think of the idea of working on this until we reach the standard for a main-paged featured article? Newyorkbrad 03:37, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I got involved in this. Thanks for the welcome to Wikipedia a few weeks back, too.WFinch 00:35, 6 March 2007 (UTC)