As the presidential election campaigns end and the polls begin to close, we'd like to take a break from the real world and lose ourselves in our favorite place—a good book! From Agatha Christie's Miss Marple to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, there are several fictional characters we'd love to see duke it out on…
Rex Stout’s beer-drinking, reclusive, genius detective, Nero Wolfe, was introduced to the world in 1934 to immediate and overwhelming acclaim. During the next 41 years, Mr. Stout wrote 33 Nero Wolfe books and 39 novellas. The stories, which might properly be classified as soft-boiled detective fiction, are narrated by Mr. Wolfe’s assistant detective, the dapper…
An observation I had in my years working for Sports Illustrated: athletes and the heroes of crime fiction have much in common, but most simply this—a ruthless clarity of purpose and an ability to perform at their best when the action reaches its climax. Below I’ve assembled a football team populated by great characters from…
To Lily and Sally and all Rex Stout’s Gals who try to do the right thing. This is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Rex Stout’s Some Buried Caesar, the first time we meet Lily Rowan, one of the great hottie-totties in crime fiction literature. Lily is Archie’s main squeeze. You know Archie, right?…
“Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.” That tag at the start of John LeCarré’s first espionage novel conspicuously describes the master spy, George Smiley. Call for the Dead, published in…
Mystery author Rex Stout was, by all reports, a flirt. He loved beautiful women, and to him, most women were beautiful. According to his daughter, shortly before he died at age 87, Mr. Stout engaged in some charming repartee with his hospital nurse—he flirted with her and she flirted back. How lovely, and to me,…
Crime fiction is cheerfully described as an addiction by many of its fans, including such diverse personalities as Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson. Just as neurochemical addicts have an endless menu of obsessions to gorge on (alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, gambling, chocolate, sex…), crimefic addicts have an ever-growing and ever-mutating variety of subgenres to sample. But…
Philip Marlowe might not have had a secretary, but Sam Spade knew better. Who else do you trust to bring you the dingus but your loyal secretary? Who else can you depend on to fend off inconvenient lovers or nasty cops, and deal with dead ship captains? Dashiell Hammett’s Effine Perrine is just one of…
The Wolfe Pack has announced its shortlist for the annual Nero Wolfe Award, bestowed during its Black Orchid festivities in December. The award was designed to recognize new tales of criminal detection in the spirit of Rex Stout’s eminent and world-famous Nero Wolfe (and his associate Archie Goodwin, of course). This year’s finalists are: Guilt…
Auctorial influence is a tricky thing, even for those writers whose style or choice of subject is consciously patterned (admittedly or otherwise) after another writer’s work. When confronted with the question of influence, I usually mention Nelson DeMille, because it was his John Corey novels, beginning with Plum Island, that convinced me both that I…
