The first appearance of an American genius, as seen through the eyes of his right-hand assistant, Archie Goodwin:
Wolfe lifted his head. I mention that, because his head was so big that lifting it struck you as being quite a job. It was probably really bigger than it looked, for the rest of him was so huge that any head on top of it but his own would have escaped your notice entirely.
Wise observation and, beginning at the very beginning, typical wisecracking remark from Archie Goodwin, who - in addition to his role as principal aide to his gargantuan, seventh-of-a-ton boss, Nero Wolfe - acts as our narrator for the more than six dozen Nero Wolfe stories by Rex Stout. That quote comes from Fer-de-Lance, and that book, first published in 1934, is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Over the past dozen years or so, I've reviewed a number of the Nero Wolfe mysteries both on this blog and on the Classic Mysteries podcast, but I have never written about the book that started it all: Fer-de-Lance. To be honest, it's not really my favorite of the Wolfe and Goodwin novels - both Nero Wolfe and Archie seem to have rough corners which disappear by some of the later books in the series. But it's an interesting story all the same and undoubtedly worth your reading time.
The plot of Fer-de-Lance is pretty much straightforward – Wolfe is hired to find out what happened to a missing man, an immigrant who has disappeared. Not surprisingly, that man turns up dead, quite possibly the victim of a robbery. What is surprising is that Wolfe sees a link between that murder and the death of a college president – a death which the family, the doctor, and the police all insist was natural, the result of a stroke suffered by the victim on the golf course. Wolfe insists that it isn’t natural at all, and he forces authorities to perform an autopsy which reveals that the man was indeed murdered and, in fact, that he died from the deadly venom of a snake, a pit viper known as the fer-de-lance. And as Wolfe and Archie investigate further, they will find their own lives threatened as they match wits with a murderer.
Wolfe certainly does some fine detective work in Fer-de-Lance, making logical deductions from scraps of information as he figures out what has been going on – and what to do about it. Go ahead. Give it a try.
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