The following—with some late emendations—is the introduction I wrote for the 1992 Bantam Books reissue of Fer-de-Lance, Nero Wolfe’s inaugural adventure, as it was written and submitted before editorial excisions were made. This is its first appearance in the form in which it was composed.

Series are seldom read in order. By the time the average reader discovers a continuing character the chronicle is usually well advanced, and except in the case of those dreary series whose titles are numbered prominently on the covers (to avoid confusion among the interchangeable plots), he has no way of knowing at what point in the saga the book he has just acquired takes place. This can cause distress, particularly if the next book he reads is an earlier entry in which the hero he knows as widowed appears with his wife, or having quit smoking and drinking, is seen puffing and guzzling happily away with no explanation for his relapse.

Rex Stout avoided this situation through the simple expedient of never changing his characters.

The Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin of A Family Affair, the forty-sixth (and last) book in the epoch of West Thirty-Fifth Street, are essentially the same thought-and-action team we met forty-two years earlier in Fer-de-Lance. And therein lies the secret of the magic.

Under the present technocracy, when even the nine-to-five ethic has come to seem medieval, we can find peace in the almost Edwardian order of life in the old brownstone: Plant rooms, nine to eleven a.m. and four to six p.m.; office, eleven a.m. to one fifteen p.m.; six p.m. to dinnertime (and after dinner if necessary), day in and day out, except Sunday. Like Holmes’s corpulent brother Mycroft—an uncle, perhaps? Stout is coy on this point—Wolfe “has his rails and he runs on them.” Nothing short of a major catastrophe, such as a submachine gun assault on the plant rooms (The Second Confession), can persuade him to alter that comfortable routine or, worse, leave home on business. Barring extreme circumstances, he will be found in those places at those hours in 1976 and 1934 and all the years between with all his virtues and vices intact. One wishes that family values and the U.S. dollar were to remain as stable.

The reader new to Wolfe and Goodwin may be surprised upon reading Fer-de-Lance to learn that it represents their debut. So many references are made to earlier adventures in such an offhand, familiar way by narrator Archie, and his abrasive relationship with his eccentric employer fits them so much like a beloved and well-worn suit of clothes, that the newcomer may be excused the assumption that he has encountered the canon in midstride. Throughout the book, and indeed throughout the series, the sense is acute that these two fixed planets and their satellites—laconic Theodore Horstmann, keeper of the orchids and protector of the faith, Fritz Brenner, the unflappable cook and major-domo, loyal and efficient bloodhounds Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and (sometimes) Orrie Cather, and the volcanic Inspector LT Cramer—exist beyond the margins of the page and that their lives do not start and stop with the first and last chapters. Has any other saga begun with a statement as casual as “There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day . . .”?

When Fer-de-Lance appeared, popular crime literature was divided between the manorial “English School” of puzzle mysteries and the two-fisted American urban variety that took its inspiration from the headlines of Prohibition and Depression. Now, more than eight decades later, that division still exists, but there is evidence that the two camps are drifting closer together as both the grim butler and the sadistic bootlegger fade further into history. From the start, Stout wedded the forms. Nero Wolfe, the eccentric genius swathed in his one-seventh of a ton, is a combination Sherlock Holmes in his more contemplative moments and Baroness Orczy’s sedentary Old Man in the Corner, while Archie Goodwin exemplifies the hardboiled, wisecracking “private dick” prevalent in pulp fiction. Consider this exchange:

WOLFE: “Your errand at White Plains was in essence a

primitive business enterprise: an offer to exchange

something for something else. If Mr. Anderson had

only been there he would probably have seen it so. It

may yet materialize; it is still worth some small

effort. I believe though it is getting ready to

rain.”

GOODWIN: “It was clouding up as I came in. Is it

going to rain all over your clues?”

WOLFE: “Someday, Archie, when I decide you are no

longer worth tolerating, you will have to marry a

woman of very modest mental capacity to get an

appreciative audience for your wretched sarcasms.”

Not exactly the Holmes-Watson relationship, but a symbiotic one. Without Goodwin’s badgering, Wolfe would certainly starve, collapsing under the weight of his own sloth. Without Wolfe—well, we learn from In the Best Families that Goodwin can get along only too well without any oddball geniuses around to coddle, but we may assume by how readily he takes up his old post when Wolfe returns from his enforced sabbatical that for all Archie’s grousing he prefers the status quo, as do we.

We read Nero Wolfe because we like a good mystery. We re-read him not for the plots, which lack the human complexity of Raymond Chandler’s or the ingenuity of Agatha Christie’s, but for the chemistry between the orchid-fancying enfant terrible and his optimistic-cynical amanuensis and all-around dogsbody, and for the insular complacency of life in the venerable townhouse where world-class meals are served three times daily, the Cattleyas Laelias continue to get on splendidly with the Laeliocattleya Lustre, and a peek through the tricked-up waterfall picture in Wolfe’s office may provide a glimpse of the Great Man relaxing in his custom-built chair with some arcane volume, or pushing his lips in and out with his eyes closed over some dense pattern of facts, while his legman sits by the telephone, waiting for his cue to gather all the suspects and other interested parties for the denouement. It is a world where all things make sense in time, a world better than our own. If you are an old hand making a return swing through its orbit, welcome back; pull up the red leather chair and sit down. If this is your first trip, I envy you the surprises that await you behind that unprepossessing front door.

Oh—about the snake. You didn’t think I was going to spoil that, did you?