Customer Reviews

The brownstone house of Nero Wolfe

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Reviews the career of the famous fictional detective, Nero Wolfe, as recorded in the books by Rex Stout. Since Wolfe "stoutly" refused to leave his house, practically all of his detecting took place here. Discussions of events are provided, with detailed layouts of the house and of individual rooms. There is also a bibliography of the seventy or so cases in which Wolfe acted. Ken Darby is a well-known choir director, composer, and lyricist, and clearly a Nero Wolfe enthusiast.

This book is, in my opinion, superior to the better known (and much earlier one) by Baring-Gould. It has, for instance, what appear to be beautifully drafted and absolutely correct floor plans of the famous brownstone on West 35rd -- in sharp contrast to the infamous plan on page 100 of Baring-Gould's book, in which the first-floor rooms are grotesquely wrong.

It is, however, marred by a bizarre rant beginning on page 152, supposedly in the form of a letter written by Wolfe himself, about the use of the word "gay" as a synonym for homosexual. Whether Darby was homophobic or not, I don't know. And, of course, in 1978, "gay" was still far from being universally accepted in the sense that it now is. Perhaps Darby was just being ultra-conservative in a rear-guard action about the shifting meanings of words (as has occurred through the history of the English language). But the purported letter is strangely out of place in this otherwise estimable work.