Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"No, Archie. It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia. It is the greatest force in the world."

Just a few days ago I re-read and reviewed here A Family Affair , the last book in the Nero Wolfe series, published in 1975. It seemed interesting to re-read the very first installment in the series Fer-de-Lance (1933). The time now is quite appropriate as the series that includes 46 novels and sets of novellas spans 42 years in the middle of the 20th century, and it is now exactly 42 years since the last novel was published in 1975.

May 1933. Prohibition has just been effectively repealed and Nero Wolfe decides to give up the bootleg beer and is looking into the legal 3.2 beer trying to find something potable. Fred Durkin, one of Wolfe's men, comes to ask the detective for help as the brother of his wife's friend has disappeared. The obese genius of crime solving is goaded into taking the case when the connection between the missing man and the murder of Mr. Barstow, the president of Holland University, is discovered. Mrs. Barstow offers a $50,000 reward for information leading to discovery and punishment of her husband's murderer (the amount would be equivalent to almost $1 million currently). No wonder that Wolfe and of course the narrator, the intrepid Archie Goodwin try very hard to find the guilty party.

Aided by Goodwin and others, Wolfe succeeds in solving the crime, and the ingenious plot involves several interesting and uncommon elements, like offering a bet to a law enforcement official about results of an autopsy, the biomechanics of golf, the Bothrops atrox species, and some aviation-related passages. While both Mr. Wolfe and Archie already exhibit most of their characteristic personas, they are not exactly the same as in the later novels. Yes, Mr. Wolfe is unbearably condescending, but much less pompous. Archie is rather crude, not as refined and debonair as in the later books. Well, people do change. Of course, actual people would change much more over the period of 42 years, but in the Nero Wolfe world "literary time" only a few years have passed between 1933 and 1975. I like the character of Sarah Barstow - the most colorful and well-drawn in this novel.

My experiment with comparing the 1933 Nero Wolfe time with that of 1975 has been rather inconclusive, but I definitely feel that more time elapsed between 1933 and 1975 than between 1975 and 2017. It is probably related to the fact that I was born closer to the first than the second date. On the other hand it is so satisfying to read about the world not only without Internet but also without TV. It was so much more difficult to enslave minds of millions of people in the olden days! Radio was virtually the only tool of mind control.

Fer-de-Lance is very far from the excellence of Murder by the Book but it is quite readable and feels much less dated than its mature age of 84 years would suggest.

Two and three quarter stars.



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