We have here six volumes of mastermind and sleuth Nero Wolfe,
containing twelve tales, and there isn’t a bad nut in the set.

I’m not going to wax rhapsodic about these books, although I justifiably
could. And I’m not going to spend paragraphs telling you how Nero Wolfe
is an interesting character, with his bed temper, his rudeness, his
gourmet appetite, and his orchids, but that Archie Goodwin, now, Goodwin the
wise-cracking sidekick, is the real hero of the books, and a completely
sufficient reason for reading them. Even though it’s true.

Suffice it to say that if you enjoy mystery novels, and you’ve not read
any of Stout’s books, you’ve got better things to be doing than reading
this review when Amazon’s just a click away.

And now, a few notes about these particular books.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the Nero Wolfe novels; I like
it, but it isn’t the best of the series. The maguffin’s a little
over-complicated, and Wolfe isn’t quite himself–at maybe 99%, he’s more
himself than most long-running characters are at first appearance, but
not quite himself.

I fear I read In The Best Families out of order (I was just
picking the books off of the shelf in whatever order I found them, which
wasn’t chronological). There are three Nero Wolfe novels for which the
sequence matters; this is the third, in which Wolfe has his final
showdown with that mastermind of crime Arnold Zeck.

Over My Dead Body‘s an interesting little tale, involving
fencing, murder, Balkan politics, and, most remarkably, Wolfe’s long-lost
daughter from Montenegro. As Wolfe dislikes women intensely, much comedy
ensues. We learn quite a lot about Wolfe in this one, some of it good.

The remaining three books are all triples; apparently Stout wrote three
shorter Wolfe tales every year, which (IIRC) were always published in a
single volume just before Christmas. I won’t say too much about these
except that in each tale you get the distilled essence of Wolfe and
Goodwin, and that’s no bad thing.