This is a Rare! Nero Wolfe Sunday Page by Stout and Mike Roy.  Fantastic Detective Stories and Beautiful Artwork! This was cut from the original newspaper Sunday comics section of 1957.  Size: ~11 x 15 inches (Tabloid Full Page) Paper: some light tanning, light wear, otherwise: Excellent! Bright Colors! Pulled from loose sections! (Please Check Scans) Please include $5.00 Total postage on any size order (USA) $25.00 International Flat Rate. I combine postage on multiple pages. Check out my other auctions for more great vintage Comic strips and Paper Dolls. Thanks for Looking!

Nero Wolfe

First appearance Fer-de-Lance (1934)

Created by Rex Stout

In-universe information

Gender Male

Occupation Private detective

Children Carla Lovchen Britton

(adopted daughter)

Nationality Montenegrin

Citizenship United States by naturalization

Nero Wolfe is a fictional character, a brilliant, obese, eccentric armchair detective created in 1934 by American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe was born in Montenegro and keeps his past murky. He lives in a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street in New York City, and he is loath to leave his home for business or anything that would keep him from reading his books, tending his orchids, or eating the gourmet meals prepared by his chef, Fritz Brenner. Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's sharp-witted, dapper young confidential assistant with an eye for attractive women, narrates the cases and does the legwork for the detective genius.

Stout published 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories featuring Wolfe from 1934 to 1975, with most of them set in New York City. The stories have been adapted for film, radio, television and the stage. The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated for Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon 2500, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was a nominee for Best Mystery Writer of the Century.

Title character

I suggest beginning with autobiographical sketches from each of us, and here is mine. I was born in Montenegro and spent my early boyhood there. At the age of sixteen I decided to move around, and in fourteen years I became acquainted with most of Europe, a little of Africa, and much of Asia, in a variety of roles and activities. Coming to this country in nineteen-thirty, not penniless, I bought this house and entered into practice as a private detective. I am a naturalized American citizen.

— Nero Wolfe addressing the suspects in "Fourth of July Picnic" (1957)

Although the Nero Wolfe stories take place contemporaneously with their writing and depict a changing landscape and society, the principal characters in the corpus do not age. According to a memo prepared by Rex Stout in 1949, Nero Wolfe's age is 56, although this is not directly stated in the stories.

"Those stories have ignored time for thirty-nine years," Stout told his authorized biographer, John McAleer. "Any reader who can't or won't do the same should skip them. I didn't age the characters because I didn't want to. That would have made it cumbersome and would seem to have centered attention on the characters rather than the stories."[2]: 49 

According to the same memo, Wolfe's height is 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) and his weight is 272 lb (123 kg). Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories, frequently describes Wolfe as weighing "a seventh of a ton". This was intended to indicate unusual obesity at the time of the first book (1934), especially through the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In a single short story written in 1947, Archie writes, "He weighs between 310 and 390, and he limits his physical movements to what he regards as the irreducible essentials."

"Wolfe's most extravagant distinction is his extreme antipathy to literal extravagance. He will not move," wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in At Wolfe's Door: The Nero Wolfe Novels of Rex Stout:

He insists upon the point: under no circumstances will he leave his home or violate his routines in order to facilitate an investigation. The exceptions are few and remarkable. Instead of spreading the principles of order and justice throughout his society, Wolfe imposes them dogmatically and absolutely within the walls of his house—the brownstone on West Thirty-Fifth Street—and he invites those who are troubled by an incomprehensible and threatening environment to enter the controlled economy of the house and to discover there the source of disorder in their own lives. The invitation is extended to readers as well as to clients.

Wolfe's most remarkable departure from the brownstone is due to personal reasons, not to business, and thus does not violate the rule regarding the conduct of business away from the office. That event occurs in The Black Mountain, when he leaves not only the brownstone but the United States to avenge the murder of his oldest friend. He abandons his cherished daily habits for a time and, despite his physical bulk, engages in strenuous outdoor activity in mountain terrain.

Origins

Nero Wolfe and his boyhood friend Marko Vukcic hunted dragonflies in the mountains where Wolfe was born, in the vicinity of Lovćen

You, gentlemen, are Americans, much more completely than I am, for I wasn't born here. This is your native country. It was you and your brothers, black and white, who let me come here and live, and I hope you'll let me say, without getting maudlin, that I'm grateful to you for it.

— Nero Wolfe speaking to the Black staff of Kanawha Spa in Too Many Cooks (1938), chapter 10

The corpus implies or states that Nero Wolfe was born in Montenegro, with one exception. In the first chapter of Over My Dead Body (1939), Wolfe tells an FBI agent that he was born in the United States—a declaration at odds with all other references. Stout revealed the reason for the discrepancy in a 1940 letter cited by his authorized biographer, John McAleer: "In the original draft of Over My Dead Body Nero was a Montenegrin by birth, and it all fitted previous hints as to his background; but violent protests from The American Magazine, supported by Farrar & Rinehart, caused his cradle to be transported five thousand miles."

"I got the idea of making Wolfe a Montenegrin from Louis Adamic," Stout said, noting that everything he knew about Montenegrins he learned from Adamic's book, The Native's Return (1934), or from Adamic himself.

"Adamic describes the Montenegrin male as tall, commanding, dignified, courteous, hospitable," McAleer wrote. "He is reluctant to work, accustomed to isolation from women. He places women in a subordinate role. He is a romantic idealist, apt to go in for dashing effects to express his spirited nature. He is strong in family loyalties, has great pride, is impatient of restraint. Love of freedom is his outstanding trait. He is stubborn, fearless, unsubduable, capable of great self-denial to uphold his ideals. He is fatalistic toward death. In short, Rex had found for Wolfe a nationality that fitted him to perfection."

Wolfe is reticent about his youth, but apparently he was athletic, fit, and adventurous. Before World War I, he spied for the Austrian government's Evidenzbureau, but had a change of heart when the war began. He then joined the Serbian-Montenegrin army and fought against the Austrians and Germans. That means that he was likely to have been involved in the harrowing 1915 withdrawal of the defeated Serbian army, when thousands of soldiers died from disease, starvation, and sheer exhaustion[d]—which might help to explain the comfort-loving habits that are such a conspicuous part of Wolfe's character. He joined the American Expeditionary Forces, and after a time in Europe and North Africa, he came to the United States.

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