In the last of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels adapted for U.S. television, Death of a Doxy (1966), Archie finds a rude surprise on a personal errand: ex-showgirl Isabel Kerr with a marble ashtray that presumably dented her skull. Orrie, returning from a tail job for Del Bascom’s agency—last mentioned in, I believe, Might as Well Be Dead (1956)—says he didn’t do it, so Archie agrees to keep silent; the body is found by her sister, Stella, whose husband, Barry Fleming, teaches math at Henry Hudson High School. Held as a material witness, Orrie calls attorney Nathaniel Parker, letting Archie decide how to handle it, and a summons from Wolfe extricates him from a poetry reading at Lily Rowan’s penthouse.

   Per Archie’s report, Isabel was “rescued” from showbiz by Avery Ballou, president of the Federal Holding Corporation, now paying her rent, but has set her sights on Orrie, whose baby she claims to be carrying. To derail his engagement to airline stewardess Jill Hardy, she threatens to reveal pictures, letters…and his license, lifted from his pocket, hence said errand. Wolfe says that if he did it, he’s Parker’s problem; other ’teers Saul and Fred are uncertain, but the four vote that he didn’t, and Wolfe is “constrained not only by his long association with me but also by my self-esteem. You must know that I have no affection for him; he has frequently vexed me…But if he didn’t kill [her], I intend to deliver him.”

   Archie invites a disbelieving Jill to the brownstone, putting her in the front room, whence she exits, when Cramer comes to get Wolfe’s stance and hint darkly about Isabel’s diary; Jill denied knowing of her, so Archie visits and jars Stella with the titular term for Isabel, hotly disavowed, learning only that she lived another life with her “circle.” Archie visits Orrie, not yet charged, at the City Prison, and learns of her best friend, Julie Jaquette (née Amy Jackson), a singer at the Ten Little Indians club. A business card inscribed, “There was a diary in the pink bedroom and the police have it” brings Ballou to the brownstone, where Wolfe points out that helping identify the killer might obviate divulging his name.

   He seems to have nothing to offer, except money declined by Wolfe. Julie agrees to tell all about Isabel if shown the orchids, claiming she neither knows the identity of the man paying the rent nor has met Orrie, but told the police he killed her, although she believes Stella “thought Isabel would be better off dead” and says the family physician, Theodore Gamm, was fixated on her. “I wish you well. I have the impression that your opinion of our fellow beings and their qualities is somewhat similar to mine,” Wolfe says, actually standing as she leaves, yet a list of mutual “friends” Julie supplies is hopeless, so Archie contrives to see Minna Ballou (née Minerva Chadwick), who has the only known motive.

   With a pretext of getting advice for Lily on acquiring an Irish wolfhound, on which she is an expert, he writes off the languid, forgetful Minna. They are visited by Gamm, to state that the strain endangers Stella’s life, and Ballou, to admit being blackmailed by “Milton Thales,” i.e., Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus, pointing to Barry, who presumably learned of Ballou from Stella, and killed Isabel for threatening to tell her sister what he’d done. Withholding Ballou’s name, Archie has Julie write to Barry, revealing knowledge of “Thales” and the blackmail, and guarantees full-time protection; with Archie present at the meeting, Barry agrees to return the money in two days, begging Julie not to tell Stella.

   Shots are fired, one hitting Fred’s leg, as they transport her to her hotel from the club, so Archie puts her in the South Room, above Wolfe’s, where she spins a tale in response to Cramer’s questions. Ballou had offered $50,000 to keep him out of it and—hidden from Julie—stops by, agreeing to pay her the same if she can help them do so. They summon Stella, who wants to protect Isabel’s name even more than he does his own, so on arrival, Archie takes a gun from her handbag and, as Wolfe listens in, shows her a copy of Julie’s letter; then it’s Julie’s turn in the alcove as Cramer reports that Barry has shot himself and left a note confessing to Isabel’s murder, with a falsified motive that totally omits Ballou.

   One of three episodes of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series directed by Edward Abroms, “What Happened to April” (3/20/81) was scripted by Stephen Downing, as was “Death on the Doorstep” (1/23/81). He replaces Orrie with Saul (George Wyner), nabbed seeking his effects in the titular “floater’s” apartment after Cramer (Allan Miller) calls in midtown Det. Barney Cross (Gavin Mooney); he doesn’t recognize her, but Saul—riding along on a job—does, telling Wolfe (William Conrad) she was just a friend with whom he stayed occasionally. Downing renames Ballou (as Chester Winslow; Richard Anderson), Julie (now Keen; Deborah Fallender), and Stella (as Donna MacKenzie; Laurie Heineman).

   Math professor Donna is happy to accept drowning as the tentative cause of death and close the case, but M.E. Andy Davis (Mario Roccuzzo) wants tests to explain the pupil dilation. Julie tells Archie (Lee Horsley) that Donna was ashamed of her lack of success as a singer, despite efforts by Julie’s manager, Paul Cummings (Thaao Penghlis), to find her a gig; engaged to department head John Stewart (Bob Carraway), Donna says April’s lifestyle killed their father. Next into the river is Andy, his sample missing, but colleague Dr. Lydia Proctor (Julie Carmen) took it to continue his work, and after Winslow makes his offer, revealing the blackmail, she proves that April had died from insulin poisoning.

   After making Cramer wait while he and Fritz (George Voskovec) prepare a 200-year-old recipe for yak veal—complete with yak milk flown in from the Himalayas—to be served in a week for the first time in North America, Wolfe asks him to identify the man tailing Archie and fingers Donna as “Thales.” Archie enlists Julie, who survives being injected by a masked man at the stage door before going on at Chez Petite, yet Cramer’s men not only were watching Donna, but also saw her inject herself as a ruse. Archie’s tail (Mark Russell) confirms that Paul, his employer, blackmailed Winslow to pay gambling debts, and out of love for Paul, Julie helped with the scheme to deflect suspicion toward Donna.

   Directed by co-executive producer/star Timothy Hutton, “Death of a Doxy” (4/14/02) was the two-part second-season premiere of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery, adapted by consulting producer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. Hutton, playing Archie, sets the effective initial confrontation in Orrie’s (Trent McMullen) apartment in almost total darkness, an apt visual metaphor for his inevitable suspicion. First seen in her recurring role of Lily, as she hosts the dreaded Poet (Julian Richings)—several passages of whose hours-long “epithon” Doyle gamely supplies—Kari Matchett then assumes the part of Julie; fellow frequent repertory player George Plimpton makes his first of two appearances as Parker.

   Well and faithfully staged, the confab that Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) convenes with Saul (Conrad Dunn) and Fred (Fulvio Cecere) is an interesting character study, with none of them leaping unhesitatingly to Orrie’s defense, yet voting to help. After the visits by Jill (Janine Theriault) and Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Archie sits outside the Flemings’ door, suspiciously asked, “Are you waiting for someone?” by a hefty, broad-shouldered woman (Araxi Arslanian), then admitted by the arriving Barry (Carlo Rota), to Stella’s (Christine Brubaker) dismay. Ballou (James Tolkan) says that non-physical contact with Isabel was restricted to reading her the poems of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, and Jack London.

   One of the most interesting women in the canon, Julie serenades the unimpressed Wolfe with her flamboyant rendition of “Big Man Go-go” (lyrics presumably original to Stout), and we are treated to her number with the Little Indians. Doyle eliminates a superfluous Gamm, while Mrs. Ballou (Nicky Guadagni) is portrayed with maximum eccentricity, as she strokes one of the huge wolfhounds only alluded to on the page. We briefly glimpse Isabel (Hayley Verlyn) in a flashback as Wolfe reads Barry’s confession; as in the novel, after Cramer leaves, Archie flips a coin, telling Julie, “I am deciding something that can’t be decided any other way. Tails. Stella killed her husband herself,” and Orrie weds Jill.

   After 1967, the first year since Stout’s wartime hiatus in 1945 during which no new Nero Wolfe book was published, he produced four more novels, starting with The Father Hunt (1968), a natural bookend to The Mother Hunt (1963). Hired to help Lily research a book on the father who’d “made a pile building sewers and other items and had left her enough boodle to keep a dozen penthouses,” Amy Denovo now hires Wolfe to find her own—but discreetly, aided by the grateful Ballou. As cover, he claims to be investigating the death of her mother, Elinor (a presumed alias), a three-month-old hit-and-run in which Cramer seems to have an unusual interest…especially when he learns that Wolfe has one as well.

   Echoing Death of a Doxy and “Death of a Demon” (1961), Death of a Dude (1969) is set in and around Lame Horse, Montana; back from “The Rodeo Murder” (1960) are Harvey Greve, now the boss of Lily’s Bar JR Ranch, and Mel Fox, filling in when he is jailed for shooting daughter Alma’s impregnator, St. Louis newspaper scion Philip Brodell. Wade Worthy is outlining A Stripe of the Tiger: the Life and Work of James Gilmore Rowan, and fellow guest Archie is certain but unable to prove Harvey is innocent. So, per Lily, “The mountain comes to Mohammed,” with Wolfe pulling some strings to get himself and Archie credentialed as special investigators by county attorney Thomas R. Jessup.

   Following a record four-year gap, in Please Pass the Guilt (1973), Wolfe does Vollmer a favor for his friend, crisis-intervention psychiatrist Irwin Ostrow, seeking to learn if there is any basis to a pseudonymous patient’s Lady Macbeth syndrome. Quickly identified as Kenneth Meer, he is chief assistant to Amory Browning of the Continental Air Network; fellow VP Peter J. Odell, Browning’s rival to succeed retiring president Cass R. Abbott, was blown to bits while opening a drawer in Browning’s office. The obvious question is whether Meer really does have metaphoric blood on his hands…but was the bomb meant for Browning, reputedly dallying with secretary Helen Lugos, or truly targeted at Ordell?

   Guilt and A Family Affair (1975) feature both developments with recurring characters and Stout’s customary carelessness about names; the former’s climax reveals that a suspect’s sister is married to Wolfe’s bête noire, Lt. J.M. (hitherto George) Rowcliff. In the latter, Rusterman’s waiter Pierre Ducos arrives, afraid for his life and insisting on seeing Wolfe, so Archie stashes him for the night in the South Room, where he is killed by a bomb in an aluminum cigar tube he’d presumably discovered in his coat pocket. The last name of the maítre d’hôtel who ran Rusterman’s under Wolfe’s trusteeship, Felix, is variously Martin in The Black Mountain (1954), Courbet in “Poison à la Carte” (1960), and finally Mauer.

   Pierre served at the dinner hosted by Harvey H. Bassett, president of National Electronics Industries—shot shortly afterward—to address how Watergate “debased…the equipment for electronic recording.” We learn that Wolfe has “hankered…to have an effective hand in the disclosure of the malfeasance of Richard Nixon,” yet per the title (“since there was no client and no prospect of a fee, this was all in the family”), the truth is closer to home. This time, Orrie is guilty of killing Pierre and his daughter, who attempted blackmail, and Bassett, whom he cuckolded; the jig up, he uses a bomb on himself on Wolfe’s doorstep.

   A month after that was published, Rex Stout passed away at the age of 88 on October 27, 1975, in Danbury, Connecticut, where my lovely bride and I first set up housekeeping in 1988. That brings us to the end of the long road down which I’d started some two years ago with my post (2/13/23)—the first of 24, by my count—on Fer-de-Lance (1934) and its screen incarnation, Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). I’ve hugely enjoyed revisiting the series, my memories of first devouring the books in 1981 back in high school (where I also met said lovely bride) totally undiminished, and hope you’ve enjoyed getting (re)acquainted with what rank among the greatest characters and partnerships in all of detective fiction.

      Editions cited:

Death of a Doxy: Bantam (1967)
The Father Hunt: Bantam (1969)
Death of a Dude: Bantam (1970)
Please Pass the Guilt, A Family Affair, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)

      Online sources:

      [link above mislabeled “Might as Well Be Dead”]