Over My Dead Body

"The detective in this series is almost a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, but what makes it so brilliant is that Rex Stout merged the classic British mystery with the American hard-boiled. Nero Wolfe is this eccentric, brilliant, genius detective who is always able to solve the crimes police can’t. His assistant Archie is the traditional hard-boiled PI—wise-cracking, always like one, two, steps behind. He does all the legwork. He’s the one who gets arrested, the one who gets beat up. He’s the one who is interested in women. “The American approach to the detective novel is more cynical, more violent” Their relationship is what makes the Nero Wolfe books so fun. I don’t know how many Nero Wolfe books were written—probably forty odd—but at one point I was just reading a new book every couple of days. It’s like getting together with friends. They are fantastic characters, especially in the early books, which are very clever. Over My Dead Body has some foreign intrigue, it has blackmail and murders, a clever ending, and it introduces a little bit of Nero Wolfe’s background, his relationship with Montenegro. I could have picked maybe half a dozen Nero Wolfe books I like as much as Over My Dead Body , but this is a lot of fun. I’ll warn you that the first book in the series, Fer-de-Lance , is a little stiff. You have to push your way through it, because the relationship and the humour and everything that makes the series so great isn’t so evident in that first book. It takes probably until the third book to hit its stride. I read them in order. There are things that carry on from the earlier books into the later ones."