He is whip-smart, honorable, and quite capable of adapting to the customs of the cultural elite. People underestimate Nero Wolfe – and the rest of us mountain folk – at their peril. We can jettison the accent, acquire a taste for opera and sushi, and stifle the glower of Wolfe under the sparkle of Archie’s charm and self-deprecating humor. Most of us feel like Wolfe but have to act like Archie. We manage. But we tend to count trees when nobody’s looking, and we always, always hold something back. Inside each of us there’s a brownstone fortress, and it takes some doing to get us out of it.

Nero Wolfe has outlived his creator, and even now he is practicing the art of detection from his Manhattan home; but if he had been allowed to retire, I think I’d see another mountain trait in him. I saw it in my great-uncles, who spent forty years between youth and retirement working in the car factories in Detroit. When their working lives came to an end, they went back to the mountains. The lucky ones never leave; the rest come home when they can. Wolfe settled in New York because you can’t be an eminent and well-paid private detective in, say, Banner Elk, North Carolina; but for all Wolfe’s success, I am not convinced that he felt at home in the city. I think his residence there would have ended when he quit the gumshoe business.

Maybe Nero Wolfe wouldn’t have made it all the way back to the hills of Montenegro, but if he’d ever been allowed to stop crime solving, I think I’d know where to look for him. You’d be walking on the Appalachian Trail, in the green wilderness somewhere between Springer Mountain, Georgia and Mount Katahdin, Maine, and as you started to climb over a split-rail fence to reach a spring, a voice would yell, “Get away from my rhododendrons!” And you’d see a pear-shaped hulk glowering down at you from the deck of a glass and cedar chalet up on the ridge. Walk softly, dear reader. Archie’s no doubt somewhere on the premises. He’s probably armed. Now git.