That’s as spooky as it gets. Yessiree, we’ve got a monster on our hands. Folded inside all that idle flesh is the working metaphor of the working mind. Thought, like tiny bits of light, is brought into the shadowy recesses, absorbed and stored, swollen with the occasional illumination of a blossoming idea. This is spooky stuff in a big way. It gives me chills. And I love it. But I no more want to touch him than I want to drill a hole in my skull and place a fingertip to my pulsing brain. Luckily, I don’t have to touch Nero Wolfe to know him. I have Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, to do that for me.

It generally takes reading three Nero Wolfe stories, in any order, before one begins to fully understand what’s going on between the mammoth man locked inside the brownstone and his seeming errand boy, likable Archie Goodwin. It is the relationship of these two characters that makes up the heart and soul of Rex Stout’s work. I like to think of it as a marriage of men, though I don’t always understand how the two of them get along. Archie is normal, after all.

Those who have mistaken Archie Goodwin as mere chronicler, as sounding board; those who have read one or two Nero Wolfe mysteries, by once or twice picking up a book found in a room or on a train, are missing the game. Three doses of Stout and the magic begins. Three doses of Stout, in any order, and Archie takes over as the character of interest.

Archie is Nero Wolfe’s sustenance. The immobile genius thrives on the details of Archie Goodwin’s activities. And Archie, despite his reluctance at times, is wedded to the eunuch mind inside the boundless bulk of Nero Wolfe.

They need each other. Archie feeds Nero Wolfe precise pieces of reality, facts from the real world outside the prison of Wolfe’s brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street, outside the prison of Wolfe’s intolerable immobility. Archie tends the monster so that the monster may live.