Comfort Reading

In the autumn of 1972 I was invited to stay with Baron and Baroness von V-S on their estate in Germany. A Mercedes was at the station to meet me driven by a tweedy type who spoke no English. It dawned on me that this was not the Baron but his chauffeur. A parp on the horn announced our arrival at the Schloss and a distinguished looking chap in a white dinner jacket appeared to greet me. This was the butler and I was seriously wondering if I’d ever meet the Baron. Life at the Schloss ran along well-ordered lines and I enjoyed my visit very much. I wrote a little about it a while back in The Shooting Party.

The Baroness was American and introduced me to Nero Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie Goodwin, as depicted by Rex Stout in thirty-three novels and thirty-nine short stories. I was transported to another world; a world where order reigns supreme in Nero Wolfe’s brownstone on West 35th Street.

“That readers have proved endlessly fascinated with the topography of Wolfe’s brownstone temple should not be surprising,” wrote J. Kenneth Van Dover in At Wolfe’s Door:

It is the center from which moral order emanates, and the details of its layout and its operations are signs of its stability. For forty years, Wolfe prepares menus with Fritz and pots orchids with Theodore. For forty years, Archie takes notes at his desk, the client sits in the red chair and the other principals distribute themselves in the yellow chairs, and Wolfe presides from his custom-made throne. For forty years, Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins ring the doorbell, enter the office, and explode with indignation at Wolfe’s intractability. The front room, the elevator, the three-foot globe — all persist in place through forty years of American history. … Like Holmes’s 221B Baker Street, Wolfe’s West Thirty-Fifth Street remains a fixed point in a turning world.

If you haven’t read any, I recommend them as ideal comfort reading. If you have, then it’s time to reread them, as PG Wodehouse advises.

He passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don’t know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn’t matter. That’s writing.