Fridge Brilliance
- A reason why Wolfe charges such extortionately large fees. Obviously he has expensive tastes (orchids, gourmet cuisine, first-edition books and customised furniture don't come cheap), but he also considers it beneath his dignity to do the kind of typical pay-the-bills grunt work most private detectives would have to do — divorce cases, photographing cheating spouses, etc. At the same time, however, he also notes on several occasions that the police are more than capable of solving nine out of ten homicide cases. This means that the kind of cases he deigns to accept come few and far between. As well as his natural laziness and hating to work, he has to make sure that when he does work, the fee he gets has plenty of fat to cover his costs through any dry spells when the kind of work he's willing to do simply isn't there.
- An explanation for Wolfe's phobia of moving vehicles (cars, trains, etc.); throughout the series, Wolfe is canonically somewhere in his fifties. As the first novel in the series came out in 1934, this would place his date of birth at some point around the 1870s-1880s, when the steam train was barely fifty years old and the car non-existent. Furthermore, both would have taken quite some time to reach the rugged mountainous wilds of Montenegro, where Wolfe was born. He probably never encountered either until well into adulthood, and all it would have taken was one bad experience with any/either to sour him for life.
