The first novel in the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout, Fer De Lance was written in 1934, and is set in early June of 1933, two months after the repeal of Prohibition and during the Great Depression.
It introduces not only Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, his right-hand man, but also the core trio of the recurring corps of free-lancers Wolfe will use through the rest of the series, Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, plus one more who is dropped later, Bill Gore; and the other members of his household, chef Fritz Brenner and nursemaid-to-the-orchids Theodore Horstmann. Other recurring characters introduced in this novel include Ben King, the Westchester County Sheriff and Anderson, the Westchester County District Attorney. Purley Stebbins, of the New York City Police Department is mentioned, but only in passing.
It is not long after the end of Prohibition, and Nero Wolfe is distracted from reacquainting himself with legal beer by Fred Durkin, one of his freelance operatives, who approaches him with a missing person case. Carlo Maffei, a poor immigrant metal-worker, has disappeared, and while the police have dismissed the case his sister Maria insists that he has not returned to Italy, and that foul play has occurred. Archie Goodwin is duly dispatched to the missing man's house, where he learns that Maffei had received mysterious phone calls and had cut a story out of the front page of a newspaper. The investigation soon leads to the mysterious death of Peter Oliver Barstow, an academic who died suddenly while playing a round of golf, and both Wolfe and Archie soon find themselves faced with family secrets, a deadly device for murder, a cunning killer, and a sinister "gift" from the killer they're after...
Tropes in this work: (Tropes relating to the series as a whole, or to the characters in general can be found on Nero Wolfe and its subpages.)
- Ambiguous Disorder: Mrs. Barstow. Sarah is quite open to Archie that her mother has a mental issue of some nature; Mrs Barstow herself is the same, additionally telling Archie that there is one person who wanted her husband dead — herself. Dr Bradford confirms that it has something to do with her husband. But exactly what it is is never identified for the audience; her symptoms are never clearly laid out; the closest anyone comes to a clear identification is "neurosis".
- Asshole Victim: Subverted; everyone who knew him describes Peter Oliver Barstow as a borderline saint who had no enemies in the world, thus making it incredibly tricky to figure out who wanted him dead. Which makes a lot more sense when it's discovered that he wasn't the intended victim after all. The intended victim turns out to be an incredible jerk, thus making it easy to see why his son wanted him dead.
- Battle Trophy: In thanks for Wolfe leaving behind a 'pistol' the killer gifts him the modified golf club used as the murder weapon.
- Blackmail Backfire: Carlo Maffei picked the wrong man to try and blackmail.
- Chekhov's Gun: At the beginning of the novel, Wolfe switches his beer supply from bootleg beer delivered in barrels to legitimate beer that comes in individual bottles. When Wolfe figures out that Barstow's death had something to do with his golf clubs, Archie remarks that personally he never saw any use for golf clubs other than beating snakes to death. Both of these are set-up for the scene near the end where the murderer tries to dispose of Wolfe with a venomous snake and Wolfe beats it to death with a beer bottle.
- Consummate Liar: Wolfe demonstrates his ability to convincingly tell absolute whoppers when he spins his yarn of keeping his dear mother imprisoned on the top floor of the brownstone for Kimball (See "Madwoman in the Attic"). Archie's reaction:I got it all down as he said it, and I almost glanced up at him in surprise, he said it so convincingly, with little emotion in his voice but the impression that the feeling underneath was so overwhelming that it was kept down only by a determined will. For a second he darn near had me feeling sorry for his mother, even though it was I who, balancing the bank account each month, checked off the debit item for his remittance to her at her home in Budapest.
- The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Dr. Nathaniel Bradford signed the death certificate for Peter Barstow, stating that the cause of death was a heart attack. Once Wolfe is satisfied that he knows the real cause of death, this catapults Dr. Bradford to the top on the list of suspects, since the symptoms of snake venom and heart attack are nothing alike, establishing that Dr Bradford either 1) is utterly incompetent or 2) was covering something up (for his own benefit or to protect someone else). It turns out to be #2; Bradford is covering for Barstow's wife, who is suffering from an ambiguous disorder which caused her to act with irrational violence towards her husband. She turns out to be innocent however.
- Deadly Delivery: A deadly snake, the fer-de-lance of the title, which is delivered to the brownstone and put in Wolfe's desk drawer by a young man masquerading as a courier/messenger who has come to pick up some orchids.
- Due to the Dead: Maria Maffei, in her first visit to the brownstone to hire Wolfe to find Carlo, her brother, is aware that he may be dead rather than just missing. When Wolfe asks her how much she can pay him to find Carlo, she says she has a thousand dollars, and that if Wolfe finds him alive, she will pay all of it. But if Carlo is dead, she will pay less, because she will pay for his funeral first. Wolfe considers this deal not only completely acceptable, but honorable.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The tone of the back-and-forth banter between Wolfe and Archie is rather more biting, and at times nearly acrimonious, compared to the tone they adopt as the series progresses.
- As part of that, Wolfe pulls an uncharacteristic Sherlock Scan on Fred Durkin (immediately knowing that he brought a woman with him to the house even though he didn't bring her into the office), and Archie gets angry at Wolfe for simply making the deduction.I leaned forward and broke in, "Damn it, he's alone! My ears are good anyhow!"
- Archie takes a much more active role in helping with the orchids, at one point spending much of the afternoon working with Theodore to check in a shipment of new plants that has just arrived and at another spending a couple hours just hanging out in the orchid rooms, "chinning with Horstmann", to kill time. In later stories, his involvement with the orchids is almost entirely confined to admiring them and doing the record-keeping, and he is not on particularly social terms with Theodore.
- While Orrie is not described in detail, Archie refers to him 'screwing up his thin lips and looking for a place to spit his tobacco juice.' In later stories he is described as young, handsome, and does not chew tobacco.
- Fred is frequently called just "Durkin", while he's almost always called by his first name or full name in subsequent books.
- Purley Stebbins is mentioned in passing, in a way that implies that he and Archie are on somewhat friendlier terms than they are in later stories; Archie mentions that he took Purley along to lend official weight to one of his errands, and that doing so cost him a beer.
- Archie is openly racist to one of the characters, an Argentinian, in a way that is directly contrasted with the more tolerant Wolfe. This would be dropped in later novels.
- Wolfe's Consummate Liar performance (see above) belongs here; in later books, while he does play games with the truth it tends to be more along the lines of Exact Words than telling outright whoppers.
- Good Hair, Evil Hair: Lampshaded by Archie when he finally meets Dr. Nathaniel Bradford face-to-face:Archie: One look at Dr. Bradford was enough to show me that I had been wasting a lot of pleasant suspicions which might have been avoided if I had happened to catch sight of him somewhere. He was tall and grave and correct, the distinguished old gentleman type, and he had whiskers! There may have been a historical period when it was possible for a guy with whiskers to pull a knife and plunge it into somebody's back, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays it just couldn't be done.
- The Great Depression: Discussed. At the beginning of the novel, Archie mentions that Wolfe has slashed his and Saul Panzer's wages, and dropped Fred Durkin entirely from the regular payroll (although he still occasionally hires him on a freelance basis) due to the lingering effects of the Depression.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: Wolfe dispatches the fer-de-lance with a beer bottle. Two beer bottles, really, but he misses with the first one.
- I Gave My Word: Anna Fiore's stubborn refusal to tell Wolfe the vital information she possesses about the murder is because the murderer has already approached her and given her money to keep silent, and having accepted his money it's a point of honor with her that she keeps her mouth shut. Wolfe respects her integrity, but still needs the information she possesses, so rather than forcing her to break her vow he instead finds a way to manipulate her into realising that her interests are better served if she does so of her own volition.
- I Made Copies: Carlo didn't make copies, but he did do the next best thing and put all his documentation of making the golf club into an envelope that he gave to Anna to keep before he went to meet the murderer, with instructions that if he came back, she was to return it to him, but if he didn't she was to give the envelope and its contents to Maria, his sister. She didn't do that, but she does, eventually, give it to Wolfe (see Victoria's Secret Compartment).
- It's All About Me: E.D. Kimball. When he's recounting how he came to kill his wife (Manuel's mother) years before, when he caught her in bed with his best friend, he flat-out says that he was the only one who was wronged in the situation and he was the only injured party. He dismisses the idea that his son might feel any resentment toward him over it.
- Honor-Related Abuse: E.D. Kimball killed his wife and his best friend in Argentina, when he caught them in bed together. He comments to Wolfe that he doesn't feel at all guilty, he was following the rules.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: The murderer is given the option to settle accounts themselves before Wolfe passes the information he has accrued confirming their guilt to the police the next day.
- Madwoman in the Attic: (Zig-zagged) After Wolfe tells E.D. Kimball that he was the intended victim, not Barstow, Kimball calls the idea "poppycock" and asserts that he has always played by the rules and never wronged anyone. In an effort to get him to back down from that position and think about who might feel that he has injured them, Wolfe spins a yarn:"There is a woman under this roof at this moment, living on the top floor of this building, who cannot wish me dead only because her heart is closed to venom by its own sweetness. I torture her daily, hourly. I know I do and that knowledge tortures me; still I persist. You can guess at the obscurity of the psychology and the depth of the torture when I tell you that that woman is my mother."
- The Magazine Rule: For the first, but definitely not the last, time, Archie seeks out the staff at a narrow-scope magazine to check on something he's been told. In this case, the magazine is The Metropolitan Medical Record, a monthly magazine for medical professionals in the city. There he learns that Dr. Bradford's claimed alibi for the time of Carlo Maffei's murder — that he was presenting a paper at a dinner meeting of doctors — is true. The June issue lists the meeting upcoming on the calendar, and the editor of the magazine is writing up an article on the paper that Bradford presented that night for the next month's edition.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: E.D. Kimball tells Wolfe that he has always doubted whether Manuel is really his son. This attitude is why he abandoned the boy to his mother's family in Argentina after killing her and her lover.
- Murder by Mistake: Peter Oliver Barstow was not the intended victim. He had the misfortune of borrowing E.D. Kimball's golf club, which Kimball's son rigged to shoot a poison dart and kill the user.
- Noble Bigot: Archie, when he casually calls Manuel a "dirty spiggoty" note . Wolfe calls him out on it, although in a sort of sideways manner at first, pointing out that Manuel is Argentinian, not Mexican. When Archie repeats it, Wolfe tells him to stop.
- Noodle Incident: Although this is the first novel in the series, Archie refers to previous cases that Wolfe and Archie have worked together in a veiled fashion, indicating that they've been doing this a while.
- They have previously worked with District Attorney Anderson on a case that, while ended successfully, was handled by Anderson in a way that brought embarrassment to Wolfe and has resulted in lingering acrimony from Archie ever since.
- Whatever it was that involved the Williamsons. It apparently was a kidnapping, since Archie says June 16th is "the anniversary of the day that Little Tommy Williamson had been restored to his parents in Wolfe's office". Williamson happily agrees to let Wolfe stage the mock robbery in his driveway.Archie: Wolfe will phone you tomorrow, I expect, to thank you.Williamson: He needn't bother. I'll never do enough to make Nero Wolfe owe me any thanks.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: She's not hiding brilliance, but Anna Fiore is not as stupid as she pretended to be when Detective O'Grady questioned her.Wolfe: Miss Fiore is not perfectly equipped, Mr O'Grady. You found her memory faulty?O'Grady : Faulty? She had forgot Maffei's first name!
- Offstage Waiting Room: The story opens with Maria Maffei coming to Wolfe and hiring him to find her missing brother, Carlo alive or dead. If he's dead, she wants to know who killed him. That holds the stage for 3 chapters. Once Wolfe finds out about Barstow's death, Carlo is completely sidelined; we don't even get a scene of him telling Maria she's no longer his client, even though he also knows that Carlo has been murdered. Halfway through chapter three, Wolfe begins to concentrate on the Barstow death; Carlo is mentioned only in passing a few times in the next ten chapters. Finally, about halfway through chapter 14 (there are only 19 in the book) Maria, Anna, and Carlo come back into focus, but only because Wolfe can only prove the guilt of the Barstow killer by linking him to the golf club Carlo made. There are some justifications; firstly, Carlo's death springs directly from Barstow's (turns out he decided to blackmail the murderer), meaning that proving the latter will make proving the former easier, and secondly, given Wolfe's Punch-Clock Hero nature he's doubtlessly realised that focusing on solving the murder of an affluent academic will net him a better payday than a working class immigrant labourer.
- Parental Abandonment: The killer's motive for murder revolves partly around this. Turns out, he held a bit of a grudge about it.
- Patricide: Manuel.
- Rambunctious Italian: Maria Maffei is hot-tempered and has to be dissuaded from taking vengeance for her brother's death into her own hands.
- Rube Goldberg Device: A moderate one, in the mechanism that Carlo Maffei was hired to make and place in the golf club. There are several pages of detailed drawings in the envelope Carlo gave to Anna to hold for him.
- Stealing the Credit: It's implied that in their previous dealings District Attorney Anderson not only did this to Wolfe, but then had the gall to publicly embarrass him in some fashion on top of it. Archie notes that while he could tolerate the former, the latter isn't going to be forgiven or forgotten any time soon.
- Taking You with Me: By way of offering to give his hated father a plane ride...
- Til Murder Do Us Part: E.D. Kimball's killing of his wife in Argentina.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: Where Anna stashed the envelope of papers Carlo entrusted to her. Keep in mind this was written in 1933 and women's undergarments were much more substantial then than they are now; Anna may well have been wearing a corset or a camisole with plenty of fabric to pin an envelope to.Anna: Could you catch him?
Wolfe: I could try. I could if I knew where to look.
Anna: ...I've got to undress.
- Additionally, she keeps the money she received in the mail folded up and tucked into the top of her stocking.
- Your Days Are Numbered: After his narrow escape from death via Murder by Mistake, both Wolfe and Archie note that, despite his denials, the intended victim is walking around like a person who knows that they're already dead but whose body hasn't quite realised it yet.
