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Deleted Pet the dog:
- Pet the Dog: All the time, but in one case, used literally. In the novella "Die Like a Dog," Archie brings a big black Labrador retriever home and announces he plans to keep it, as a ploy to annoy Wolfe into working. However, it backfires on him when Wolfe takes a liking to the dog - it turns out he used to own a similar dog in his youth. The ending implies that they wound up keeping him, renaming him from Bootsie to Jet. (Though it never actually appears again in-canon.)
- As an immigrant to America himself, Wolfe frequently comes as close as he gets to demonstrating a heart of gold if the case he's dealing with touches on the plight of impoverished and desperate immigrants needing his help.
- Wolfe is also notably courteous and respectful towards the African-American cooking and serving staff of the resort he and Archie visit in Too Many Cooks, in contrast to the racist disrespect they receive from almost everyone else.
The trope is "show the nasty old crank petting a dog, and you show the audience, aw shucks, he's all right after all. Often used to demonstrate that a Jerkass is really a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, ... any attempt to soften the edge of a villain (or Anti-Hero) by showing him engaging in a moment of kindness, especially towards someone who can't do anything for them. ''
Wolfe is neither villain nor antihero, and is already a sympathetic character ( though not quite as easily-relatable or personally likeable as Archie) . The trope does not apply.
The same reasoning applies to "Morality pet"
- Morality Pet: Archie seems to serve as Wolfe's conscience in many ways, since it's his job to badger, prod and poke Wolfe out of his indulgent complacency and do the right thing, and Archie is often quick with condemnation when he feels that Wolfe has stepped over the line. Played with, in that Wolfe's conscience is not easily troubled and he has little problem ignoring Archie when he feels like it.
And from Morality Pet: "A Morality Pet is a character who redeems a villain. The villain's affection for the pet starts them down the path of good, and even should the pet get hurt the villain will most likely behave as a hero (or anti-hero) in seeking their revenge or protecting the pet."
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it. Hide / Show Replies
Both of these tropes clarify that they can be used to refer to a villain or Anti-Hero, however (Morality Pet: "This isn't just for villains, either."; Pet the Dog: "It's just any attempt to soften the edge of a villain (or Anti-Hero)") and I think Wolfe qualifies as a Anti-Hero sufficiently to make the tropes in this case valid. Sympathetic he may be (and it's arguably the points under these tropes that make him sympathetic as much as anything else), he's still a grumpy misanthropic reclusive crank who doesn't exactly go out of his way to join the good fight, and given his laziness and his tendencies towards moral neutrality, apathy and even borderline amorality at times, he's not exactly a straightforward hero even if the audience is supposed to be on his side. This is a man who only gets involved in a good cause if someone sufficiently pays him, after all, he's not exactly selflessly devoted to good or anything.
Plus, well... if "nasty old crank" and "Jerkass" aren't terms that can be used to describe Wolfe, then how do we describe him? He's hardly warm and cuddly. He qualifies under Morality Pet for those terms alone IMO.
Edited by DoctorNemesis
Both tropes are for Villains (he's not) or Anti-heroes (he's not that, either: "a protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero. They may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely apathetic. More often an antihero is just an amoral misfit.").
From Morality Pet: "A Morality Pet is a character who redeems a villain. The villain's affection for the pet starts them down the path of good, and even should the pet get hurt the villain will most likely behave as a hero (or anti-hero) in seeking their revenge or protecting the pet." Archie does not redeem Wolfe; Wolfe needs no redemption.
He's a crank and at a few times approaches Jerkass ("A Jerkass is a character who is so completely obnoxious that it is unbelievable anyone would willingly interact with them.") when dealing with suspects or obstreperous clients, but he needs to be more clearly on the side of the devils rather than being abrasively on the side of the angels for either Pet the Dog or Morality Pet to apply.
Edited by Madrugada ...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Fair enough, I can't really argue there, although it does seem like "abrasively on the side of the angels" has been sufficient reason for this wiki to class a character as an Anti-Hero before — a look at those pages sees (among other characters) Batman, several incarnations of the Doctor, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter as anti-heroes, and I'd argue that despite their rougher edges (and tendencies towards Depending on the Writer at times) they are all usually still way more overtly heroic and on the side of the angels than Wolfe is. But that may be more an issue with how Anti-Hero is being identified on this wiki than an issue with Wolfe himself.
In any case, I can't say I agree 100%, but your reasoning is solid enough for me to withdraw my objection.
Edited by DoctorNemesis
That's exactly the problem. Anti Hero is being misused to mean "any hero who isn't absolutely Superman-level squeaky clean." It's one of those tropes that many people have decided is somehow a mark of honor; that their favorite work is ever-so-much cooler for having an Anti-Hero in it, instead of a plain old Hero. But I think that Holmes and Batman, especially are somewhat farthewr from the side of the angels than Wolfe: Batman is, in a way of looking at it, ineffective. He's very hgood at catching criminals, but he can't finally deal with them, so they escape, and do more damage and he has to catch them again. Holmes flat out lets one killer go because he sympathizes with why he did it ( That I can think of— the may be more, but in The Abbey Grange, he catches the killer, gets his story and then tells him to go away for a year, and that he'll only reveal what he knows to the police if they charge someone else; knowing full well that they aren't going to catch anyone because they're not only barking up the wrong tree, they are in entirely the wrong forest.) The closest Wolfe comes to letting a killer go is the times that he does, but also pulls Leave Them A Revolver, after making abundantly clear that if they don't kill themselves, he'll destroy their lives. Oh, and the time he sits on evidence in The Silent Speaker, because the longer the case goes unsolved, the more damage a political group that he disagrees with will take. And even there, he claims that he's doing it for the sake of the woman who was killed; because that's what she would have wanted, and that's why she died. He's pretty solidly on the side of the angels. He's just abrasive and sometimes duplicitious about what he does while he's standing there.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
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By the way, I've started a Sandbox for Fer De Lance here: Wolfe Fer De Lance. I'd be delighted to have help with it. I'd like to, eventually, get pages made for each of the books, but that's going to be years of work.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
"Archie probably also qualifies under Great Detective just barely. A few times he actually ends up unraveling the case before Wolfe and sits back in amusement watching his boss trying to figure things out."
It would be nice to have the examples of this actually listed, because after having read the series several times, I can't come up with any examples of Archie solving a mystery "before" Wolfe does.