YMMV / Nero Wolfe

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Hyper-Competent Sidekick recurring subcontractor Saul Panzer is quite well-liked. Yes, there is enough of a fandom for this trope to apply.
  • Hattie Annis, Wolfe's Cool Old Lady client in Counterfeit For Murder (and its earlier draft Assault on a Brownstone, published after Stout's death) is one of the more popular guest characters.
• Epileptic Trees: Guest characters Hattie Annis and Tammy Baxter swap roles as the murder victim in the only short story Stout substantially rewrote (with the second draft being published as Counterfeit For Murder in one anthology and the first draft Assault on a Brownstone coming out in a posthumous anthology), with the plots otherwise being similar enough to feel like they take place in Alternate Universes with a small but crucial point of divergence. This can make it interesting to wonder if there is a hypothetical Wolfe multiverse with other worlds where a different person was the main victim (or the second or third victim, since Never One Murder is common in the series) for many stories with a victim who at least some of the readers wouldn't have minded seeing live (Harlan Scovil, Mike Walsh, Clyde Osgood, Ann Amory, Dazy Perrit, Bess Huddleston, Phoebe Gunther, Cynthia Brown, Jean Wellman, Rachel Abrams, Priscilla Eads, Sarah Jaffee, Leo Heller, Pete Drossos, Carla Lovchen, Vernon Assa, Johnny Keems, Kurt Bottweil, Maria Perez, Susan Brooke, Jane Ogilvy, Sam Peacock, etc.).
• Fair for Its Day: As noted below, there's a lot of Values Dissonance in the earlier stories especially, but Rex Stout was a fairly progressive man for his day and often attempts to show the foolishness of a lot of the racist and misogynistic attitudes he was surrounded by. It's also possible in reading the stories at times to get a sense that Stout is ashamed or embarrassed by attitudes he displayed as a younger man that he's grown out of and is making a conscious effort to repudiate them. Wolfe himself is a bit of a complex example, in that he is openly misogynistic but he tends to treat women respectfully when he's directly interacting with them and many of his more ridiculous attitudes towards women are treated with an eye-roll by Archie's narration, so there is a question about how seriously we're supposed to take him. Some specific examples:
  • While it would be a stretch to call Prisoner's Base a feminist text, it does nevertheless have a rather more nuanced take on the pre-second wave women's rights movement than you might expect from a sixty-year old man writing outspokenly feminist characters in a 1950s mystery novel. In particular, a subplot involves the victim was planning to introduce an all-women management board to the business she was about to inherit, which is treated as a bit of a flighty whim of hers rather than a genuine good idea, and the main feminist character is a rather stereotypical man-hating battleaxe. But both are suggested to have a legitimate good point that the all-male board they're planning to replace are themselves a bunch of mediocrities and non-entities who are only in the positions they enjoy because they're men.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • A Family Affair isn't universally acknowledged due to having a long-time character as the killer and being seen as an unnecessarily grim final novel by some.
  • While the death of Marko in The Black Mountain is hard to disregard due to frequently being referenced, the same can't be said for Carla's fate in the same book.
• Fanon Welding: An Older Than Cable TV example. There is a theory that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. This idea, first voiced by sci-fi author John D. Clark in the '50s, is so popular in both fandoms that it has made into William S. Baring-Gould's fictional biography of Holmes and Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and was the basis for two novels by John Lescroart (Son of Holmes and Rasputin's Revenge). A variation is that Wolfe was sired by Holmes' smarter older brother Mycroft. He certainly shares a lot of Mycroft's characteristics (physical laziness and obesity, a fondness for unbreakable routines and the finer things in life, a slightly misanthropic reclusive tendency, etc).
• Harsher in Hindsight: the discussions in Death of a Doxy about whether Orrie could be guilty of a crime, as he is innocent there but guilty in a later book.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the characters in "Murder is Corny" is named Duncan McLeod. Towards the story's end, he blows himself up with dynamite, resulting in his decapitation.
  • In The Second Confession, after Wolfe gives newspaperman Lon Cohen a good story, a grateful Lon tells him "All you need is long whiskers and a red suit", to which Wolfe replies he's too fat. in Christmas Party Wolfe does briefly dress up as Santa and it's mostly played for laughs.
• Memetic Mutation: THE POLICE! SHALL RECEIVE! NO SANDWICHES!
• Values Dissonance: Since each story is set in the year it was written, and the first one was written in 1934, there's lots of this, especially in the earliest stories.
  • In Fer-de-lance Archie takes an immediate dislike to a South American suspect, calling him a "spigotty." Stout may have deliberately been playing the Politically Incorrect Hero card here.
  • Too Many Cooks, set in the American South during The '30s, reaches a level of casual racism — Archie included — that might startle even jaded modern readers (the N-word and similarly ugly epithets get thrown around a lot), but is also notable for weaving the issue into the plot in a serious and meaningful way, to the extent that recognising the foolishness of prejudice becomes crucial to solving the mystery. It should also be noted that Wolfe himself clearly rejects the racist attitudes of those around him and makes a point of treating the African American characters he deals with fairly, respectfully and with courtesy.
  • Too Many Clients, set in 1960, has Archie seemingly condoning spousal abuse after a character who discovers his wife has been cheating on him beats her to the point where she's bedridden. This said, it can be read as ambiguous whether Archie's being sarcastic or not, and an earlier novel (Might As Well Be Dead) depicts another victim of spousal abuse who has fallen in love with another man, who is portrayed entirely sympathetically and her husband entirely in the wrong. Although the ambiguity comes in part from the fact that in the later novel the wife is depicted as being sexually unfaithful to her husband, whereas in the earlier novel the wife is never directly suggested to have slept with the other man despite her romantic feelings towards him; the problem is essentially sexual infidelity versus romantic/emotional infidelity. Furthermore, in the earlier story the wife does nothing that could be interpreted as provoking her husband's abuse, whereas in the later story the wife's open infidelity can be read as mocking and taunting her husband until he snapped; the earlier wife is depicted as an 'innocent' victim in a way that the later wife, by the standards of the time at least, is not.
  • Too Many Women has been out of print for decades, due to the title, and Archie being just a bit too casual with his affections.
  • A Right to Die, as well as possessing some of this for modern readers (given that it was published in 1964), also demonstrates this trope operating over the course of the series. It's something of a sequel to Too Many Cooks (as mentioned above), features a significant character from the earlier work returning in a prominent role, and also examines American race relations. Accordingly, the N-word is thrown about quite casually... but unlike the earlier work, where even sympathetic characters demonstrated a rather alarmingly casual level of racism, not a single character who is supposed to be sympathetic uses or approves of that word. Archie himself demonstrates much more progressive attitudes, demonstrates clear attraction to an African-American woman who appears throughout the novel, and at the end is so disgusted with the murderer's casual racism that he finds himself unable to continue listening to their Motive Rant. As one introduction to the story notes, while the specific way Archie is written and that Stout addresses race may seem clumsy to a modern reader, it's clear that if nothing else both character and author have their hearts in the right place.
    • The trope does kick in with regards to interracial romance, however; while not explicitly condemned, even many of the sympathetic characters (both Caucasian and African-American) tend to disapprove of the idea of interracial relationships and view them as something to be discouraged. The story ends with an African-American character who was a suspect due to his interracial relationship with the victim eventually realise his "mistake" and begin to hook up with the African-American woman whom Archie was attracted to.
  • Wolfe's weight can also fall here. His "seventh of a ton" (roughly 280 pounds or 127kg) would have been a massive size when he was created in the 1930s, when the fallout of the Great Depression meant that food deprivation was common and a man who was wealthy enough to have access to sufficient access to fattening foods and fine cuisine to become obese would have been a lot rarer. In the early 21st century, however, such foods are much cheaper and a lot more easily available to the point where the western world is currently experiencing an obesity epidemic, meaning that while having the same weight would still see Wolfe classified as obese, he's less distinctive in this regard (and actually on the thinner side of the scale compared to some). Again, this is something particularly apparent in earlier books rather than later ones; while Archie always notes and picks at Wolfe's weight (because his weight is a key aspect of his character and description), in books written in the 1930s and 1940s characters often react with open awe and astonishment at seeing Wolfe, whereas in later books it's made less of an issue.
  • An area where Stout does seem to have been a bit behind the times was with regards to changing sexual mores regarding casual sex; several of his stories involve characters clearly reinforcing the idea that sex outside of marriage is a big no-no, at least for the woman, and several female characters remark that they intend to keep their virtue until marriage. While this is a bit more understandable in the earlier works published between the 1930s-1950s (while even then perhaps still a bit on the stricter side), it can be pretty eye-opening for a modern reader when it appears in some of his later works set during the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s. For example, "Kill Now - Pay Later" features a young woman who, when confronted with a slanderous rumour that she has slept with an older man, calmly retorts that it couldn't be true because if it were, she would have killed herself out of shame. The story was published in 1964 — for context, this was the year that The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller, so while it would be exaggerating to say that the sexual revolution was in full swing at that point, attitudes had been clearly shifting away from such a prescriptive view of sex outside of marriage for some time.
  • In Over My Dead Body when the prospect of Wolfe having a daughter out of wedlock arises, Archie tells his boss he'll have to resign his position, which Wolfe smoothes over by saying he adopted her. Nowadays, such a thing probably wouldn't rise an eyebrow.
  • Champagne for One revolves around a charitable home for poor unwed mothers where they can stay until their pregnancy comes to term and their baby is ready to be given up for adoption. Several of the mothers display a rather casual attitude toward the reasons why they're there, and it's hinted that it is not the first time some have had such a stay; while Archie is consistently polite and friendly towards them, he is clearly disapproving of their flippancy regarding premarital sex. And, of course, a certain other potential solution to their little problem which the modern reader might suggest never comes up (it being very illegal at the time, of course — which is not the same thing as saying it never happened).