Just started in on Nero Wolfe. Was looking for something that would match up to my all time favorite - Le Carre. Stout doesn’t measure up on that score but they do provide interesting windows into life in the 30s a world that is now 80 years behind us.
Dear 2 Kool,
Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books range from the ‘30’s, all the way up to the ‘70’s, with the authorial magic of Wolfe and Goodowin never aging.
Nero Wolfe had in his library over 1200 books, and read them all. I live in a small apartment, and have a slowly growing number of over 110.
Le Carre’s characters leave their humble abodes to do what they do.
Nero Wolfe, on the other hand, is THE ‘armchair detective’, (5’11”, 1/7th of a ton) with Goodwin, and sometimes others in Wolfe’s employ, doing all the out-of-house work.
If you have seem the movies, “The Glass Key”, “The Maltese Falcon”, any of “The Thin Man”, then I direct you to a man that ‘did work in his field’, Dashiel Hammett.
I suggest that you might try Mickey Spillane’s works.
I do suggest you try any of the classic detective/private investigator authors, but to do so, i suggest you forget about technology beyond a manual typewriter, real pay phones on the city blocks, no answering machines. A good place to start to sample all of that, is to visit the Hard Case Crime website, and then to find the books in your local bookshop. Michael Chriton, Stephen King, and others have had stories published by them.