"Rex Stout's greater innovation lay in his attention to the realities of the larger world. Nero Wolfe might not know the streets of his city very well, but he knew his nation. There are, for examples, reference in Fer-de-Lance to national issues such as Prohibition, and the Depression, and the Lindbergh baby. A few others writers of Golden Age detective stories were inserting a few topical references of this sort, but none to the degree Stout did. The Wolfe series is probably the only major detective story series before the 1970s to make national affairs an essential part of the detective's world, and few of the post-1970 series are as explicit about historical events and figures. ... Stout does not feel obligated to invent a surrogate senator from a vaguely Midwestern state; Nero Wolfe despises Joseph R. McCarthy, and he says so. Archie may drive a Heron, but when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover or Richard M. Nixon, he names names."
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Novelists from the United StatesPeople from IndianapolisDetective fiction authorsRadio personalitiesPeople from Kansas
Original Language: English
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Sources
J. Kenneth Van Dover, At Wolfe's Door: The Nero Wolfe Novels of Rex Stout. Rockville, Maryland: James A. Rock & Co., 2003 (second edition), p. 94
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rex_Stout
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Rex Stout
Rex Stout (1 December 1886 – 27 October 1975) was an American author of detective fiction most famous as the creator of the fictional detective Nero Wolfe. He was also prominent in the allied efforts of World War II as the announcer of the wartime radio broadcasts of Our Secret Weapon.
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