A Listing of Known Pastiches

Archive of Our Own:  This site's "Fandom: Nero Wolfe - Rex Stout" section has dozens of works for downloading. [warning: slash, fantasy, etc. may lurk]

Dave Zeltserman's Julius Katz & Archie: The multi-award winning novellas, originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, are now available as e-books and paperback. This intriguing mystery series evidences some similarities to Rex Stout's detective pair, Nero & Archie, but only some. This modern-day duo from Boston's Beacon Hill, are well worth a try. One of the more striking similarities is the humor evoked by first person narrator, Archie Smith. Click here to purchase the Kindle e-book or paperbacks from Amazon.

Arnold J. Haiman's pastiches (five at the time of this writing), are available for download on his site: http://www.arnoldhaiman.com. They are: Murder at the Gazette, Death of a Doctor, Wolfe at the Door, Major Goodwin Returns, and The Return of Major Goodwin..

Glenn Dixon's three terrific Wolfe pastiches can be downloaded free:

Literature R Us offers Alan Vanneman's Three Bullets:  A New Nero Wolfe Threesome for download:
Politics is Murder
Invitation to a Shooting Party
Fame Will Tell

Loren Estleman

Click the image to read what Mystery Scene Magazine has to say about these stories.

Loren D. Estleman's Claudius Lyon and Arnie Woodbine Short Stories
Available for purchase from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine: http://www.themysteryplace.com/custsvc/ordering.aspx
Who's Afraid Of Nero Wolfe?      (June, 2008 Page 58)

The Boy Who Cried Wolfe          (Sept./Oct, 2008, Page 21)

Wolfe at the Door                     (Feb, 2009)

 

Winnifred Louis, from Her Site, Merely a Genius, Contributed the Following

Glen Cooks's Science Fiction Series featuring "The Dead Man" & "P. I. Garrett"

The two main characters in this Sci-fi/Fantasy/Mystery Series are, by the authors own statement, a great deal like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. See:

George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails
Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin appear in the novel: available for purchase at Amazon or read a review.

The Red Orchid, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac translated from the French and published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in January, 1961
The Lobo Blacke series by William DeAndrea -- Wolfe-like character in the Wild West:

Written in Fire (1995, Walker Press)
Fatal Elixir (1997, Walker Pres)
Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy fantasy series available on Amazon
G. M. Ford's Slow Burn features a client, Sir Geoffrey Miles, who is deftly characterized as a Nero Wolfe with a plot that has some similarities to Some Buried Caesar (1999, Avon). Available on Amazon.
Steven Gould's Poppa Was a Catcher (1987 in New Destinies and in 1991 in Cities In Space, Ace Books)

Lawrence Block's Chip Harrison series available on Amazon

The reason I'm writing today: I was idly poking around your site, and I noticed what looks like a serious omission from your Pastiche section: the Chip Harrison stories, written by Lawrence Block.

Chip Harrison has a rather interesting pedigree. He was originally created by Block for a pair of novels geared toward the young-adult reader, NO SCORE and CHIP HARRISON SCORES AGAIN. These were very entertaining little coming-of-age stories written with more than a tip of the hat to J.D. Salinger (the difference being that Chip is a heck of a lot better adjusted than Holden Caulfield, and, if the books are to be believed, gets LOTS more girls).

However, one thing these books were not was mysteries. So it was quite a surprise when Chip turned up a couple of years later in another pair of novels, MAKE OUT WITH MURDER and THE TOPLESS TULIP CAPER. In these, Chip had moved to New York and found himself working as the legman, man of action, and Boswell for a private detective named Leo Haig... and here we have our connection.

Leo Haig is a very funny parody of Wolfe. He's more roly-poly than gargantuan and lives in a converted carriage house above a whorehouse, with a Chinese gourmet cook who pretends he can't speak English. Haig collects tropical fish, about which he has an encyclopedic knowledge; is continually trying to learn to smoke a pipe because he likes the way it looks; and, oh yes... believes that Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin really exist. His life goals are, in this order, to be invited to supper at Wolfe's table and to be the world's second greatest private detective.

Chip is as good an Archie as he can be under these circumstances, considering that (a) he has never been a private detective before, (b) he's being taught how to be one by the likes of Haig, and (c) he's only seventeen years old. Chip tells the stories in first person, of course, as verbatim as he can, and Block manages the astounding feat of making Chip sound like Archie Goodwin and Holden Caulfield at the same time.

The stories are, as I've noted, very funny, and also pretty solid mysteries. They were published in the 70s, and go in and out of print, but may still be available: the most recent editions, I believe, were brought out in the late 80s by The Mysterious Press.

H. Paul Jeffers' 1998 novel, Corpus Corpus: A Sgt. John Bogdanovic Mystery. Theodore R. Janus is a world-renowned defense attorney whose client list is rife with underworld figures as well as the author of an encyclopedia on Rex Stout's famous detective, Nero Wolfe.' .... The story is slight both in characterization and in plot. But it is fun to read a book in which virtually every section and chapter title is the name of a Wolfe story (and those titles are usually worked into the plots of the chapters) and in which several characters are conversant with the corpus. The conversation is littered with quotations and lessons from the corpus.... Jeffers uses the corpus and the fans to good effect. I enjoyed the book."

THE RESURRECTED HOLMES, Ed. Marvin Kaye, contains the story "Too Many Stains" by Kaye. It is "ascribed to Rex Stout" and in it Sherlock and his brother Mycroft relate the hitherto untold "Adventure of the Second Stain."

Margaret Weis and Don Perrin's Hung Out (in their Mag Force 7 space-opera series) features the commander of the team with Nero Wolfe's lawyer. The description of how they met is clearly that of Wolfe and Wolfe's office.

John Lescroart wrote two Wolfe pastiches, Son of Holmes (1986), and Rasputin's Revenge: The Further Startling Adventures of Auguste Lupa - Son of Holmes (1987).

John Kavanagh wrote this review of Son of Holmes:

As I remember the plot, Auguste Lupa is the illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler (!), who apparently shacked up during the period Watson et al. thought Holmes was dead. Lupin, Fritz Brenner, and the boring narrator are involved in a thriller espionage plot during WWI.

We learn that Lupa has used several aliases, usually with a Roman emperor's name coupled with the word for "Wolf" in some language. He tells the narrator that he has no wish to remain a man of action, and his plan after the war is to settle in a large city and raise orchids.

I forget the details, and as I recall the book does not live up to the clever premise; it's not very well-written. I forget if Marko Vukcic is included. The name "Nero Wolfe" is never mentioned, so you have to be a fan to get it. Also, it pokes fun at the fact that Wolfe is modelled on Mycroft Holmes - apparently that side of the family disposition is one that prevailed in "Lupa".

One thing I might like to add is that book is not (as far as I remember) intended to be written in the style of either Stout or Conan Doyle, and it's more of an adventure thriller than a murder mystery.

Gene Wolfe's The Rubber Bend (collected in Storeys from the Old Hotel) has this summary from Kate Nepveu: "[A] Wolfe and Holmes pastiche and a definite groaner. (Though the robot Nero deciding to grow mushrooms instead of orchids because you can't eat orchids was pretty amusing.)"

Mack Reynolds, in one of his Ultra-Welfare State stories in Analog (science fiction), featured Wolfe and company. The characters were not named, but included Lily Rowan as a dried-up old woman, Saul, Fred, and Orrie practically senile, and Wolfe reduced to eating canned soup because there was no work (the Ultra-Welfare State having removed the root cause of crime)

Josh Pachter's Sam Buried Caesar (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, August, 1971) is described here. Interestingly, Rex Stout's Counterfeit For Murder novella is published in the same issue. In Barbara Paul's novel The Fourth Wall, the main character lives on W 35th Street. At one point her apartment is broken into and the police are alerted by two of her neighbors, a Dr Vollmer, and a Mr Goodwin. She never meets them, alas.

Saturn's Race by Niven and Barnes has a computer simulation of Nero Wolfe (or actually a thinly-disguised-to-avoid-copyright-infringement version of same) in a fairly important role. It's an old computer game AI (made by someone who didn't want to shell out for the rights), adapted for another purpose.