Today, I revisit...

[seawasp]

... a prior review of Nero Wolfe because there were things I hadn't touched on before! 

Comments

[kengr]

I've seen the differences in time cut the other way too.

I had to explain to someone that his character in the late 50s/early 60s could not be using a "credit card" at multiple stores.

Yes, many stores had cards that you could use to charge things. But they were seperate cards for each chain. They were also stamped metal. A Sears charge plate was useless at Bon Marche, and vice versa.

I *barely* remember that, mostly because I was fascinated by the plates when my mom used them.

But that created a major problem in the story he was writing because it meant he couldn't just have a person hand the character *a* card for purchases across a number of different stores.

[kayshapero]

Master Charge was the first I believe, and that was in the mid-late '60s because they sent ME one when I was 18 as part of a promotional ad campaign.

[dragoness_e]

Perhaps I should re-read them and see if they are better than I remembered. The last time I read one, after getting to know some actual, real-life, fellow genius engineers at college, I found that Nero Wolfe just didn't ring true as a genius. Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, did ring true. We know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes' personality on a brilliant physician he knew, and, after getting to know a few geniuses, I could see that all of Holmes's personality quirks were those of a brilliant man bored to tears at all the incredibly dull, slow-thinking people he has to work with and explain things to. (To quote Gandalf on the subject: "the long explanations needed by the young are wearying".)

Nero Wolfe, on the other hand, seems to have eccentricities just to have eccentricities, like the author heard that geniuses are supposed be eccentric and incomprehensible to lesser mortals, but didn't know why. For me, he did not ring true as a genius.