Editing Nero Wolfe (section)

===Eccentricities===
[[File:Wolfe-Too-Many-Cooks-Train.jpg|thumb|Wolfe suppresses his loathing of travel and trains in ''Too Many Cooks'' (illustration by [[Rico Tomaso]] for ''The American Magazine'', March 1938).]]
{{blockquote|I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.|Nero Wolfe in ''[[Fer-de-Lance (novel)|Fer-de-Lance]]'' (1934), chapter 5}}
Wolfe has pronounced eccentricities and strict rules concerning his way of life. Their occasional violation adds spice to many of the stories.

Despite Wolfe's rule never to leave the brownstone on business, the stories find him leaving his home on several occasions. At times, Wolfe and Archie are on a personal errand when a murder occurs, and legal authorities require that they remain in the vicinity (''[[Too Many Cooks (novel)|Too Many Cooks]]'', ''[[Some Buried Caesar]]'', "[[Too Many Detectives]]" and "[[Immune to Murder]]", for example). In other instances, the requirements of the case force Wolfe from his house (''[[In the Best Families]]'', ''[[The Second Confession]]'', ''[[The Doorbell Rang]]'', ''[[Plot It Yourself]]'', ''[[The Silent Speaker]]'', ''[[Death of a Dude]]''). Nevertheless, Wolfe is usually able to justify the travel associated with these cases as still being within the limits of his self-imposed "no leaving the house on business" rule, often by noting that there was a personal non-business related reason to make the journey. Although he occasionally ventures by car into the suburbs of New York City, he is loath to travel, and clutches the safety strap continually on the occasions that Archie drives him somewhere. He does not trust trains to start or to stop.<ref>''[[And Be a Villain]]'', chapter 10.</ref> As Archie says of Wolfe in ''[[The Doorbell Rang]],'' "he distrusted all machines more complicated than a wheelbarrow."<ref>''[[The Doorbell Rang]]'', chapter 8. However, in ''[[In the Best Families]]'', Wolfe displays no noticeable reticence whatsoever concerning travel in an automobile.</ref>

Wolfe maintains a rigid schedule in the brownstone. He has breakfast in his bedroom while wearing yellow silk pajamas; he hates to discuss work during breakfast, and if forced to do so insists upon not uttering a word until he has finished his glass of orange juice (''[[Murder by the Book]]''). Afterwards, he is with Horstmann in the plant rooms from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Lunch is usually at 1:15&nbsp;p.m. He returns to the plant rooms from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Dinner is generally at 7:15 or 7:30&nbsp;p.m. (although in one book, Wolfe tells a guest that lunch is served at 1 o'clock and dinner at 8). The remaining hours, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., and after dinner, are available for business, or for reading if there is no pressing business (even if, by Archie's lights, there is). Sunday's schedule is more relaxed; Theodore, the orchid-keeper, usually goes out.

[[File:Yellow-dart-left.jpg|thumb|"He took his coat and vest off, exhibiting about eighteen square feet of canary-yellow shirt, and chose the darts with yellow feathers, which were his favorites." —Wolfe exercises in ''[[The Rubber Band]]'', chapter 14]]

Wolfe is loath to exercise, but in ''[[The Rubber Band]]'' he is sufficiently concerned about his weight that he adds a workout to his daily routine. From 3:45 to 4 p.m., he throws yellow-feathered [[Dart (missile)|darts]] (which he calls "javelins") at a poker-dart board that Fritz hangs in the office. Archie joins him, using red-feathered darts, but quits when he loses nearly $100 to Wolfe in the first two months; he resumes playing only after Wolfe agrees to raise his salary. "There was no chance of getting any real accuracy with it, it was mostly luck", Archie writes.<ref>''[[The Rubber Band]]'', chapter 1.</ref> Other surprising examples of Wolfe's athleticism occur in "[[Not Quite Dead Enough (novella)|Not Quite Dead Enough]]" and ''[[The Black Mountain (novel)|The Black Mountain]]''.

Wolfe does not invite people to use his first name and addresses them by honorific and surname. Aside from his employees, one of the only two men whom Wolfe addresses by their first names is his oldest friend, Marko Vukčić; Marko calls him Nero.{{efn|"He was one of the only two men whom Wolfe called by their first names, apart from employees", Archie writes of Marko in ''[[Too Many Cooks (novel)|Too Many Cooks]]'', chapter 1. Sixteen years later, in ''[[The Black Mountain (novel)|The Black Mountain]]'' (chapter 1), Archie puts the number at ten.}} In ''[[Death of a Doxy]]'' Julie Jaquette refers to Wolfe as Nero in a letter to Archie; and [[Nero Wolfe supporting characters#Lily Rowan|Lily Rowan]] has addressed Wolfe using an assumed first name. But these are exceptions. In "[[The Rodeo Murder]]" Wolfe finds it objectionable when Wade Eisler addresses him as Nero; and in "[[Door to Death]]" Sybil Pitcairn's disdainful use of his first name makes Wolfe decide to solve the case. Men nearly always address him as Wolfe, and women as Mr. Wolfe.

He is extremely fastidious about his clothing and hates to wear, even in private, anything that has been soiled. The short story "[[Eeny Meeny Murder Mo]]" opens with an example of this habit, in which Wolfe removes his necktie and leaves it on his desk after dropping a bit of sauce on it during lunch. The tie is later used to commit a murder in his office. Beyond that, Wolfe has a marked preference for the color yellow, habitually wearing shirts and silk pajamas in this color and sleeping on yellow bedsheets.<ref>"[[Help Wanted, Male]]", chapter 2.</ref>

He restricts his visible reactions: as Archie puts it, "He shook his head, moving it a full half-inch right and left, which was for him a frenzy of negation."<ref>"[[Instead of Evidence]]", chapter 1.</ref>

Wolfe states that "all music is a vestige of barbarism"<ref>"[[Blood Will Tell (short story)|Blood Will Tell]]", chapter 2</ref> and denies that music can have any intellectual content.<ref>''[[The Father Hunt]]'', chapter 12.</ref> He takes a dim view of television, but TV sets did find their way into the brownstone in the later stories. Archie notes in ''[[Before Midnight (novel)|Before Midnight]]'', "It was Sunday evening, when he especially enjoyed turning the television off." Wolfe's attitude toward television notwithstanding, the TV set in Fritz's basement quarters proved handy in ''[[The Doorbell Rang]]'', when the volume was turned up to foil potential eavesdroppers.<ref>''[[The Doorbell Rang]]'', chapter 7.</ref>

Wolfe displays a pronounced, almost pathological, dislike for the company of women. Although some readers interpret this attitude as simple [[misogyny]], various details in the stories, particularly the early ones,<ref>''[[The League of Frightened Men]]'', chapter 10</ref> suggest it has more to do with an unfortunate encounter in early life with a ''femme fatale''. It is not women themselves that he dislikes: rather, it is what he perceives as their frailties, especially a tendency to hysterics—to which he thinks every woman is prone. "In the all-male Wolfe household that is an apparent bulwark of men's-club solidarity, Wolfe's misogyny is part pose, part protection, but above all, a shrewd tool of detective strategy", wrote critic [[Molly Haskell]]. "Archie does the romancing while Wolfe prods and offends, winnowing out the traitorous and brattish women and allowing the cream, the really great women, to rise to the top. ... We deduce from the glow of those special women who do earn the detective's good will just how discriminating and interested an observer of womankind the author is."<ref>{{cite news |last=Haskell |first=Molly |author-link=Molly Haskell |date=December 23, 2001 |title=Beware a Brand-New Kind of Man |newspaper=[[The New York Observer]] }}</ref> These women include Clara Fox (''[[The Rubber Band]]''), Lily Rowan (introduced in ''[[Some Buried Caesar]]''), Phoebe Gunther (''[[The Silent Speaker]]'') and Julie Jaquette (''[[Death of a Doxy]]''). In ''The Rubber Band'', Wolfe says, "It has been many years since any woman has slept under this roof. Not that I disapprove of them, except when they attempt to function as domestic animals. When they stick to the vocations for which they are best adapted, such as chicanery, sophistry, self-adornment, cajolery, mystification and incubation, they are sometimes splendid creatures."

That Wolfe disapproves of women is well established, but Archie claims that there are nuances: "The basic fact about a woman that seemed to irritate him was that she was a woman; the long record showed not a single exception; but from there on the documentation was cockeyed. If woman as woman grated on him you would suppose that the most womanly details would be the worst for him, but time and again I have known him to have a chair placed for a female so that his desk would not obstruct his view of her legs, and the answer can't be that his interest is professional and he reads character from legs, because the older and dumpier she is the less he cares where she sits. It is a very complex question and some day I'm going to take a whole chapter for it." (''[[The Silent Speaker]]'', chapter 30.)

Wolfe has an aversion to physical contact, even shaking hands. Early in the first novel Archie explains why there is a gong under his bed that will ring upon any intrusion into or near Wolfe's own bedroom: "Wolfe told me once ... that he really had no cowardice in him, he only had an intense distaste for being touched by anyone ..."<ref name="ReferenceA">''[[Fer-de-Lance (novel)|Fer-de-Lance]]'', chapter 3.</ref>{{efn|In "[[Help Wanted, Male]]" Archie states that the gong was installed "... some years previously when Wolfe had got a knife stuck in him. The thing had never gone off except when we tested it ..."}} When Jerome Berin, creator of ''saucisse minuit'', repeatedly taps Wolfe on the knee, Archie grins at "Wolfe, who didn't like being touched, concealing his squirm for the sake of sausages."<ref>''[[Too Many Cooks (novel)|Too Many Cooks]]'', chapter 1.</ref> In ''[[Prisoner's Base]]'', Wolfe speaks coldly as he tells the DA and Inspector Cramer that the despised [[Nero Wolfe supporting characters#Lieutenant Rowcliff|Lieutenant Rowcliff]] "put a hand on me. ... I will not have a hand put on me, gentlemen. I like no man's hand on me, and one such as Mr. Rowcliff's, unmerited, I will not have."<ref>''[[Prisoner's Base]]'', chapter 6.</ref> Wolfe's prejudices make it all the more surprising when, in "[[Cordially Invited to Meet Death]]", Archie finds Wolfe in the kitchen with a woman who has solved the problem of preparing corned beef hash: "Standing beside him, closer to him than I had ever seen any woman or girl of any age tolerated, with her hand slipped between his arm and his bulk, was Maryella."<ref>"[[Cordially Invited to Meet Death]]", chapter 6.</ref>

Wolfe likes to solve the crossword puzzle of British newspapers in preference to those of American papers, and hates to be interrupted while so engaged.{{efn|Archie most frequently mentions Wolfe working on the crossword puzzle in ''[[The Observer]]'' (''[[Too Many Clients]]'', chapter 10) and ''[[The Times]]'' (''[[Murder by the Book]]'', chapter 1).}}

Wolfe is very particular in his choice of words. He is a [[Linguistic prescription|prescriptivist]] who hates to hear language being misused according to his lights, often chastising people who do so. One example is his dislike of the word "contact" being used as a verb; when Johnny Keems says that "contact" ''is'' a verb, transitive and intransitive, Wolfe replies "Contact is not a verb under this roof". One of his most severe reactions occurs in the first chapter of ''[[Gambit (novel)|Gambit]]'', when he burns [[Webster's Third New International Dictionary]] in the front room fireplace because it states that the words "imply" and "infer" can be used interchangeably. Wolfe generally abhors slang (though in "[[Murder Is Corny]]" he says "There is good slang and bad slang"<ref>''[[Trio for Blunt Instruments]]''</ref>) and expects Archie to avoid slang and other language he disapproves of when speaking to him. However, as with other worldly concerns, he sometimes relies on Archie's greater familiarity with slang when business demands it.

In nearly every story, Wolfe solves the mystery by considering the facts brought to him by Archie and others, and the replies to questions he himself asks of suspects. Wolfe ponders with his eyes closed, leaning back in his chair, breathing deeply and steadily, and pushing his lips in and out. Archie says that during these trances Wolfe reacts to nothing that is going on around him. Archie seldom interrupts Wolfe's thought processes, he says, largely because it is the only time that he can be sure that Wolfe is working.