7.8 /10 1 Votes7.8
Cover artist S. A. Summit Publication date August 20, 1969 Originally published 20 August 1969 | 3.9/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Rex Stout books, Nero Wolfe mystery books, Mystery books |
Death of a Dude is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1969.
Contents
Plot introduction
Archie Goodwin is part of a house party at Lily Rowan's vacation home in Montana when a murder brings Nero Wolfe from New York to take a hand. Uniquely for a Nero Wolfe novel, it takes place entirely away from the brownstone on West 35th Street. (Some Buried Caesar came close, but returned to the brownstone for a brief coda; Too Many Cooks similarly came very close, but includes a brief description of the departure from the brownstone, including the good-byes from Fritz, Saul and Theodore.)
Publication history
The unfamiliar word
"Nero Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic," said Michael Jaffe, executive producer of the A&E TV series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery. "Readers of the Wolfe saga often have to turn to the dictionary because of the erudite vocabulary of Wolfe and sometimes of Archie," wrote Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald.
Nero Wolfe's vocabulary is one of the hallmarks of the character. Examples of unfamiliar words — or unfamiliar uses of words that some would otherwise consider familiar — are found throughout the corpus, often in the give-and-take between Wolfe and Archie.