The Corpus

Nero Wolfe, Stout’s Other Writings, Books about Stout & Wolfe, and Loads of Reading Materials

  • Use the menu option above, “The Books,” to explore all the options for the Corpus section. [Hold your mouse OVER “The Books,” then click on a submenu option.]
  • View Cover Art—go to any of these listings to locate a vast range of cover art, including non-US printings, as well as synopses, reviews, illustrations from magazine printings, and related information (example: the last, long-missing chapter of Prisoner’s Base): “Non-Nero,” “Goldsborough,” “Biographies, Wolfe Anthologies” and for THE CORPUS itself: “Synopses: Reviews, Quotes, Book Cover Scans,” “Chron” and “Alpha” (chronological or alphabetic list of Wolfe books with a link to a page for each Wolfe book).
  • If you have a book cover you don’t see on the cover art page for a book, send book cover scans to the webmaster at this address. I add cover scans to the site as soon as time permits.
  • Purchase books, audiobooks, DVDs, etc., using the Amazon link in the sidebar.
  • The Abbreviations use upper case for books, including novella collections, and lower case for novellas.
  • Find other Wolfe-related material using the menu options.
  • Check out Wikipedia for additional information regarding the Corpus, including a separate page for each title in the corpus, the full printing history of each title, etc.
  • Please report errors to webmaster at Nero Wolfe dot org! Unlike Mr. Stout, the webmaster reverts to a non-genius streak and re-reads, edits, rewrites, reviews, etc. We want to correct any errors.

Quick Links to Key Resources

LISTS ABOUT NERO WOLFE’S WORLD

MORE LISTS AND RESOURCES

PROLIFIC AUTHOR

Rex Stout led a long, productive, and multi-faceted life with a wide variety of careers.

From about 1912 until his death in 1975, he wrote a great many stories, articles, essays, book reviews, and social and political material besides the many Wolfe novels and novellas. Use the links below to access the sub-sections that attempt to chronicle his sporadic non-Nero Wolfe writing careers from about 1912 until his death in 1975.

Rex Stout’s prolific output is not always grasped because he is identified as the author of the Nero Wolfe series, without due regard for his other writings. Here is the tally, and it does not include his writings for various social and political causes, book reviews written for The New York Times , and others, etc.

There are MANY free files for your reading enjoyment and slide shows of the cover art from his many writings on these pages:

In addition to fiction writing, Mr. Stout spent a great deal of his time verbally championing a wide variety of political causes. But that’s a different section: https://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/stout/activism_overview.htm. The entire Rex Stout section has many interviews and writings by Stout for your reading pleasure.

PUBLICATION CATEGORIES/QUANTITIES

1912 – 1918: Pulp fiction

(READING COPIES OF MANY OF THE SHORT STORIES ARE AVAILABLE ON THIS SITE.)

Some stories may be lost because they were published in “pulp” magazines long ago. Those that have been located in archives have been published in book form: 9 to date.

  • Novels = 6
  • Short Stories = 41
  • TOTAL = 47

1929 – 1941

  • Non-Nero Wolfe novels (serious fiction & mystery stories) = 14
  • Non-Nero Wolfe stories & articles = about 5 (READING COPIES OF MANY OF THESE STORIES ARE AVAILABLE ON THIS SITE.)
  • Edited anthologies and compilations = 16
  • TOTAL = 35

1934 – 1975

  • Novels = 33
  • Novellas = 39
  • (Nero Wolfe books (novels and novella collections (2-3 novellas in one book, usually also printed in magazines)) = 48)
  • TOTAL = 72

1934 – 1975

  • TOTAL = 154

NOTES: There is an additional novella published only posthumously in Death Times Three entitled Assault on a Brownstone. It is an early version of Counterfeit for Murder, which was published in magazine and book format (Saturday Evening Post and Homicide Trinity, respectively). Assault on a Brownstone is not counted in the number of novellas above.

The novella, Frame Up for Murder, was published only in magazine format until its inclusion in Death Time Three. It is a longer version with marked plot differences of Murder is No Joke. Frame Up for Murder is not counted in the number of novellas.

Bitter End, another novella published only in magazine format until after Mr. Stout’s death, and then in Corsage, is a reworking of his Tecumseh Fox novel Bad for Business, and is included in the tally of 39 novellas.

WHERE TO BUY THE BOOKS

The Wolfe Pack does not sell books directly, although we do receive a small percentage of any Amazon purchase you make using the links on this site (see the link in the sidebar.)

  • Use the Alphabetic or Chronological list of the Wolfe Books to make sure you don’t miss any of the 48 Wolfe stories.
  • Not all the books are still in print, so you can buy some new, but will need to buy some used. Bantam reprinted 10 of the titles, two-per-book (five books). They are also keeping many of the previous printing available for purchase new as well as all of the books (usually) are available in Kindle & Nook format.
  • Barnes & Noble bookstores in Manhattan usually stock a minimum of 20 Wolfe titles, including all the newest reprints. If possible, try to buy from local stores to keep them in business.
  • Used books can be in quite good condition—or not. They are usually reasonably priced. However, a recent attempt to locate a replacement copy of Too Many Women determined that because it has not been reprinted for many, many years (evil sexist plot device?), used copies of even the paperbacks are quite expensive.
  • If you hold out for hardbound copies you will pay a good deal of money and have to accumulate them more slowly. Hardbound copies were only printed the first couple of years after the original publication date. Beware of Book Club editions: they are fine for reading but have a very low resale value and poorer quality paper than trade editions. Compared to original hardbound publications, they easily turn brown and eventually dry out altogether.
  • If you use the link on our web site to Amazon (in the sidebar as well as the header and footer menus), the Wolfe Pack receives a small percentage of the sale price that helps pay for our web site hosting costs.
  • Anthology printings are a great way to obtain between 3 and 7 stories in one volume. Because they are hardbound, the paper and binding is usually better than paperback printings. See the anthologies page for a listing of their contents.

OTHER SOURCES OF BOOKS

(AND DON’T FORGET TO TRY THE INDIES FIRST!):

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  • Winnifred Louis contributed her entire pioneering site “Merely a Genius” to this site and that included many of the reviews and quotations now on the updated corpus covers pages.
  • Contributors at GoodReads provided some reviews
  • Peter Darrel compiled the magazine publication listing of the Nero Wolfe saga. 
  • Jesse Strater assembled the Alternate Titles list.
  • Dan Augustine compiled a similar listing that we used to update these listings.
  • Michael Bishop compiled the ORCHIDUS COMPLETUS with an index and illustrations of all orchids mentioned in the corpus.
  • Those indefatigable Wolfeans at Wikipedia have compiled incredibly well-document research on all aspects of The Corpus.

Thanks Winnifred, Dan, Michael, Peter, Jesse, and the dozens and dozens of cover art contributors. I’m sorry it took so long to organize all those JPGs.