Publication Order of Nero Wolfe Books
| Fer-de-Lance | 1934 |
| The League of Frightened Men | 1935 |
| The Rubber Band | 1936 |
| The Red Box | 1937 |
| Too Many Cooks | 1938 |
| Some Buried Caesar | 1939 |
| Over My Dead Body | 1940 |
| Where There’s a Will | 1940 |
| Black Orchids | 1942 |
| Not Quite Dead Enough | 1944 |
| The Silent Speaker | 1946 |
| Too Many Women | 1947 |
| And Be a Villain / More Deaths Than One | 1948 |
| Trouble in Triplicate | 1949 |
| The Second Confession | 1949 |
| Three Doors to Death | 1950 |
| In the Best Families / Even in the Best Families | 1950 |
| Curtains for Three | 1951 |
| Murder by the Book | 1951 |
| Triple Jeopardy | 1952 |
| Prisoner’s Base / Out Goes She | 1952 |
| The Golden Spiders | 1953 |
| Three Men Out | 1954 |
| The Black Mountain | 1954 |
| Before Midnight | 1955 |
| Three Witnesses | 1956 |
| Might as Well Be Dead | 1956 |
| Three for the Chair | 1957 |
| If Death Ever Slept | 1957 |
| And Four to Go / Crime and Again | 1958 |
| Champagne for One | 1958 |
| Plot It Yourself / Murder in Style | 1959 |
| Three at Wolfe’s Door | 1960 |
| Too Many Clients | 1960 |
| The Final Deduction | 1961 |
| Homicide Trinity | 1962 |
| Gambit | 1962 |
| The Mother Hunt | 1963 |
| Trio for Blunt Instruments | 1964 |
| A Right to Die | 1964 |
| The Doorbell Rang | 1965 |
| Death of a Doxy | 1966 |
| The Father Hunt | 1968 |
| Death of a Dude | 1969 |
| Please Pass the Guilt | 1973 |
| A Family Affair | 1975 |
| Death Times Three | 1985 |
Publication Order of Tecumseh Fox Books
| Double for Death | 1939 |
| Bad for Business | 1940 |
| The Broken Vase | 1941 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Her Forbidden Knight | 1913 |
| Under the Andes | 1914 |
| A Prize for Princes | 1914 |
| The Great Legend | 1916 |
| The Last Drive | 1916 |
| How Like a God | 1929 |
| Seed on the Wind | 1930 |
| Golden Remedy | 1931 |
| Forest Fire | 1933 |
| The President Vanishes | 1934 |
| O Careless Love! | 1935 |
| The Hand in the Glove | 1937 |
| Mr. Cinderella | 1938 |
| Mountain Cat / The Mountain Cat Murders | 1939 |
| Red Threads | 1939 |
| Alphabet Hicks / The Sound of Murder | 1941 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Justice Ends at Home and Other Stories | 1977 |
| Target Practice | 1998 |
| An Officer and a Lady and Other Stories | 2000 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Nero Wolfe Cook Book | 1973 |
About Rex Stout
Rex Stout was an American mystery writer, born in 1886, who created the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin. The pair appear in 33 novels and around 40 novellas and short stories published between 1934 and 1975, and Stout received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1959.
Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, to Quaker parents who moved the family to Kansas soon afterwards. He attended Topeka High School and the University of Kansas, then served in the US Navy from 1906 to 1908, part of that time as a yeoman on Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential yacht. Between 1912 and 1918 he sold more than 40 stories to magazines. Around 1916 he devised a school banking system that was adopted by about 400 American schools, and the royalties paid for extensive travel in Europe during the 1920s.
He returned to fiction with “How Like a God” (1929), a psychological novel told in the second person and published by the Vanguard Press, which he had helped to found. Three more psychological novels followed before he turned to detective fiction. “Fer-de-Lance”, the first Nero Wolfe book, was published in October 1934, the same year as his political thriller “The President Vanishes”, which first appeared anonymously.
Wolfe is a Montenegrin-born private detective who rarely leaves his brownstone on West 35th Street in New York, where he tends his orchids and eats the meals cooked by his chef, Fritz Brenner. Archie Goodwin does the legwork and narrates the cases. From 1940 the series included novellas as well as novels, usually gathered three to a volume. Stout also wrote mysteries without Wolfe: “The Hand in the Glove” (1937) features the private detective Dol Bonner, and Tecumseh Fox leads three novels.
During the Second World War Stout chaired the Writers’ War Board and presented the CBS radio series “Our Secret Weapon”. He later served as president of the Authors Guild and, in 1958, of the Mystery Writers of America. “The Father Hunt” won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger. Columbia filmed “Fer-de-Lance” as “Meet Nero Wolfe” in 1936, and the stories were adapted for an A&E television series in 2001.
The last Wolfe novel, “A Family Affair”, came out in 1975. Stout died on 27 October that year, aged 88. “Death Times Three”, a collection of three novellas, was published posthumously in 1985.
Photo: Jill Krementz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).