The International Herald-Tribute

by James Lincoln Warren

Nero Wolfe
Illustration by Carl Mueller
American Magazine, November 1940

I just finished a project that took several years to come to fruition, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I first had the idea for it when reading The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk (Kodansha International, 1992) more than a decade ago. Although I’ve never been able to find the passage again when looking for it, I remember Hopkirk mentioning that the British used doctors as spies in Afghanistan, because they were worth more to the natives alive than dead. That got me thinking. What famous literary doctor served in Afghanistan in the 19th century? Yep. John H. Watson.

I started writing something using this idea almost immediately, but I wasn’t all that happy with the result and shelved it. I didn’t get interested in it again until I finished my most recent (and as yet unpublished) Treviscoe story, “The Satan League”. I had committed to writing a novel, and had gotten a good start, but soon it was going very slowly—still is, but it hasn’t been shelved—and my invariable rule is that when you have trouble writing something, then whatever else you do, don’t stop writing—just write something else. So out came the Holmes pastiche for another look.

I already had a title for it, “Shikari”. The draft was bad, but not as bad as I remembered. I fiddled with it some more, decided that it would have two narrators instead of the original one, and then promptly got stuck. It probably would have waited another ten years at that point, but at Bouchercon I told Janet Hutchings at EQMM that I might have a story for her annual Sherlock Holmes tribute issue later in the year. The logjam broke. When I got back to Los Angeles, the whole story was mostly ready in my head. During the actual writing, I came up with probably the best twist in the plot and incorporated it. (That’s what inspired me to write “Garden Plot” here two weeks ago.)

And then I got to thinking about the Black Orchid Novella Award, an annual contest governed in tandem by the Wolfe Pack (as the Baker Street Irregulars are to Sherlock Holmes, so are the Wolfe Pack to Nero Wolfe) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Linda Landrigan, AHMM’s editor, had first told me about it four years ago before it had even been announced, hoping that I would enter. I didn’t. As a rule, I’m not crazy about contests, and I didn’t have any plots running around in my head that I regarded as Wolfesque enough.

But having my story “Shanghaied”, which is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, picked as one of the “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2009” by Otto Penzler, and having just now written another story using characters invented by somebody else, I decided maybe I should give the Black Orchid another look. The way I see it is that I’ve already written two tributes. Why not a third?

Now, the Black Orchid isn’t for fan fic. Our pal Dale C. Andrews may be the latest person to write as Ellery Queen, but right now Nero Wolfe himself is off limits. One of the guiding principles provided by the WP is “We’re not looking for anything derivative of the Nero Wolfe character, milieu, etc. ” On the other hand, Dave Zeltserman’s now very popular Julius Katz (Get it? Nero/Julius, Wolfe/Katz) got his start as an entry for the Black Orchid. “Julius Katz” did not win, but it did get published in EQMM to great acclaim and won the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice Award and a Derringer. There’s at least one other JK story that has appeared in EQMM, and last summer, Zeltserman told Ed Gorman that a JK novel was almost finished.

Hm.

So I pulled out the copy of AHMM with the most recent winner, “O’Nelligan’s Glory” by Michael Nethercott—incidentally the same issue containing John M. Floyd’s story “The Powder Room” (which made Otto’s list along with “Shanghaied”), and Rob Lopresti’s short story “Shanks on Misdirection”—to see how he had handled the whole Nero-Wolfe-Tribute idea. His characters are different, but there’s the Nero/Archie dynamic going on between his characters Mr. O’Nelligan and Lee Plunkett. And Nethercott also informs us that an O’Nelligan novel is in the works, too.

Hm again.

Somebody once told me that in my Cal Ops series, Carmine Ferrari was sort of like Archie and that Custer Malone was sort of like Nero, and I wonder if that wasn’t in the back of my mind when I wrote the first story. It is true that Carmine is definitely more active than Cus and Cus is definitely more cerebral than Carmine, although the whole Cal Ops flavor is much more hard-boiled than Nero Wolfe. But the resemblance is there, even if I hadn’t consciously intended it. So in a sense, I had already written a Nero Wolfe tribute or three.

But is it really a good idea to write these tributes, to put one’s own spin on someone else’s idea?

Well, in the case of Dale Andrews, the answer is a resounding yes, because if he didn’t write an Ellery story or two, he probably wouldn’t have published anything at all in terms of fiction, and the stories are very good. Dave Zeltserman I have already mentioned.

So I’ve decided I’m going to give it a crack. Accordingly, I’ve already come up with my own alternative version of Nero Wolfe.

I think she’s very interesting.