A minor character in the original Nero Wolfe series penned by Rex Stout takes center stage — sort of — in the latest from Robert Goldsborough. Of course, Theodore Horstmann, orchid nurse extraordinaire, was not a minor character to Wolfe. In fact, he was indispensable to keeping the rooftop greenhouses alive and blooming with color in all seasons. But he didn't have much of a role in the books themselves, and I have to say that seemed about right to me. About all Stout ever chose to tell us about Theodore was that he was crotchety and fussy, lived in a little alcove of the greenhouse itself, and didn't get along with Archie (of course, all of that is relayed through Archie as narrator, so we must take into account there are always two sides to a story).

The plot of Trouble at the Brownstone revolves around Theodore, yes, but he's pretty much offstage. He appears at the very beginning, when he arrives on the stoop of the brownstone having been badly beaten and bleeding (we learn later that he had moved out and into his own apartment some months earlier). He promptly lapses into a coma and conveniently remains so until the case is solved, when he is miraculously revived and returns to work and live in Wolfe's house.

Of course, Wolfe is insulted by the notion that one of his employees has been assaulted (you should have seen how mad he got when not one, but two, women got strangled in his office in separate books of the original series) and he vows to find the culprits. This involves Archie going undercover as Theodore's nephew at the apartment building where he had recently moved, which appears to be filled with a bunch of mute weirdos. There's also some action down on the docks, and any accounts of extralegal activity by longshoreman are always welcomed by this longshoreman's daughter and granddaughter.

When Goldsborough first took up the writing of the Nero Wolfe series (with the full blessing of Rex Stout's estate) in 1986, it had been about a decade since the last book Stout wrote. Goldsborough attempted to re-imagine Archie and Wolfe and the rest of the crew in the modern world, with a desktop computer instead of a clackety manual typewriter and various other technological updates. It didn't really work; they felt like crude parodies of themselves. Lately he's begun setting the books in the past, during Wolfe's heyday of the 1940s-1960s, and while the dialogue's still a bit stiff and you never forget you're reading someone else's interpretation of beloved characters, the plots are fine and the books are more enjoyable to read. I never read series continuations, and it's a measure of my love for Archie (and the rest) that I have stuck with this one. You could find worse ways to spend your time, but temper your expectations accordingly. ( )

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