Awesome / Nero Wolfe

Novels

Fer-de-lance

• Wolfe receives a suspicious package, so he calls the supposed sender, confirms it wasn't from her, grabs a nearby bottle, opens a drawer of his desk, and kills the venomous snake hidden inside. He does the whole thing without changing his tone of voice or even expressing surprise.

The League of Frightened Men

• Wolfe’s forgery of a confession describing that he's deduced he's true but realizes he'll never get Paul Chapin to admit, which has the effect of both breaking Chapin's psychological torture of the men, and helping lead to the capture of the murderer.

The Rubber Band

• The entire jailbreak backstory, a client hiding from the cops in a flower pot, the implied Hero of Another Story amateur investigation by 72-year-old Mike Walsh, an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech to an Obstructive Bureaucrat, and the summation/shootout in the office at the end are all quite memorable.

Where There's a Will

• An unseen deputy figures out that an accident was murder through an examination of the crime scene that would do a main character proud.

The Silent Speaker

• Phoebe Gunther hiding a piece of evidence in Wolfe's office in The Silent Speaker.

The Second Confession

• Wolfe playing the local Communist Party like a fiddle to trick them into naming the killer.

In the Best Families

• Everything Wolfe does after the first act. After a criminal mastermind interferes with his cases once too often, Wolfe gets fed up, leaves his home, goes into hiding, adopts a new identity which even Archie isn't capable of seeing through, and... well, gives us a look at what he did before his detective days.

Murder by the Book

• Wolfe's client John Wellman causing the murderer of his daughter (who has held his own amid Wolfe's deductions) to suffer a Villainous Breakdown by walking up to the killer, looking him in the eye and daring him to shake his hand.

The Golden Spiders

• The action scenes where Archie, Saul and Orrie capture the gangsters who are shaking down illegal immigrants.

The Black Mountain

• The knife fight where Wolfe and Archie fight four villains.

Champagne for One

• A woman rushes at Wolfe with intent to harm. He responds by casually leaning back in his chair quickly enough to kick her on the underside of the chin and send her sprawling.

The Final Deduction

• The book features a treasure hunt subplot which twice features Noel Tedder beating his sister Margot to success by mere minutes: once when hiring Wolfe, and once when finding the ransom money.

The Doorbell Rang

• Wolfe makes J. Edgar Hoover wait on his doorstep in The Doorbell Rang.
  "I have nothing for him. Let him get a sore finger."
• The trap Wolfe sets for the FBI, particularly how he smuggles in Saul, Fred, Orrie and a pair of body doubles.

Novella collections

Black Orchids

• Wolfe's Batman Gambit in Black Orchids. Having gathered the suspects together in his plant rooms, Wolfe accuses one of the murder, explaining the motive and method behind the crime, before another suspect exits to the potting room. The suspect who left is the killer (which Wolfe promptly reveals), and he opens the gas to asphyxiate Wolfe and the others, who are in the fumigating room, but Wolfe blocked up the pipe so instead the gas would fill the potting room.

Not Quite Dead Enough

• Wolfe's Breaking Speech to the killer in "Booby Trap," ending with Leave Behind a Pistol.

Trouble in Triplicate

• The Enemy Mine scene at the end of "Before I Die," where Saul and two rival mobsters all blaze away at the trigger-happy killer.
• Wolfe's reply to Cramer’s claim he didn’t earn his fee in "Instead of Evidence" after it turns out that the man who hired Wolfe to avenge his own murder wasn't the murder victim, but someone impersonating him.
  Pfui. Whether Mr. Poor paid me or not, he got his money's worth.

Curtains for Three

• The horseback chase in the climax of “Bullet for One.”

Three Men Out

• Leo Heller's Dying Clue in "The Zero Clue," which even Wolfe displays respect for.
• In "This Won't Kill You," Wolfe solves the case at the same time that they get a call from the police, reporting that they have a confession from an accomplice who Archie captured. Archie pointing out to Wolfe that it could be argued that they both solved the case separately that time.

Three Witnesses

• In The Next Witness Wolfe manipulates the District Attorney to ask him a question (what he said to the suspect when he visited the man in jail) that will let him be able to describe his entire theory on what happened under cross-examination.

Three for the Chair

• The sheer number of operatives Wolfe gets investigating the case in "Too Many Detectives" and his explanation of the simple logic that led him to realize that it would have been too big of a coincidence to assume that the five detectives hired under false pretenses for surveillance jobs by the victim, and only those five detectives, all happened to be called together to give statements by a man who should have had no way of knowing they were connected.

Homicide Trinity

• Wolfe's confrontation with the murderer in "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo." To put in context, this person had not only brutally dispatched someone in Wolfe's own office (while he was up in the plant rooms and Archie had stepped out briefly), but used Wolfe's discarded necktie to do it.
  "There's the phone. Why don't you use it?"

  "Because Madame, 25 hours ago in this room you inflicted upon me the worst humiliation I have experienced in many years and now I am getting even with you. To put it bluntly, I'm enjoying watching you squirm."

Death Times Three

• Wolfe's reaction to food that's been tampered with in "Bitter End":
  "That will do, Archie." Wolfe put down his empty glass. I had never heard his tone more menacing. "I am not impressed with your failure to understand this abominable outrage. I might bring myself to tolerate it if some frightened or vindictive person shot me to death, but this is insupportable." He made the growling noise again. "My food. You know my attitude toward food." He aimed a rigid finger at the jar, and his voice trembled with ferocity. "Whoever put that in there is going to regret it."

Multiple books

• A mutual one whenever Wolfe gets a phone call from Arnold Zeck and they trade threats.

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