Three Trumps, A Nero Wolfe Omnibus: The Black Mountain / If Death Ever Slept / Before Midnight - Hardcover

From Wikipedia: Nero Wolfe is a fictional character, an armchair detective created in 1934 by the American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin narrates the cases of the detective genius. Stout wrote 33 novels and 39 short stories from 1934 to 1975, with most of them set in New York City. Wolfe's residence, a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street, features prominently in the series. Many radio, television and film adaptations have been made from the stories. ~~~ The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated for Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon 2000, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was a nominee for Best Mystery Writer of the Century. ~~~ The Nero Wolfe stories take place contemporaneously with their writing and depict a changing landscape and society. The principal characters in the corpus do not age. Although it is not directly stated in the stories, Nero Wolfe's age is 56, according to Rex Stout. ~~~ "Those stories have ignored time for thirty-nine years," Stout told his authorized biographer John McAleer. "Any reader who can't or won't do the same should skip them. I didn't age the characters because I didn't want to. That would have made it cumbersome and would seem to have centered attention on the characters rather than the stories." ~~~ Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories, frequently describes Wolfe as weighing "a seventh of a ton." At the time of the first book, 1934, this was intended to indicate unusual obesity, especially through the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In 1947 Archie writes, "He weighs between 310 and 390, and he limits his physical movements to what he regards as the irreducible essentials." ~~~ "Wolfe's most extravagant distinction is his extreme antipathy to literal extravagance.