Review: Archie Goes Home by Robert Goldsborough

I read this novel as I have read all of Robert Goldsborough’s Nero Wolfe novels. What’s interesting about Goldsborough is that his Wolfe books can be grouped into two distinct categories. First there are the seven earlier novels, which he wrote between 1986 and 1994. In those he picked up where Rex Stout left off. Stout always kept his characters contemporary. They never aged but in ways large and small, time pased in the novels. Goldsborough continued this, picking up a few years after Stout’s final novel and marching on.

Then he stopped, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was his day job as a journalist that got in the way, but after retiring in 2004, he began writing another mystery series beginning with Three Strikes You’re Dead and continuing for four more books. And then in 2012, he returned to Nero Wolfe.

There was a difference, though. These books were set firmly in the past. In fact Goldsborough makes a book of locating them very precisely in the past. And I can’t blame him since the 50s and 60s when he’s set most of his books are the era where a lot of us love the books. And really the era where I think of the novels as being set. I know of course that Fer-de-Lance, the first of the series, was published in 1934. The duo worked for the government during the war and then in the late forties took on Arnold Zeck in a trilogy of novels, but after that, the series settled into a rhythm.

Goldsborough wants to play with our positive memories of and associations with the era and the books. But in that first book for his return, he took a different tact. Telling the story of how Archie Goodwin met Nero Wolfe. And that really explicits ties the characters to a time and setting.

I thought about this fact reading the new book, which I should note is fine. I read it in the course of a single lazy Saturday and enjoyed myself. I certainly don’t regret spending the time reading it. But I have to ask why.

Like Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, this is a story that no one was clamoring for. (I shouldn’t say that. Maybe someone was. I have no idea what fans want). But my point is that it’s a story that’s not especially necessary. The mystery isn’t very good. It smacks of fan service. The filling in of characters’ backgrounds, telling stories no one was demanding be told, answering questions no one was asking. In this case, we follow Archie back to his hometown in Ohio and spend time with his mother and aunt and the small town he grew up in as he solves a case of what seems like a suicide.

It’s a trend right now, unfortunately. Moreso now that we’re being overrun with remakes and retreads and re-imaginings. This is the answer to what so many writers do, to over explain the characters and their backgrounds. Somehow these characters existed before and we’re known and understood, but now we have to explain them in more detail, dig into their past even more, and not even in especially interesting ways.

I’m not about the spoil anything, and as I wrote above, the mystery isn’t very good, but I can’t help but think that this says that Goldsborough’s time with the characters is coming to a close. Because he doesn’t have much to say. There’s very little the we learn about Archie, his hometown, his mother or anyone else the warrants a book length manuscript. For any new book, but especially for one that is explicitly playing with the formula, trying something different (and as is explained in the afterward, Stout had a few different answers for Archie’s background in different books) there has to be a reason. It can’t just be. Why are we breaking the formula? And the book never answers that question. It doesn’t have much to say about the characters. Archie stops by different places in town and notes that some are the same and others have changed an that’s really about it. It’s a small town, but he doesn’t interact with many people he knew.

Honestly, the more I think about the book, the more disappointed I am by it. My initial reaction being the result of being catered to than of actually being presented with work that I could sit with. The book was fine for an afternoon where I didn’t want to think, but nothing more. If it were a novella or short story as opposed to a novel, I would have been much kinder in my assessment. Because it doesn’t have enough story to be a novel and is padded out.

I’m not a fan in general of series that continue after the original writer’s death. I don’t think the world needs more Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy or Robert B. Parker novels. (Honestly, I think the world had too many written by them when alive…). There are pleasant surprises, of course. I’ve enjoyed a few Holmes novels over the years. Anthony Hororwitz’s Bond novels are good (though Hororwitz can write far better). Joe Gores wrote Hammett and Spade & Archer. Sophie Hannah writes a great Agatha Christie pastiche in her Poirot novels. And Ace Atkins is continuing the Spenser series, but he’s made changes to the series and doesn’t want them to feel like the wet novels Parker wrote at the end of his life.

I can’t lie, if I were asked if I wanted to write a Nero Wolfe novel, I would almost certainly say yes, if only to see if I could pull it off and to play with those characters in that world. But I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason.

The Ship of Theseus thought experiment questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains the same object. I think about this when it comes to series. Because there is a point where what is cool and cutting edge becomes static and dull and cliched. Even though sometimes they predated the cliche or were the cause of the cliche. Still, that’s just how culture works. That’s how time moves on. And after so many years and decades, as a series changes hands, it is even the same series? Are they the same characters? Can they be?

I would argue that Goldsborough changed the series when he returned to writing them in 2012. And some will question how much that was necessary and how true he remained to the characters. But even without those major changes, they wouldn’t be the same. They couldn’t be. Should we simply let the characters and series die with the creators? Because it feels depressing to leave it to capitalism, which is the state of things now. How many impressive works and careers falter due to low sales and how many mediocre series continued by other people limp along?

So many unnecessary books. So many pointless films. The movie Solo was good, it just didn’t serve much purpose except expanding the franchise and serving IP.

I loved Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books. The banter between Wolfe and Archie. Or Archie and other characters. That voice of Archie’s which made it so much fun. The character of Wolfe, who remains such a colorful puzzle. There’s such joy to the novels and the setting. Wolfe is an aesthete and the books are full of pleasure. (though the readers’ pleasure is different from Wolfe’s to be fair). Goldsborough writing stories with the characters, but he fails to capture what made them such a joy. But I suppose it was a mistake to think that anyone could.

And it’s unfair to place all of my annoyances about the glut of these stories onto a slender novel like Archie Goes Home. But to be fair, the novel can’t even justify its own premise, or length. I’d like to think that Goldsborough could write another good novel, a good summation of his work and his feeling towards Wolfe and these novels, but he doesn’t seem to have anything to say.