Nero Wolfe: Three Witnesses, Three for the Chair, Champagne for One, And Four to Go

• “Where did you get the idea,” she asked back, “that vulgarity is the best policy?”
  
  “It’s not policy; I was born vulgar."

—"When a Man Murders..." in Three Witnesses

• She has character, but she hasn’t decided what to do with it.


• "In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted."

—Champagne for One

The short story collection Three for the Chair features a story in which two murders are committed by making pneumonia patients cold, and also a story featuring all the licensed PIs in NYC working together under Wolfe's direction. These are especially fun, so I wanted to make a note of them even though I haven't saved any quotes from them. Probably the most amusing part is how (exaggeratedly, unwarrantedly) jealous Archie gets in the PI story, "Too Many Detectives", about Wolfe cooperating with the female PI Dol Bonner, who also appears in the novel If Death Ever Slept, although "Too Many Detectives" seems to be her first appearance. The story "Christmas Party" in the collection And Four to Go provides the inverse, Wolfe jealous (over the possibility of Archie getting married), and includes some gruff wordless gestures because Wolfe is emotionally repressed.