Review: You don't need to know your Nero Wolfe to love this novel
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 16, 2011
You don't need to know your way around Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels and novelettes to enjoy JULIUS KATZ AND ARCHIE, but familiarity will enable you to more fully appreciate what Dave Zeltserman has accomplished. There are any number of similarities between Julius and Wolfe, but there are also a great many striking and significant differences. The most important thing, however, is that Zeltserman, a rising star among writers who specialize in noir fiction, has demonstrated his versatility by writing a more traditional whodunit populated with colorful characters.Another significant difference between Stout and Zeltserman? Zeltserman's novel is fairly-clued, allowing the reader to solve the crime before Julius does if he can pick up on the clues and put them together. Many of Stout's stories had Wolfe solving cases by intuition alone, thus only allowing the reader to guess at the culprit's identity.JULIUS KATZ AND ARCHIE is a fast-paced, high-tech take on the classic whodunit, and I hope the first novel in a series of novels.