My favorite mystery show of all time is A&E's "A Nero Wolfe Mystery", an incredibly faithful and visually perfect adaptation of some of the best of Rex Stout's many Nero Wolfe mysteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe_(2001_TV_series)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/ANeroWolfeMyst...

One of the best ones is "The Doorbell Rang":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang

>An hour later we were having a pleasant evening. The three guests and I were in the front room, in a tight game of pinochle, and Wolfe was in his one and only chair in the office, reading a book. The book was The FBI Nobody Knows. He was either gloating or doing research, I didn't know which. — Archie Goodwin writing in The Doorbell Rang, chapter 12

>Nero Wolfe is hired to force the FBI to stop wiretapping, tailing and otherwise harassing a woman who gave away 10,000 copies of a book that is critical of the Bureau and its director, J. Edgar Hoover.

>The Doorbell Rang generated controversy when it was published, due largely to its unflattering portrayal of the FBI, its director and agents. It was published at a time when the public's attitude toward the FBI was turning critical, not long after Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover clashed and the Bureau was coming under fire for its investigations of Martin Luther King Jr. Some dismissed the book: National Observer described it as "little more than an anti-FBI diatribe," and Nero Wolfe fan John Wayne wrote Rex Stout a terse note of goodbye after reading the condensed magazine version.: 461 But Clifton Fadiman, quoted in a Viking Press advertisement for The Doorbell Rang, thought it was "… the best of all Nero Wolfe stories."

[...]

>The FBI and The Doorbell Rang

>Researching his book Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors (1988), journalist Herbert Mitgang discovered that Stout had been under FBI surveillance since the beginning of his writing career. Most of the heavily censored pages he was allowed to obtain from Stout's FBI dossier concerned The Doorbell Rang:

>About one hundred pages in Stout's file are devoted to the novel, the FBI's panicky response to it and the attempt to retaliate against the author for writing it. The FBI's internal memorandum for its special agents told them that "the bureau desires to contribute in no manner to the sales of this book by helping to make it the topic of publicity." Orders came from headquarters in Washington that any questions concerning the book should be forwarded to the Crime Records Division, thereby putting book and author in a criminal category.

>An internal memorandum by Special Agent M.A. Jones (name surprisingly not censored) summarized the novel and went on to write a critique for the FBI's top command — a rare "literary" honor accorded to few books in its files ... Following the review came a series of recommendations — first, Stout was designated as a person "not to be contacted" without prior approval by FBI headquarters in Washington ...

>In April 1976, the Church Committee found that The Doorbell Rang is a reason Rex Stout's name was placed on the FBI's "not to contact list", which it cited as evidence of the FBI's political abuse of intelligence information.