The Our lead character and lead actor this week were a match made in heaven.

Rex Stout's overweight orchid-loving private detective Nero Wolf had been played by several actors in films and on radio, but in

1950, Sydney Green Street assumed the role and made it his own.

Green Street's most famous film performance was Casper Gutman, the Maltese

Falcon villain with a similar build to Wolf, and his British accent and clip delivery were

perfectly suited for one of fiction's most unusual detectives.

The Rex Stout stories blended two schools of detective fiction.

Nero Wolf was a classic armchair detective, relying on his massive intellect and keen

deductive eye to solve crimes, usually from the comfort of his own home.

But he was aided by his street-smart leg man Archie Goodwin, a gumshoo cut from the cloth of Philip

Marlow and other hard-boiled detectives. The duo would take on a case and Wolf would dispatch Goodwin to the crime scene and to interview witnesses.

Wolf would leave his brownstone and his prized orchids only in the rarest of circumstances and always with considerable

complaint.

By all accounts, Rex Stout wasn't a huge fan of the earlier radio portrayals of Nera Wolf, but he was said to have enjoyed

Sydney Green Street in the role. The author believed that Green Street came the closest to capturing

Wolf as he'd been written.

Green Street had been working steadily in film since his 1941 debut in the Maltese

Falcon, including turns in Casablanca and a number of films that paired him with Falcon co-star Peter Lorry. By 1950, like

other big screen stars, Green Street was looking for a radio vehicle. He was

tapped to star in a new NBC series centered on

Nerel Wolf. No, Rexed-out stories were adapted for the program, but the show featured

characters from the books like New York Police Inspector Kramer, played on radio by Bill Johnstone of the lineup.

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