The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery

Nero Wolfe, “who thinks he’s the world’s greatest detective — truth being, he is”, lives in an opulent Manhattan brownstone on West 35th Street where, in between solving cases, he indulges in the finer things in life, including fine cuisine, book collecting and the growing of rare orchids. One night, after Wolfe reacts petulantly to a change made in one of his favourite meals, his assistant Archie Goodwin decides to prank him by allowing a boy from the neighbourhood, Pete Drossos, into the house to consult with Wolfe on what Pete believes is a case. Pete claims that a woman wearing distinctive golden spider-shaped earrings asked him to get a police officer while he was cleaning the windshield of the car she was driving at a stop light, and believes that she was being held hostage by her male passenger.

To indulge Pete, Wolfe has Archie contact the police with the car’s registration details. The next night, both Wolfe and Archie are shocked when Sgt. Purley Stebbins of the NYPD informs them that Pete has been killed by a hit-and-run driver, as well as Matthew Birch, an agent of the INS. Soon after, Pete’s mother brings Wolfe $4.30 that Pete has saved and asks him to find Pete’s killer. Angered by Wolfe’s reluctance to get involved, Archie uses the money to place an advert in the newspapers asking for the woman driving the car to contact Wolfe.

Wolfe and Archie are soon contacted by Laura Fromm, a wealthy widow and philanthropist, who arrives at Wolfe’s office wearing the golden spider earrings and asks to hire his services. However, they quickly determine that Fromm was not the driver, and she is horrified when she learns that Pete is dead. Wolfe begins to suspect that Fromm knows the identity of the driver, but she refuses to reveal it; the next day, Fromm is also murdered in an apparent hit-and-run. Angered that two people who came to him for help are now dead, Wolfe decides to solve the murders.

Wolfe identifies a charitable organisation providing help to displaced refugees that Mrs Fromm supported as a likely link between the deaths, and Archie — along with freelance operatives Saul Panzer, Orrie Cather, and Fred Durkin — are assigned to investigate different aspects of the charity. Archie contacts various individuals connected to the charity — including Fromm’s secretary Jean Estey, director Angela White, and the wife of the charity’s attorney Dennis Horan — and offers to sell them confidential details of Fromm’s conversation with Wolfe to provoke a reaction. Each refuses, but Wolfe is approached by Paul Kuffner, the charity’s public relations manager, who offers to buy the information. Realising he has been tipped off, Wolfe rejects the offer.

Saul Panzer, who has been posing a displaced person seeking aid from the charity, reveals that after meeting Dennis Horan for help, he was approached by an individual who attempted to blackmail him. Meanwhile, Fred Durkin, who was investigating Matthew Birch, is captured by two men who discover he is a private investigator. They attempt to torture him, but Archie, Saul and Orrie — each converging on Durkin’s location after following different threads of the case — manage to rescue him. Archie and the others discover that the two crooks are part of a blackmail ring targeting desperate refugees who are in America illegally, but before they can interrogate the crooks further Dennis Horan shows up unexpectedly.

Horan and the two crooks are taken to Wolfe’s office, where Horan is interrogated by Wolfe and Inspector Cramer of the NYPD. Horan attempts to distance himself from the other men, but when they learn this the others identify him as a key ringleader of the blackmail scheme, along with Matthew Birch. Birch, however, took orders from an unknown woman, confirming to Wolfe a key misassumption the police have made — the individual driving the car that struck Pete was not a man, but a woman disguised as a man.

Gathering the principal suspects in his office, Wolfe reveals the identity of the murderer — Jean Estey. Estey was the organiser of the blackmail ring, but Fromm had overheard the codewords she used with her confederates — “said the spider to the fly” — and had begun to suspect her, giving her the earrings to try and provoke a response; Estey murdered Fromm to keep her quiet. Fearing exposure, Birch had captured Estey, prompting her to panic and try to contact Pete for help; after she managed to overwhelm and kill Birch, Estey realised that Pete could identify her, and so killed him. Estey is identified by the tailor who sold her the men’s clothing she used as a disguise, and is arrested. The case ends with Archie giving half the fee Wolfe has earned to Pete’s mother; despite her emotional response, Archie lies to Wolfe and informs him that she reacted stoically, which earns Wolfe’s respect.

In a 2002 interview in Scarlet Street magazine, executive producer Michael Jaffe explained why the novel The Golden Spiders was selected to introduce contemporary audiences to Nero Wolfe:

There are three or four really extraordinary novels — The Silent Speaker, In the Best Families, and The Doorbell Rang, for example. These are some of the most famous and most complex and most amazing stories in the series, but we didn't want to start with those particular ones for a whole complex of reasons. We wanted to pick a story that had activity in it so that we could slowly bring people into the static milieu of Nero Wolfe's house. The Golden Spiders took you outside. There's a gunfight and a tough interrogation scene. It was a very strong story with a lot of pathos, because a young boy is murdered and Wolfe has to deal with his mother. So that was why we chose that one.[2]

Saul Rubinek, who would take the role of Lon Cohen in the subsequent series, was cast as Saul Panzer in the pilot. Prior to the original film's broadcast, Rubinek was asked what made him want to do the project:

Maury Chaykin and I have known each other for almost 30 years and so we know what each other's doing, and I've also been an aficionado of Rex Stout's. ... By total coincidence, I started doing book tapes. I must have done seven or eight book tapes reading Rex Stout novels. I've always known Maury would be great casting as Nero Wolfe... And as it turned out, there's a character called Saul Panzer, who is one of Wolfe's operatives. ... At one point, Saul has to go undercover and play an immigrant. ...

Rex Stout was a great humanitarian, and he did a tremendous amount of charity work, and he was very compassionate towards immigrants to the United States. It's not out of keeping with Stout's personality that he would have written about victimization of immigrants who are being blackmailed. The center of the story is about that. And don't forget that he's writing in the fifties, when there was a lot of reaction against immigrants after the Second World War coming into America, and it wasn't pleasant. I would imagine it's not so different from the eighties when the Vietnamese were coming into America, and there was a lot of reaction against that. There's always a period during American history where the American public might react against who we're letting into the country, and I think he had a great deal of compassion for that, for people who are stateless. I was born in a refugee camp myself, and my family are Holocaust survivors, and I was naturalized as a Canadian citizen before I became an American citizen, so it's a part of the story that I kind of connected to.[3]

The Golden Spiders is an A&E Network Production in association with Jaffe/Braunstein Films, Ltd. Shot in Toronto, the film features production design by Lindsey Hermer-Bell and cinematography by Michael Fash. The adaptation of Rex Stout's novel is the final credit of Paul Monash, a veteran screenwriter and film producer. "I have no need to work on things I don't care to," Monash told an interviewer about his work on The Golden Spiders. "This, I wanted to do."[4]

His is a definitive performance, in much the same way that Jeremy Brett became Sherlock Holmes and David Suchet found the human being inside the caricature Agatha Christie created in Hercule Poirot.

— James D. Watts, "An Appetite for Crime," Tulsa World (March 5, 2000), on Maury Chaykin

• Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe, private investigator
• Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's assistant and narrator of the story
• Bill Smitrovich as Inspector Cramer of Manhattan Homicide West
• Mimi Kuzyk as Laura Fromm, socialite and philanthropist
• Colin Fox as Fritz Brenner, Nero Wolfe's chef and major domo
• Saul Rubinek as Saul Panzer, freelance detective working for Nero Wolfe
• Larissa Laskin as Jean Estey, Mrs. Fromm's secretary
• Gary Reineke as Dennis Horan, attorney representing the Association of European Refugees
• Beau Starr as Lips Egan, organized crime figure
• Elizabeth Brown as Claire Horan, wife of Dennis Horan
• Fulvio Cecere as Fred Durkin, freelance detective working for Nero Wolfe
• Nancy Beatty as Mrs. Anthea Drossos, Pete Drossos' mother
• R. D. Reid as Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Manhattan Homicide West
• Philip Craig as James Maddox, Mrs. Fromm's attorney and executor of her estate
• Gerry Quigley as Lon Cohen, journalist
• Rothaford Gray as Peckham, Mrs. Fromm's butler
• Robert Clark as Pete Drossos, a 12-year-old boy who lives in Wolfe's neighborhood
• Norma Clarke as the receptionist at the Association for European Refugees
• Nicky Guadagni as Angela Wright, executive secretary of the Association of European Refugees
• Hrant Alianak as Mr. Gerstner, proprietor of Gerstner Jewelers
• Brian Miranda as Irving Gerstner, a 12-year-old boy
• Trent McMullen as Orrie Cather, freelance detective working for Nero Wolfe
• Peter Mensah as Mort Erwin, a thug
• James Purcell as Walter Neary, deputy police commissioner
• Jack Newman as Bernard Levine, clothing store owner
• Dwayne McLean as Matthew Birch, special agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
• Robert Bockstael as Paul Kuffner, Mrs. Fromm's publicist

A&E initially planned that The Golden Spiders would be the first in a series of two-hour mystery movies featuring Nero Wolfe.[5] The high ratings (3.2 million households) garnered by the film, along with the critical praise accorded Chaykin as Wolfe and Hutton as Archie, prompted A&E to order a weekly one-hour drama series — A Nero Wolfe Mystery — into production.[6]

• The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery at IMDb
• The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery at the Internet Archive
• "A&E Will Adapt Nero Wolfe Mystery Classic, The Golden Spiders"; Business Wire, July 6, 1999
• Small-screen version of the great man, consultant Winnifred Louis' reflections on a visit to the set of The Golden Spiders (September 1999)
• Dale, Don, "Reclusive Sleuth: Rex Stout’s eccentric sleuth Nero Wolfe is brought to life in A&E’s The Golden Spiders"; Style Weekly, February 28, 2000
• Cuthbert, David, "Famous detective Nero Wolfe takes on murder in The Golden Spiders"; Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 1, 2000
• Oxman, Steven, The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery; Variety, March 1, 2000
• Watts, James D., "The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery shines on A&E Network"; Tulsa World, March 4, 2000
• Watts, James D., "Nero Wolfe: An Appetite for Crime"; Tulsa World, March 5, 2000
• Stasio, Marilyn, "A Perfectionist Pursues the Perpetrators"; The New York Times, March 5, 2000
• Amole, Gene, "A&E Isn't Just Crying Wolfe"; Rocky Mountain News, March 7, 2000
• Leonard, John, "Stamp of approval for the Nero Wolfe mystery, The Golden Spiders"; CBS Sunday Morning, March 12, 2000
• The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery at The Wolfe Pack, official site of the Nero Wolfe Society