Рекс Стаут

American author, who wrote over 70 detective novels, 46 of them featuring eccentric, chubby, beer drinking gourmet sleuth Nero Wolfe, whose wisecracking aide and companion in crime solving was Archie Goodwin. Stout started his literary career as a writer for the pulps, publishing romance, adventure, some borderline detective stories, but after 1938 all his fiction was in the mystery field. 

“His face, chronically red, deepened a shade. His broad shoulders stiffened, and the creases spreding from the corners of his gray-blue eyes showed more as the eyelids tightened. Then, deciding I was playing for a burt, he controlled it. “Do you know,” he asked, “whose opinion of you I would like to have? Darwin's. Where were you while evolution was going on?” Далее