Underwoods, Monkey Wards and Nero Wolfe

An Intriguing black case...

Awww, trashed machine ):

A Monkey Wards "Signature"

On Archie Goodwin's desk in Wolfe's office, he has a 1950's Underwood (even though the show is set in the '40s)

Archie Goodwin is played by Timothy Hutton, son of Jim Hutton, who played Ellery Queen. Queen was a Royal fan.

On Archie's bedroom desk is an Underwood #5, which gets used mostly when Wolfe's office gets closed by Inspector Cramer as a crime scene.

Nice Labels!

Nero Wolfe tries his hand at typing. He is the consummate one-fingered typist.

Updated: November 7, 2011 — 2:16 pm

7 Comments

Add a Comment
  1. As if any effort was really required, my girlfriend has been almost forcing me to watch the A&E series. It’s more of enticing me to watch as many episodes as possible in one sitting. She’s going to go crazy when I direct her attention to that #5 in the series; I almost had her using my #3 model, this past weekend.

    1. Oh, yeah. I guess it’s A&E not, AMC. It’s a terrific series – too bad they didn’t continue it past 2 seasons. |:

  2. Nero Wolfe is one of my all-time favorite detectives, a prototypical INTP. That was a good series too.

  3. Ah, the plague of the headless typewriter strikes again! (Or the bald typewriter, if you want a gentler way of putting it.) The only one I ever picked up had a mitigating feature: script typeface. And I eventually found some “hair” for it thanks to a kind friend, so that ended well. I agree that for $20 it was definitely not worth it.

    As for the Swissa for Tori; I’ll keep it in mind starting now so I don’t pass up another great $10 deal :) Once I have it, I can keep it in the office until it is needed. Lots of room here!

    Oh, and look forward to seeing yours back in action after the platen is restored – that will be one pampered Swissa!

  4. Loved the series so much I got the whole thing on DVD, the only time I’ve done something like that. BTW, Rex Stout wrote the books over the course of at least four, maybe five, decades and each show reflected the decade that story was published. Now I have to watch all of it again to keep track of the typewriter changes. Oh, what a burden! Of course, this will be post-NaNo and might wait for a snowed-in period this winter. A worthy project.

    Jeff

    1. The show very occasionally makes obvious jumps in time period, especially in the second season. The first episode in 2nd season is clearly set in the pop-art 60’s, and although the external sets are meticulously period-appropriate, Nero’s office, car and clothing are unchanged from when the show is set in the “just getting into WW2” late-30’s period episodes.

      In all episodes, regardless of set period, Nero, Fritz and Archie’s style of dress, the interior of the Brownstone and Nero’s car never change – and Archie uses the same two typewriters, although the older Underwood open-frame machine does move to his front office desk in the last few episodes of the second season, and the 50’s model seems to either vanish or gets moved to his bedroom desk. The only other typewriter I’ve seen so far in the series is Lon Cohen’s Royal, in his newspaper office.

  5. As a Rex Stout fan for the past nearly fifty years, there was no way that any series would replicate the books for me. However, tossing that aside, the series was fun to watch without the association. I noticed that that Underwood in the sales case is missing the margin stops and the type scale. Weird, and how could someone use it without any margins?

Leave a Reply to Richard Keistler Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.