Nero Wolfe Is Back, With ‘Too Many Clients’

Murder is a tragedy, except when it’s an art form fit for the pages of a pulp novel, the wide screen or for television, as in Sunday night’s Nero Wolfe mystery (8 p.m., A&E;). In this case, murder is a brain-twisting exercise in logic.

The ruminating detective created by Rex Stout in a series of novels begun in 1934 is played to perfection by Maury Chaykin in this latest TV incarnation (William Conrad played him in a 1981 series on NBC), now in its second season. Sunday’s installment, the two-part “Too Many Clients”--the case of the puzzling murder of one Thomas Yeager--is expertly tailored for the portly sleuth and his loquacious legman, Archie Goodwin, superbly played by Timothy Hutton.

Wolfe and Goodwin form an uneven partnership of opposites. The weight--both in pounds and in brain cells--is thrown mightily to Wolfe, but it’s Goodwin who drives and drolly narrates the story, as he hauls in the suspects in Yeager’s demise--the actress, the secretary, the landlord, the professor, the widow--and parks them at Wolfe’s door. When the mastermind attempts to sort through the lies and alibis, Goodwin enforces civility until they “cry Wolfe”--and four suspects become clients, desperate to clear their names.

The setting is posh 1950s New York, but the dialogue--full of wisecracking private detectives and cops, fast-talking mugs and the patois of pretentious society women and their high-priced mouthpieces--tracks back to the noir detective sagas of the ‘40s. Watching Nero and Archie is a lot like reading a good mystery you can’t put down.