is himself a bachelor," Wolfe tells Hilda Lindquist in The Rubber Band (1936, chapter 7). A change is indicated in the 1948 novella "Bullet for One" (chapter 7), when Wolfe asks Saul about his family. In "Door to Death" (1949, chapter 7), Archie leaves a phone message with Saul's wife in Brooklyn. Saul has a wife and children in Brooklyn in The Second Confession (1949, chapter 5); he has a wife and children in In the Best Families (1950, chapter 14). No mention is made of Saul's wife or children after 1950, though, and readers are left to decide whether the marriage ended, or Saul's family was simply retconned out of existence. In "The Next Witness", first published in May 1955, Saul has an apartment in Manhattan to himself. He lives alone on the fifth (top) floor of a remodeled house on 38th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues. In chapter 4, Archie describes Saul's living room, which Wolfe deems "a good room" when he sees it for the first time: It was a big room, lighted with two floor lamps and two table lamps. One wall had windows, another was solid with books, and the other two had pictures and shelves that were cluttered with everything from chunks of minerals to walrus tusks. In the far corner was a grand piano. The role of Saul Panzer is played by George Wyner in the NBC TV series Nero Wolfe (1981); by Saul Rubinek in the A&E original film The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2000); and by Conrad Dunn in the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2001–2002). Fred Durkin Fred Durkin is a blue-collar investigator who is often hired for mundane tasks such as surveillance. In his earliest appearances, Archie is very dismissive of Durkin, calling him "dumb". However, over the course of the series, Archie comes to appreciate Fred more; though not prone to flashes of insight, Fred Durkin is reliably hard-working and stubborn about getting details right. In the novella "Kill Now—Pay Later," Archie opines that Fred "wasn't in Saul's class but was way above average." Married with several children, Fred is honest and likable, but unsophisticated. He is often nervous around Wolfe, whom he once offended by stirring vinegar into a roux for squab at Wolfe's table. To curry favor with Wolfe, he sometimes accepts Wolfe's offer of beer, though Archie has heard Fred