talent, a remorseless purpose and a will that cannot be dented or deflected." Wolfe considers Zeck the most dangerous criminal he has encountered in his career and informs Archie that any direct conflict between them would by necessity become a battle to the death, intimating that he would be compelled to abandon the brownstone and work to destroy Zeck utterly if such circumstances arose. Zeck’s malevolent presence intrudes via telephone in two novels, And Be a Villain (1948) and The Second Confession (1949). In the latter, he sends gunmen to fire on Wolfe's orchid rooms in an attempt to dissuade Wolfe from investigating a case that could lead back to him. Zeck had previously telephoned Wolfe twice: on June 9, 1943, concerning Wolfe’s work for General Carpenter; and on January 16, 1946, regarding Mrs. Tremont. Zeck himself appears in In the Best Families (1950), the third book of what is popularly called The Zeck Trilogy, in which Nero Wolfe finds it necessary to defeat Zeck once and for all. In 1974, the Viking Press collected the three Zeck novels in an omnibus volume, Triple Zeck, and in 2016, Random House issued an e-book set of the three books titled The Zeck Trilogy. "I was thrilled when Wolfe finally encountered his own Moriarty in the archvillain Arnold Zeck," wrote Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post. British author and literary critic David Langford and others have compared the relationship between Zeck and Wolfe to that of Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. The role of Arnold Zeck (renamed Arnold Dorso) is played by Robert Loggia in "In the Best Families", an episode of the 1981 NBC TV series Nero Wolfe. Notes References External links