Finally, Orrie Cather is introduced in Fer-de-Lance as a crusty old veteran detective, who smokes cigars; in all future Stout works, he would be a younger, self-confident ladies' man with no cigar-smoking habit. The story's title is the common name of Bothrops atrox, a venomous South American snake. Fer-de-Lance is French for spearhead, literally iron of the lance. In Fer-de-Lance, Stout reused a key plot point relating to the murder weapon that he had used in his early mystery The Last Drive, which was serialized in Golfers Magazine in 1916. This story had been forgotten for many years—it is not mentioned in Stout's biography or in bibliographies of his works—until it was rediscovered in 2011.<ref>Ross E. Davies & Cattleya M. Concepcion, "Fore-Shadowed: Where Rex Stout Got the Idea for Fer-de-Lance", The 2012 Green Bag Almanac and Reader pp. 249-54, [available on SSRN https://ssrn.com/abstract=1962907].</ref> Plot summary Maria Maffei, a family friend of one of Wolfe's free-lance men, offers to hire Wolfe to locate her missing brother Carlo, a metalworker. Wolfe, affected by the Depression, decides to take the job, although it is unappealing to him. Archie locates Anna Fiore, a girl who listened in on a phone call Carlo received at his boarding-house shortly before his disappearance. Wolfe learns from her that Carlo had clipped a story from a copy of The New York Times about the sudden death (apparently by stroke) of Peter Oliver Barstow, president of Holland College. However, Anna refuses to provide any further details about Carlo, who is soon found dead in the countryside, stabbed in the back. From reading the account of Barstow's death, which occurred during a round of golf, Wolfe conjectures that one of his clubs may have been altered to fire a poisoned needle into his belly. An autopsy proves Wolfe right, and he and Archie begin to concentrate on the Barstow family and their acquaintances, E.D. Kimball and his son Manuel, who had both been part of the golf foursome. While trying to figure out the whereabouts of Barstow's golf bag, Archie learns from the group's caddies that he had borrowed a driver from E.D. during the round. This fact, coupled with E.D.'s accounts of his past in Argentina, leads Wolfe and Archie to conclude that Manuel had intended to kill his father, not Barstow, in revenge for the death of his mother years earlier. Archie confirms Manuel's movements on the day