Then There Was Nero Wolfe

Rex Stout always wanted to write but at the beginning, writing as freelancer, he realized he could not make enough to pay the bills and searched financial independence first, so that he could pursue his career as a writer. He made his fortune devising and implementing a school banking system that was adopted in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927, with enough proceedings from his financial venture, he retired and retiring to Paris intending to write serious fiction.
Yet, it was only when he turned to detective fiction that he found his way as a writer, and it was as creator of the Nero Wolfe character that he become famous as a writer. But at the beginning there were others short lived characters, such as Theolinda (Dol) Bonner and Tecumseh Fox, before Stout settled on writing only Nero Wolfe stories. And before those, many years before the first Nero Wolfe novel, there were characters and stories that foreshadowed the Wolfe-Goodwin down and Stout's commitment to detective fiction.
It is in those stories that we find the roots and precursors of what will come almost two decades later.