Arnold Zeck
Arnold Zeck appears in three Nero Wolfe novels. Zeck is a mysterious and powerful crime boss possessed of a superior intellect. He and Wolfe become mutual admirers and antagonists in the course of several cases.
Zeck’s malevolent presence intrudes via telephone in two novels, And Be a Villain (1948) and The Second Confession (1949). 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.
"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 has also noted that the relationship between Zeck and Wolfe compares 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.
Read more about this topic: Nero Wolfe Supporting Characters
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“Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)