I still reread all of Nero Wolfe once a year; it's one of my summer rituals, man being a creature of habit! There's so much fun stuff there--the orchids, the haute cuisine, the love for New York, baseball, the passion for words--and truly do I think that Archie is one of the great, great comedic voices in American literature. The mysteries themselves are often not so mysterious, but the writing is so very good. I even have the cookbook!

Raymond Chandler, too, OHG!

Oh, and purist about such things though I normally am, I do very much like Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell novels. The first one in particular (The Beekeeper's Apprentice) I can see really appealing to our kids here.