By James Brady, PARADE

We all love a good mystery. And thanks to Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton, the wonderful detective Nero Wolfe is back on television Sunday nights on A&E. Tim doesn't play the fat and fastidious Wolfe (that's Maury Chaykin, who was the neurotic Army officer in Dances With Wolves). But the films, which began earlier this spring and will run 13 weeks, are Hutton's baby. He was an executive producer, directed several of them, and plays Wolfe's slimmer, dashing and equally dapper legman, Archie.

We spoke on the weekend the first film made its debut. In the '70s, Tim's late dad, actor Jim Hutton, starred on the Ellery Queen mystery series. Had the younger Hutton, now 40, grown up reading whodunits? "In high school I got to be a mystery fan," said Hutton. "I liked Rex Stout [who wrote the Wolfe books] and later began to haunt the bookstores looking for his mysteries. By the time we did The Golden Spiders [a Wolfe story] last year as a one-shot on A&E, I must have read half of the Nero Wolfe books [there are 73 of them]. That movie did well in the ratings, and so we thought it might be worth doing more. Since then, I guess I've read them all."

The stories are set in the 1940s and '50s in the Manhattan townhouse of the eccentric, orchid-cultivating Wolfe but were filmed in a warehouse that was "outside Toronto and very cold," said Hutton.

"We wanted to be faithful to the books," he added. "Even the colors. Nero Wolfe always wears yellow shirts. The front stoop has to have seven steps. There's a look to the show. [Some of what i saw reminded me of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy.] And I wanted to get away from the detective genre and that 'what's around the corner' music and give it more of the big band, swing and jazz sound. And, yes, the orchids are real." So too is the food -- so important to gourmet Wolfe. "A gourmet chef is in the back preparing quail, pheasant, pate'," said Hutton. "We eat pretty well on this set -- cast and crew both."

"Brady Bits"

It has been 21 years since young Timothy Hutton won the Academy Award working for director Robert Redford in Ordinary People. And he's been making feature films ever since, including Taps, The Falcon and the Snowman and Beautiful Girls. Hutton grew up in Malibu and dropped out of high school to get into acting full-time. These days he lives in the country in upstate New York. On the day after we spoke, he and his 14-year-old son, Noah, were heading down to Yankee Stadium to see the Red Sox play the Yanks. After wrapping his final Nero Wolfe film recently, Hutton took off for Amelia Island, Fla., to make Sunshine State for John Sayles, also starring Edie Falco (The Sopranos), Mary Steenburgen, Angela Bassett and Jane Alexander. At least it's in Florida, in the sun, and not in a warehouse in chilly Ontario. On the other hand, they won't be dining on pheasant and pate'.

Thanks to Janet for supplying this article.