Asimov writes about A Whiff of Death

Isaac Asimov discusses his writing of A Whiff of Death in his autobiography, In Joy Still Felt. I reproduce some of what he says below:

[and there a reveal of the murderer, so beware]

On May 14, 1957, or thereabouts, Asimov began writing a straight mystery novel. He had been asked to do so by Isabel Taylor of Crime Club, Doubleday's mystery outlet (Doubleday being one of the publishers of his science and science fiction work.)

My first title was Sit With Death. After I had written two chapters, I sent it off to Isabelle Taylor and began a new science fiction story.

And

Meanwhile [while he was dealing with the threat of being fired from the Medical School because he did not have tenure, pg 99] all that month I had been racing to finish Sit With Death, my mystery novel. It was done on September 22, and I liked it a great deal. ...It had, not entirely coincidently, a subplot in which the professorial hero struggled to obtain tenure.

However, on October 4, Isabelle Taylor told him she didn't like the book, and rejected it. It was the first time Doubleday had ever rejected one of his books.

He retitled it A Whiff of Death and sent it to other publishers, but it was coninually rejected. (This despite the fact that at this time he was extremely well known as a science and science fiction writer. He was also doing battle with the Boston University Medical School at this time.)

I discovered, eventually, that the chief flaw in the book from the standpoint of the publishers was the inadequacy of the motive for the murder. It involved a PhD student faking results, and that seemed a tiny sin to most editorial readers.

When I gave fellowe professors an inkling of the plot, however, they shuddered and turned away from me, obviously suspecting some deep-seated perverse element in my nature even to imagine so heinous a crime. Too little for one group of people, too much for another.

Finally, Avon accepted the book, perhaps - thought Asimov - because they hoped to get some science fiction books out of him as well.

Several months pass.

On that December 10 trip to New York, I picked up an advance copy of the Avon paperback edition of my mystery. They called it The Death Dealers, a totally inapprpriate name. What's more, there was on the cover a beautiful woman holding a gun-which was fine except there was no beautiful women in the story and no gun. I complained, but the Avon editor told me the cover was simply a device to label the book as a mystery and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with the story.

The book was not a success in its original printing (because of the title, Asimov believes), but as Asimov says:

The poor reception that The Death Dealers received, both in manuscript and in print, deterred me [from writing a sequel with his police officer detective, Jack Doheny.]

He tells another story:

When I wrote the book, I was very anxious not to have anyone think I was satirizing the medical school [where he was teaching at Boston University School of Medicine], so I kept my mind firmly fixed on Columbia University [which he had attended], its physical plant, its faculty, even some of the graduate students I had known. It never occurred to me that anyone at Columbia would recognize the descriptions, but of course they did. It became a game there, trying to guess who the various characters were, and everyone wanted a copy.

and

On November 24, I had agreed to talk aty Columbia University the next March. Since I had left Columbia 15 years before, I have returned only once or twice and it hd become foreign territory to me. I was not foreign to the Columbia students, apparently.

I was to talk to the chemistry students in particular, and the young man who invited me told me with great glee that various faculty members would come and, in particular, that John M. "Pop" Nelson would be there. Pop Nelson had taught me undergraduate organic chemistry a quarter century before, and it was his appearance that I had taken in vain in my picture of the murderer in The Death Dealers.

What's more, the student referred to Pop Nelson as "Cap Anson," the name I had used in the book, and said that Nelson had read the book. I was horrified, and wrote to ask for assurance that Nelson had not been angered before I would agree to come. [Asimov had assumed he'd been dead for years when he wrote the book.]

Was the book's initial failure because of its titla, The Death Dealers? Asimov received the rights back from the initial publisher, and sold it to someone else for a reprint, when it was given his original title, A Whiff of Death, and that's when all the reprints came.