It was first published in 1958 (as The Death Dealers) and went through several reprintings, though as mentioned above its out of print now.
I'm really ambivelent about whether or not I like the book or not, although I am probably influenced by my opinion of Isaac Asimov (love his non-fiction, don't care much for his fiction. No - not even the Foundation Series or the Positronic Robots!)
Well, let's get to the review first. I'll save the commentary for a sequel to this blog entry, which I'll post tomorrow.
Louis Brade is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at a certain New York university. He is based on Isaac Asimov, and his experiences at the Boston University School of Medicine, where he was an assistant professor while also pursuing his writing career.
Brade is a mild man, who has been an Assistant Professor for eleven years. Life at home is somewhat difficult, as his wife, Doris, wants him to get tenure (by being promoted to Associate Professor) to give them security. As an assistant professor, he can be dispensed with at the end of each school year for any reason or no reason. With tenure, he can't be.
Unfortunately, as the book opens, Brade has just discovered his prize PhD student Ralph Neufeld, dead in the laboratory. He'd been working with various chemicals, and had died from inhaling cyanide. And Brade, knowing of Neufeld's idiosyncrasies in preparing his various concoctions for experiments, knows that his death could not have been an accident...it must have been murder...and that as his advisor, he, Brade, is the most likely suspect.
In order to save not only his chance at tenure but also his freedom, Brade must discover who really kiled Neufeld, and why.
A Whiff of Death is a fascinating view into the inner world of higher education - where professors have (academic) life-or-death over their students, and everyone is anxious for tenure, and, in the 1950s at least, faculty wives bullied their husbands over status and tenure (because, of course, being unable to have careers of their own, their only status depended on that of their husband's).
There is a lot of scientific jargon throughout the book, but not so much as to grow weary - at least not to the average mystery reader, who has the use of his or her brain above that of the mere romance reader! - and Asimov does play fair with the reader (about on a par with his Black Widowers mysteries....the clues are there, but well obscured).
If you like Asimov's writing style, and you like mysteries, you'll enjoy A Whiff of Death, Asimov's first "straight" mystery novel. (His first science fiction/mystery novel was The Caves of Steel, published in 1954.)
Here are the first few paragraphs from the book:
Death sits in the chemistry laboratory and a million people sit with him and don't mind.
They forget he's there.
Louis Brade, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, would, however, never forget that little fact again. He slumped in the chair in the cluttered student laboratory, sitting with Death, and very conscious of it. More conscious of it, in fact, now that the police were gone and the corridors were empty once more. More conscious of it now that the lab had been cleared of the physical evidence of mortality in the shape of Ralph Neufeld's body.
But Death was still there. He hadn't been touched.
Brade removed his glasses and polished them slowly with a clean handkerchief that he kept for that one use, then paesed to look at the double reflection, one in each lens, each broadened in the middle by the trick of glass-curvature so that his spare face looked full and his wide, thin lipped mouth wider.
No deeper marks, he wondered. Hair as dark as it was three hours ago, face lined about the eyes (as was fitting at forty-two), but no more lined than before all this?
Surely, one couldn't deal with Death so closely and not be marked in some way.
And here are a few covers:
And in a test for future use, just to see if Kindle can handle umlauts and things:
ä
ë
ö
ü
β
Ű
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