The Last of the Black Widowers

Isaac Asimov, best known as the author of science fiction novels and short stories, and non-fiction science essays and books, was a fan of Agatha Christie and other mystery writers, and had long wanted to branch out into the mystery genre. His first forays in that genre carried on with his scientific expertise - he wrote a novel A Whiff of Death, in which a professor at a New York university must discover who has murdered his graduate student by substituting cyanide for chemicals on which he'd been working, and of course his two novels Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957) were science fiction mysteries with a human detective and his positronic robot sidekick Daneel Oliwaw.

He then created Wendell Urth, who also dealt with scientific mysteries, with his debut in "The Singing Bells."

But he had always wanted to get into Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and finally accomplished that feat with "The Acquisitive Chuckle," in 1972.

The formula for the Black Widowers stories are the same in all cases, six members of the club, and their waiter Henry, meet once a month at the Milano restaurant for dinner and conversation. A guest is brought, who is "grilled" - asked to justify his existence, and invariably he (it is always a he, for this is a stag organization, except on one occasion when a woman is permitted to present her story, but must remain seated just outside the doorway to the dining room.)

Murder is only involved once in these stories, they are all ...not trivial... but involve such things as stolen bonds, cheating on a test, mislaying a manuscript, and so on. Indeed, as the stories go on, the problems become more and more trivial and far-fetched, but they continue to be popular because readers like the men who compirse the Black Widowers, in particular their invaluable waiter Henry, who is the one who really solves the puzzles.

Asimov was writing these stories during the 70s and 80s, when women were first beginning to challenge those men-only laws for organizations and clubs, and the fact that the Black Widowers is a stag organization and the women's movement is referenced on more than one occasion (for all that, I think Asimov really did think of women only as eye candy...for the most part).

The Return of the Black Widowers, the final book of the series, was published posthumously, and edited by Charles Ardai (with a touching and humorous forward by Harlan Ellison, who appears as Darius Just in one of the stories in the volume, The Woman in The Bar.) Eleven of the stories are reprints of stories from the other collections, six are uncollected stories (since there need to be twelve to fill out an anthology, and Asimov died prior to completing the whole set), and two stories about the Black Widowers by other writers, William Brittain's "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov" - in which a group of men try to solve a contest using Henry's methods in the Black Widowers stories that they like, the other, by Charles Ardai, a Black Widowers tale.

The weakest story in the collection, and the one I dislike most of all, is "Yes, But Why." It deviates from the formula in that there is no guest - Henry wants to be the guest. He has a problem, and it is by hearing solutions suggested by the other members that he is able to clear away the dross to see the truth. On this occasion, he is having lady problems. As I read this story I just wanted to slap the lady in question, and Henry, and Asimov!

"I have told you," said Henry, "that she is a reserved and independant woman; that we have had a cool and entirely intellectual companionship. It may be, perhaps," and here he grew a trifle pinker, "that she found herself dissatisfied with that companionship. She knew that I pride myself on bein able to see into a complex situation, and it may be she plotted one in which I would fail."

"Yes, but why?" said Rubin.

"So that she would have a reasonable excuse to be distressed and weak for a considerable length of time. So that she would become dependent on me and cling to me. So that I would be concerned about her, and become more involved with her."

Oh, how I wanted to administer slaps all around!

Having said that, if you can track these books down in your local library, I would give them a try, and I suggest reading them in chronological order - in particular, read the first in the series, Tales of the Black Widowers, and its first, "The Acquisitive Chuckle," my favorite story of the lot.

Geoffrey Avalon (based on L. Sprague de Camp)
Emmanuel Rubin (based on Lester del Rey)
James Drake (based on Dr. John D. Clark)
Thomas Trumbull (based on Gilbert Cant)
Mario Gonzalo (based on Lin Carter)
Roger Halsted (based on Don Bensen)
The deceased founder of the club, Ralph Ottur, on whom the plot of the story "To the Barest" turned, was based on the real-life founder of the Trap Door Spiders, Fletcher Pratt. The stage magician The Amazing Larri, from the story "The Cross of Lorraine", was based on James Randi. The arrogant science writer Mortimer Stellar, from the story "When No Man Pursueth", was based on Asimov himself

Tales of the Black Widowers (1974)
More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980)
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984)
Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990)
The Return of the Black Widowers (2003)

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.

A Whiff of Death, by Isaac Asimov

A Whiff of Death is out of print, but of course it can be had through a wide variety of used book stores on the Internet, including Amazon and Abe.com.

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:

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