The Return of the Black Widowers Read online

  Henry walked to the foot of the table and fixed Nemerson with a penetrating stare. "You're thirty-two years old, Mr. Nemerson, you're married, you've had some success in your chosen field, and you have practically your whole life ahead of you. But try to imagine what it would be like if you were eighty-two, and dying, and quite possibly a failure in your own eyes, and you saw only one last chance to save your reputation. Maybe the only way you could do so was degrading and despicable— but it was there, it was an available option. And who would ever know? He had the only copy of Asimov's story that existed; he could retype it, destroy the original, and no one would be the wiser. And perhaps he asked himself, who would be hurt? Isaac Asimov, who already had more than four hundred books and countless awards to his name?

  "What he did, assuming that he did actually do it, was inexcusable. The act I suspect him of is deeply dishonest, and even if it were true that it hurt no one, which I do not believe, it would still be wrong in every way. But I do not agree that it is impossible."

  "No," Nemerson said, "I suppose it's not impossible."

  "Gary, you mentioned that Beard didn't appear to be a sophisticated computer user," Trumbull said. "If that's so, he probably didn't know that many word processors automatically save a backup copy each time you modify a document. If he ever typed the story in with Asimov's name on it and only later changed it to his own, you might be able to find an archived backup that shows the original version."

  "You can do better than that," Drake said. "I can put you in touch with some researchers at Columbia who have devised statistical techniques to analyze a piece of text and determine how likely it is to be the work of a given writer. You might remember the case, several years back, where this technique was used to unmask the anonymous author of Primary Colors, the political roman a clef. You can provide plenty of samples of both Asimov's and Beard's work, so it should be a simple matter to run the analysis."

  "And it is possible that this analysis will show that I am wrong," Henry said. "If so, I apologize sincerely. But I am afraid this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me."

  "Yes, I guess it does to me, too," Nemerson said, "now that you've walked us through it. But I just can't believe he would do it. How could he?"

  "It may give you some measure of comfort," Henry said, "to remind yourself that he didn't actually carry the plan out to completion. He never submitted the manuscript in its current form. Perhaps he was just entertaining the idea in a moment of despair, and if he had survived his illness, perhaps he would have changed the name on the story back and spent a few more years working on a story of his own. And perhaps in time he'd have written one, and perhaps it would have been good."

  "I don't know," Nemerson said. "Do you really think he deserves the benefit of the doubt?"

  "We all do," Henry said.

  Return to Table of Contents

  Afterword: Birth of the Black Widowers

  By Isaac Asimov

  One of the last books Isaac Asimov completed before his death in 1992 was the memoir I. Asimov, in which he wrote 166 essays concerning the major events and undertakings of his life. Among the topics he discussed was how he came to write mystery short stories in general and the Black Widowers stories in particular.

  I

  have always wanted to write mystery short stories. At the start I was committed to science fiction, of course, and some of my science fiction short stories were very much like mysteries. This was true of several of my robot stories, for instance.

  I also wrote a series of five science fiction stories about a character named Wendell Ruth, who solved mysteries without ever leaving home. The first of these, "The Singing Bell," appeared in the January 1955 [issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction].

  The Wendell Urth stories were fun, but they didn't quite satisfy my desires. I wanted to write a "straight" mystery, with no science fiction angle to it. I did write one in 1955, but Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM) rejected it. I finally placed it in The Saint Mystery Magazine, where it appeared in the January 1956 issue, under the name "Death of a Honey-Blonde." It was set in a chemistry department, however, so that, while it was not science fiction, I had not entirely freed myself from science.

  It was not a very good story and I was disheartened. Nevertheless, the urge to write short mysteries persisted. EQMM regularly publishes "first stories," usually short-shorts by writers who had never published before. My chagrin finally bubbled over and I thought, "If these amateurs can do it, why can't I?"

  So I wrote a short-short on November 12, 1969, and had it in the mail two hours after I had thought of the idea. EQMM took it and ran it under the title "A Problem in Numbers" in the May 1970 issue of the magazine.

  But that dealt with a chemistry department, too, as, for that matter, had The Death Dealers, my one straight mystery novel up to that time. It irritated me. I wanted to write nonscience mysteries. Why? Science and science fiction had been so good to me. Why should I abandon a faithful wife (so to speak) to lust after some flirtatious stranger?

  Well, I had done science fiction. I wanted new worlds to conquer. I had always loved mystery short stories from childhood and I wanted to do mysteries too. Besides, if you want a less idealistic reason, I found mysteries easier to write than science fiction. . . .

  My first sale of a story to EQMM did not lead to a flood of mystery writing. After all, I never lacked for other things to do. In early 1971, however, Eleanor Sullivan, the beautiful blond managing editor of EQMM, wrote me a letter asking for a story. Eagerly, I agreed, but now I had to think of a plot.

  I got one quickly because two stories above our apartment lived David Ford, a corpulent actor with a resonant baritone voice. (Voices, in my opinion, are much more important than faces to an actor, unless he is the vacuous matinee idol type.) He invited us to his apartment once and we found it crammed to the ceiling with what, in Yiddish, are called chochkes—that is, miscellaneous objects which strike the fancy of an omnivorous collector. He told us he once had a repairman in his apartment while he was forced to walk his dog. He was sure that the repairman had taken one or two of his chochkes, but he was never able to determine what was missing, or, in fact, whether anything was missing at all.

  That was all I needed. I wrote the story quickly and it appeared in the January 1972 EQMM under the title "The Acquisitive Chuckle."

  I thought of it as simply a story, but when it appeared, [editor] Fred Dannay s blurb announced it as "the first of a NEW SERIES by Isaac Asimov." (The capitalization was Dannay's.) That was the first I heard of that, but I was willing to go along with it.

  I wrote more and more stories involving the same characters. When I had written twelve and decided to have them collected in a book, Dannay assumed the series was finished and said so in print. He little knew me. I continued the series stubbornly and I have now written no fewer than sixty-five stories. (What's the good of being a prolific writer if you don't proliferate?)

  I call the series the Black Widower stories because each one takes place at one of the monthly banquets of a club of that name. The club is modeled unabashedly on a real club of which I am a member, the Trap Door Spiders....

  The stories are entirely conversational. The six club members discuss matters in a quarrelsome, idiosyncratic way. There is a guest, who is asked questions after dinner, and whose answers reveal some sort of mystery, which the Black Widowers cannot solve but which, in the end, is solved by the waiter, Henry.

  Eventually, the various Black Widower stories were published, twelve at a time, by Doubleday. The books that have appeared, so far, are:

  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

  I have written five more stories that will be included in a sixth volume someday when the new total reaches twelve. In the 1970s and 19
80s, I wrote something like 120 mystery short stories, far more than the number of science fiction short stories I wrote in that period. I don't think that will change. I enjoy the mysteries more.

  Let me explain this. Those 120 mysteries are "old-fashioned." Modern mysteries are more and more exercises in police procedurals, private eye dramatics, and psychopathology, all of them tending to give us heaping handfuls of sex and violence.

  The older mysteries, in which there are a closed series of suspects and a brilliant detective (often amateur) weaving his clever chain of inference and deduction, seem to be, for the most part, gone. They are referred to nowadays, with a vague air of contempt, as "cozy mysteries" and their heyday was Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. The great cozy writers were people such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, and Michael Innes.

  Well, that's what I write. I make no secret of the fact that in my mysteries I use Agatha Christie as my model. In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written, far better than the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Hercule Poirot is the best detective fiction has seen. Why should I not use as my model what I consider the best?

  What's more, every last one of my mysteries is an "armchair detective" story. The story is revealed in conversation, the clues are presented fairly, and the reader has a reasonable chance to beat the fictional detective to the solution. Sometimes readers do exactly that, and I get triumphant letters to that effect. On rare occasions I even get letters pointing out improved solutions.

  Old-fashioned? Certainly! But so what? Other people in writing mystery stories have their purposes, which may be to instill a sense of adventure, or a grisly sense of horror, or whatever. It is my purpose in my mysteries (and, in actual fact, in everything I write, fiction and nonfiction) to make people think. My stories are puzzle stories and I see nothing wrong with that. In fact, I find them a challenge, like writing limericks, since the rules for preparing honest puzzle stories are so strict.

  This means, incidentally, that the stories do not have to involve pathological acts or violent crime—or, indeed, any crime at all.

  One of the mysteries that I had most fun in writing recently was "Lost in a Space Warp," which appeared in the March 1990 EQMM. It dealt with a man who mislaid his umbrella in his girlfriend's small apartment and couldn't find it. From the information he gave, Henry deduced where it could be found, without stirring from his position at the sideboard.

  What's more, I don't intend to alter the format of these stories. They will stay always the same. The guest of the Black Widowers will always have a mystery to tell, the Black Widowers will always be stumped, and Henry will always come up with the solution....

  Why not? The background is an artificial one designed only to present the puzzle. What I intend is to have the reader greet each new story with the comfortable feeling of encountering old friends, meeting the same characters under the same circumstances, and having a fresh mind stretcher over which to try to outguess me.

  And in his penultimate Black Widowers collection, Banquets of the Black Widowers, he wrote:

  And so I say farewell once again, and very reluctantly. There are few stories I write that I enjoy as much as I enjoy my Black Widowers, and having written forty-eight of them altogether has not in the least diminished my pleasure or worn out their welcome to my typing fingers. I can't guarantee that this is true of my readers, but I certainly hope it is.

  Return to Table of Contents

  Back Cover