The Return of the Black Widowers (49 page)
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 1980s, 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.
