Asimov’s Black Widowers are cozier than Agatha Christie

 I first stumbled across Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers stories when I was in middle school or high school so it’s safe to say that I’ve been reading them off and on for a long time.

They are a series of straight up just straight up mystery stories. While Asimov is synonymous with science fiction, he wrote a lot more than that. (In fact, he wrote far more non-fiction than anything else.)

The Black Widowers are social club based on one that Asimov actually belonged to. (He denied the real life one ever solved mysteries though) And the stories are formulaic enough that even the characters seem to be aware of it. The Black Widowers meet once a month, there is almost always a guest who has some sort of problem and their waiter Henry solves it at the end of the story.

That being said, Asimov got more than fifteen years worth of writing out of the Black Widowers, up to the end of his life. And I like the justification that Henry was able to solve so many mysteries because all the arguing about the problem at hand helped him analyze it. That helps justify the formula.

I recently realized that, while I have read quite a bit of the series, I have never read the second collection, More Tales of the Black Widowers. Either I missed it because it has almost the same title as the first book, (only adding the word more to it) or I had completely forgotten about it.

So I decided to correct that.

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Ironically, this collection includes the story that introduced me to the Black Widowers, The Ultimate Crime, which was reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space. Further ironically, that story wasn’t about any crime or puzzle but the club helping someone come up with a topic for a Sherlock Holmes paper. I honestly don’t consider it one of the stronger stories.

However, the collection also contains what I now consider to be the weakest Black Widowers story, Nothing Like Murder. A Russian guest believes he heard two college students planning a murder. Henry is about to figure out that they were really just talking about Tolkien. Murder and Mordor just sound alike.

I don’t know if the conceit might have been cuter back in the 1970s, when fantasy and science fiction were a lot more niche, or if it would have seemed obnoxious. I did think Henry figuring it out was a lot more of a magical deduction than usual with his reasoning coming down to ‘college students talk about Tolkien’

(I am now sure that I hadn’t read this collection before because I’d have remembered Nothing Like Murder lol)

It’s ironic to harp on those two stories because one of the strengths of the series is its consistency. The formulaic nature feels comforting. Seven friends solving problems that usually don’t involve them in a luxurious restaurant is probably the height of cozy mystery.

The actual mysteries themselves, while theoretically fair play, are sometimes built on very obscure bits of trivia. Asimov actually softens this by having Henry’s solutions not being definitive but simply the most likely. 

However, the Black Widowers aren’t really puzzle for the readers to solve. They are a very pleasant and entertaining form of escapism :)

Isaac Asimov and the character of Sherlock Holmes

 Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space was published in 1985 and I’m pretty sure my brother found it around that time and introduced it to me. It is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes science fiction stories and it was edited by Isaac Asimov, as well as Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh. Of course, Isaac Asimov’s name is the one that is the biggest on the cover.

From what I can tell, this is one of the earliest examples of a fantastical collection of Sherlock Holmes fiction. Lord knows, you won’t have a problem finding a whole bunch of them now.

I decided to go back and reread the book for the first time in my adult life. And it was not the experience I was expecting. Yes, I couldn’t remember reading some of the stories whatsoever. Yes, some of them weren’t as good as I remembered. But they were still pretty decent on a whole.

But here was the surprise. All of the stories in the book were reprints and, reading the book with more awareness, I realized how much the book tapped into other series. In fact, the book had introduced me to a number of different authors.

When I first read it, I fully realized that the book included a story from Paul Anderson and Gordon Dickson’s Hoka series and Assimov’s own Black Widowers. I’ve gone on to read both of those series. I honestly find the Hoka series pretty one note but the Black Widowers are a lot of fun.

However, I had forgotten there is a story from Fred Saberhagen’s Beserker series, which would have been the first time I would have read anything from that series. I learned that there was a story from the Brigadier Ffellowes series. (Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space is the only place I remember ever heard of that series so I have no idea if it’s any good)

What I found most fascinating is that the book contains two of Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton stories. Which are, in many ways, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thirty years older. Including the first of Farmer’s two Ralph Von Wau Wau stories. (Spider Robinson would go onto use the character more often and, frankly, better to the point that I feel he’s now really a Robinson character.) 

Really, the Wold Newton family setting actually serves as a model for the anthology as a whole. Because so many of the stories aren’t Sherlock Holmes stories as much as they are meta commentary about Sherlock Holmes. Which makes the book honestly far more interesting than if it was just Sherlock Holmes in Outer Space.

Taken as pieces, Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space is an amusing series of yarns. Taken as a whole, it’s an interesting exploration of the character.