Puzzles of the Black Widowers [Hardcover]

Isaac Asimov (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1989

Once a month, the seven members of the Black Widowers Club gather for dinner at their favourite restaurant. To each dinner a guest is invited, and each guest has a problem too large and complex to solve on his own. This is the fifth collection of the "Black Widowers" stories.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The fifth Black Widowers collection has stories from 1984 to 1989, 11 appearing originally in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine . Asimov again uses a real-life New York dining club as model for the Widowers. In every story a dinner guest is asked, "How do you justify your existence?" The guests--graduate student, government spook, bookseller, plumber et al.--dispose of the question, and then pose a puzzle for the Widowers to chew over--over and over. Invariably, after the chewing, the deferential, cerebral waiter Henry, also a Widower, comes up with the solution. Said solution turns on some piece of arcana--Bermuda traffic rules, the element with the most syllables--that most readers won't know or care about. Each story is less than two dozen pages, a relief because the writing is like unbuttered, unsalted popcorn: harmless but not satisfying unless you're already addicted. Asimov assures us the Black Widowers "will continue as long as I do." Long life anyway, Dr. A.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (December 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385262647
• ISBN-13: 978-0385262644
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #961,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The fifth volume of Black Widowers stories, July 7, 2001

By 

Michele L. Worley (Kingdom of the Mouse, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Puzzles of the Black Widowers (Hardcover)

The Black Widowers meet once a month at the Milano Restaurant (notice that they take the task of host in rotation). Each month the host brings a guest for grilling, beginning with the question `How do you justify your existence?' and ending with ferreting out some mystery to be solved. The seventh Black Widower - Henry, the waiter - always solves the problem after the other six have cleared the ground a bit. The problem often isn't a crime - just some little puzzle that's been driving the guest crazy. This volume has an unusual number of spy stories, though.

I personally find the by-play between the Black Widowers entertaining in itself. For instance, Rubin can be counted upon to severely libel another writer of his acquaintance, one Isaac Asimov, a few times in every volume. :)

"The Fourth Homonym" - Host: Trumbull. Guest: Nicholas Brant, lawyer. A long-ago client named one of his children to head the family business with his dying breath - but only the word 'to' could be understood.

"Unique Is Where You Find It" - Host: Rubin. Guest: Horace Rubin, Rubin's nephew, a doctoral candidate in chemistry who has been issued a challenge by a hostile member of his committee: "I'm thinking of the name of a unique element."

"The Lucky Piece" - Host: Drake. Guest: Albert Silverstein, novelty store owner. A boy lost his lucky piece in a resort sitting-room - where it vanished into thin air.

"Triple Devil" - Host: Gonzalo. Guest: Benjamin Manfred, self-made man. Manfred had inherited a single book of his choosing from the old man's library, with only an enigmatic phrase as a clue to the correct choice.

"Sunset on the Water" - Host: Avalon. Guest: Chester Dunhill, a historian whose heart's desire is to own _The Historians' History of the World_. Someone has finally answered his advertisement, offering a copy for sale - but Dunhill threw the envelope away, so the only remaining clue to the writer's address is the text of the letter itself.

"Where Is He?" - Host: Halsted. Guest: Bradford Hume, after-dinner speaker. Hume was hired for a taping session - but the cameraman, 'Old Reliable', didn't appear.

"The Old Purse" - Host: Trumbull. Guest: William Teller. Why was his wife's old purse stolen, only for all the contents to be returned anonymously, without the purse itself?

"The Quiet Place" - Host: Rubin. Guest: Theodore Jarvik, Rubin's editor. The only clue Jarvik had to the identity of the man he met at the quiet resort was that he used the nom de guerre 'Dark Horse'.

"The Four-Leaf Clover" - Host: Drake. Guest: Alexander Mountjoy, college president. Several faculty members were taken hostage recently by terrorists, and one of them betrayed a fellow hostage (a spy). The spy left one enigmatic clue to the identity of the traitor...

"The Envelope" - Host: Gonzalo. Guest: Francis MacShannon, one-time collector of postmarks, which once led to his part in the capture of a spy.

"The Alibi" - Host: Avalon. Guest: Leonard Koenig, retired from counterintelligence. How did Koenig find the hole in a traitor's cover story?

"The Recipe" - Host: Halsted. Guest: Myron Dynast. In this locked-room mystery, his wife's blueberry muffin recipe was stolen during the only afternoon when she had it in written form - but she never left the kitchen.

4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Asimov -- quantity over quality, always., February 11, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Puzzles of the Black Widowers (Hardcover)

This collection of short stories constitutes a perfect illustration of the problem with Asimov: the man wrote millions of words in his life, but many of them weren't worth the effort. I've always enjoyed the Black Widower mystery stories, but in this fifth collection of those stories we learn that Asimov has pretty much run out of good ideas. So he publishes bad ones instead. I've read "Encyclopedia Brown" stories that were based on more clever plot twists than some of the stories in this book.