Banquets of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers
Cover of first edition, 1984
Author(s)	Isaac Asimov
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Black Widowers
Genre(s)	Mystery short stories
Publisher	Doubleday, Fawcett Crest
Publication date	1984
Media type	Print (Hardcover), (Paperback)
Pages	212 pp
ISBN	0-385-19541-9
OCLC Number	10403672
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Classification	PS3551.S5 B3 1984
Preceded by	Casebook of the Black Widowers
Followed by	Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers is a collection of mystery short stories by science fiction author Isaac Asimov featuring his fictional club of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1984, and in paperback by the Fawcett Crest imprint of Ballantine Books in June 1986.

This book is the fourth of the six books featuring the Black Widowers. It collects twelve stories by Asimov, together with a general introduction and an afterword following each story by the author. Ten of the stories were previously published; the last two are new to this collection.^[1]

Each story involves the club members' knowledge of trivia. Nearly every story here is about decoding a riddle, each of which provides a clue based on dying or last words, misunderstood words, forgotten words, or withheld words. A few are based on facts that are, perhaps, not generally known to the public - Asimov was a frequent writer of popular science and his inclination to explain anything and everything for the general public carried over into other fields, such as history and sociology - but those mysteries feel as though they play fair with the reader, who is given either enough information to figure out the solution or a satisfying conclusion that is based on previously given facts and personality qualities.

Contents

• "Introduction"

• "Sixty Million Trillion Combinations" - dramatizes the paranoia of a mathematician who suspects that his work on Goldbach's conjecture has been stolen. When the authorities demand his cooperation, he sulkily gives a clue to the code which protects his work on a shared computer, suspecting that no one could possibly guess or deduce the code. Fortunately for the agencies who need this information, the Black Widowers are able to come up with the code, sheerly because one member shares a trait with the mathematician.

• "The Woman in the Bar" - the Black Widowers have as their dinner guest Darius Just, the main character from Asimov's mystery novel Murder at the ABA. Darius finds himself in danger of violent reprisals when he tries to help a frightened woman (he knows she is frightened, by he can have no idea by whom or why). She has given him crucial nonverbal communication clues which the Black Widowers solve. Asimov states that he "thought up" this Black Widowers story just for this character.^[2]

• "The Driver"

• "The Good Samaritan"

• "The Year of the Action" - a historical clue is solved about a comic opera, "The Pirates of Penzance," by Gilbert and Sullivan.

• "Can You Prove It?"

• "The Phoenician Bauble"

• "A Monday in April" - concerns a matter of trivia about ancient Rome.

• "Neither Brute Nor Human" - the story depends on the knowledge of a riddle about a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.

• "The Redhead"

• "The Wrong House"

• "The Intrusion"

References

External links

• "Banquets of the Black Widowers" - a book review by John H. Jenkins