CASEBOOK OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

The third collection of Asimov's "Black Widowers" stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine—each tale consisting of 90% talk as the yakky Widowers discuss a crime puzzle over their fancy club dinners; as Asimov admits, "the mysteries, as mysteries, can be described, discussed, and solved in about a quarter of the space I devote to each." And the solutions to the puzzles usually involve some gimmicky twist: a bit of astronomy, the confusion between Cyrillic and Western alphabets, the fact that there's a Cross of Lorraine semi-concealed in the Exxon logo. So these are stories for a very limited audience—those with a taste for miniature game-playing, eager (but not genuinely erudite) dinner conversation, and Asimov's incorrigible verbal playfulness.