The return of the Black Widowers Book

Waaaay back in high school, I did a term paper on Asimov for my American Lit course, but it was entirely focused on his science fiction. I didn't know he wrote mysteries at all until I found this tucked away on a low shelf at a used book sale. Of course I bought it.

The wit and precision I remember from his other work is present here, and the cleverness, too. As individual stories, I have few real complaints, despite generally disliking mystery. These are much more puzzlers than they are whodunits, and most of the stories resolved with a ending, a revelation, that I found satisfactory. (I say most because some of them are highly academic, and you don't have a chance of figuring it out if you aren't familiar with the exact same canon of knowledge as the author.)

The problem I have with this is that putting together this many stories in an anthology is that it shows clearly how formulaic they are. The details repeat in a way that would make sense of stories published over months and years, but are completely redundant when read back to back. The structure of each story is brutally identical, and despite the small idiosyncracies of each man in the Widowers, they all speak with the same high-handed posh manner that made me think they're British, even though a) this is set in the US, and b) they use none of the British slang that I would expect from male-only rich-people puzzle-solving dinners. They're all horribly elitist, and it's grating.

So what it really boils down to is that I like the style of the puzzles, they're the sparkling gemstones in a terrible setting that detracts from their beauty. I can admire the wit and cleverness while hating that this is an old white boy's club that makes it a point never to admit women.