I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  When Elyse first got the idea for a Star Trek convention in 1972, the long-term popularity of the show had not yet been proven, and she expected not more than 400. She got 2,500. Of course, this success meant that Elyse (and others too) organized other conventions

  throughout the 1970s. I attended virtually all of them that were held in Manhattan, always giving a talk on such occasions. I was present, in fact, at one convention that was incredibly oversuccessful. So many people swarmed into the hotel with the intention of attending the convention that they crystallized. The halls and stairways were so full of people that no one (literally) could move. Fortunately, I saw that coming just before crystallization was complete and I managed to struggle out somehow into the street.

  I am always happy to talk, and signing books (within reason) is flattering and helps public relations. However, I was aware that the focus of attention was on the Star Trek people and I was clearly an outsider. The vast majority of the attendees may well not even have known who I was. Disenchantment was complete on one occasion when William Shatner himself (Captain Kirk of the good ship Enterprise) held an enormous audience spellbound with a talk that was largely question-and-answer, but eventually, of course, he finished and had to leave.

  This created a problem. How could he be gotten out of the hotel without his being mobbed and, probably, suffocated by his adoring groupies. There was a flying wedge of guards designed to protect him, but the crowd, if aroused, would have been overwhelming.

  So the organizer of the meeting (not Elyse, who had left the field to others) begged me to hold the crowd while Shatner got away. I had no notice that this would happen, but I got up and began speaking. I was warming up nicely when word came back that Shatner had reached his limousine and had been whisked away. At that point, I was kicked off the stage in mid-sentence.

  I appreciate the flattery that led people to believe I was the only one who could pin an audience to their seats, but I did not appreciate being so blatantly used. They might have let me complete my talk. After that, I took a leaf from Shatner’s book. When I felt like going to a local convention, I arrived just before I was scheduled to speak and disappeared just after.

  Of course, I was never in danger from charging groupies.

  Short Mysteries

  But back to my writing career and to a new departure I made in the 1970s.

  I have always wanted to write mystery short stories. At the start I was committed to science fiction, of course, and some of my science fiction short stories were very much like mysteries. This was true of several of my robot stories, for instance.

  I also wrote a series of five science fiction stories about a character named Wendell Urth, who solved mysteries without ever leaving home. The first of these, “The Singing Bell,” appeared in the January 1955 F&SF.

  The Wendell Urth stories were fun, but they didn’t quite satisfy my desires. I wanted to write a “straight” mystery, with no science fiction angle to it. I did write one in 1955, but Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM) rejected it. I finally placed it in The Saint Mystery Magazine, where it appeared in the January 1956 issue, under the name “Death of a Honey-Blonde.” It was set in a chemistry department, however, so that, while it was not science fiction, I had not entirely freed myself from science.

  It was not a very good story and I was disheartened. Nevertheless, the urge to write short mysteries persisted. EQMM regularly publishes “first stories,” usually short-shorts by writers who had never published before. My chagrin finally bubbled over and I thought, “If these amateurs can do it, why can’t I?”

  So I wrote a short-short on November 12, 1969, and had it in the mail two hours after I had thought of the idea. EQMM took it and it ran under the title “A Problem in Numbers” in the May 1970 issue of the magazine.

  But that dealt with a chemistry department too, as, for that matter, had The Death Dealers, my one straight mystery novel up to that time. It irritated me. I wanted to write nonscience mysteries. Why? Science and science fiction had been so good to me. Why should I abandon a faithful wife (so to speak) to lust after some flirtatious stranger?

  Well, I had done science fiction. I wanted new worlds to conquer. I had always loved mystery short stories from childhood and I wanted to do mysteries too. Besides, if you want a less idealistic reason, I found mysteries easier to write than science fiction.

  Perhaps it was the spirit of emulation that stirred me most. I have noticed that when I watch a good TV show involving lawyers, or musicians, or detectives, or whatever, I at once experience a great longing to be a lawyer, or a musician, or a detective, or whatever myself. I reached the height of the ridiculous once when I watched a good TV show about writers. I turned to Janet and said, “How I wish I were a writer!” (There is one exception. I have never watched a show about physicians that made me in the least want to be one. Rather the reverse.)

  Why this spirit of emulation? I suppose it’s the desire to do everything, to shine in all directions. Even when I confine myself to writing, I sometimes say, in moments of grandiosity, “If I had my way, I would write every book in the world.”

  Is this mere laudable ambition? Or is it the megalomania that caused Alexander the Great to weep at the fact that there was only one world to conquer? I think rather the former. After all, whatever my impulses, I keep my actual deeds firmly under control and do not take on any projects I strongly suspect I can’t do. I don’t really try to be a lawyer, or a musician, or a detective, or whatever. I realize that writing fills my whole life and that to be anything else even just a little bit would force me to cut down on that writing, and that would be impossible.

  Nevertheless, I have two abiding sorrows for missed nonwriting opportunities. First, that I never learned Russian, which I could have done with no trouble whatever if my parents had only spoken Russian to me as a child. Second, that there was never any money to give me piano lessons and voice lessons. (I can carry a tune perfectly and have a good natural voice but it is completely untrained.)

  Oh, well, I would have to keep using Russian if I weren’t to forget it, and I would have to practice music regularly if I played. Writing is rustproof, on the other hand. At least, I find it so. If circumstances keep me from my typewriter for a period of time, I find that I can return to it with my expertise unblunted.

  But back to my short mysteries—

  My first small sale of a story to EQMM did not lead to a flood of mystery writing. After all, I never lacked for other things to do.

  In early 1971, however, Eleanor Sullivan, the beautiful blond managing editor of EQMM, wrote me a letter asking for a story. Eagerly, I agreed, but now I had to think of a plot.

  I got one quickly because two stories above our apartment lived David Ford, a corpulent actor with a resonant baritone voice. (Voices, in my opinion, are much more important than faces to an actor, unless he is the vacuous matinee idol type.) He invited us to his apartment once and we found it crammed to the ceiling with what, in Yiddish, are called chochkes—that is, miscellaneous objects which strike the fancy of an omnivorous collector. He told us he once had a repairman in his apartment while he was forced to walk his dog. He was sure that the repairman had taken one or two of his chochkes, but he was never able to determine what was missing, or, in fact, whether anything was missing at all.

  That was all I needed. I wrote the story quickly and it appeared in the January 1972 EQMM under the title “The Acquisitive Chuckle,”

  I thought of it as simply a story, but when it appeared, Fred Dan-nay’s blurb announced it as “the first of a NEW SERIES by Isaac Asimov.” (The capitalization was Dannay’s.) That was the first I heard of that, but I was willing to go along with it.

  I wrote more and more stories involving the same characters. When I had written twelve and decided to have them collected in a book, Dannay assumed the series was finished and said so in print. He little knew me. I continued the series stubbornly and I have now written no fewer than sixty-five stories. (What’
s the good of being a prolific writer if you don’t proliferate?)

  I call the series the Black Widower stories because each one takes place at one of the monthly banquets of a club of that name. The club is modeled unabashedly on a real club of which I am a member, the Trap Door Spiders, concerning which I will have more to say later. The stories are entirely conversational. The six club members dis cuss matters in a quarrelsome, idiosyncratic way. There is a guest, who is asked questions after dinner, and whose answers reveal some sort of mystery, which the Black Widowers cannot solve but which, in the end, are solved by the waiter, Henry.

  Eventually, the various Black Widower stories were published, twelve at a time, by Doubleday. The books that have appeared, so far, are:

  Tales of the Black Widowers 1974

  More Tales of the Black Widowers 1976

  Casebook of the Black Widowers 1980

  Banquets of the Black Widowers 1984

  Puzzles of the Black Widowers 1990

  I have written five more stories that will be included in a sixth

  volume someday when the new total reaches twelve.

  A second series of mystery short stories began when Eric Protter,

  editor of Gallery, asked me to do a 2,200-word mystery for his maga zine every month. (The Black Widower stories are 5,500 words long, on the average.) Gallery is what is called a “girlie magazine,” and though it wasn’t quite as anatomical as some of the others, it was “girlie” enough to alarm me. “I don’t do erotica, Eric,” I said.

  He assured me I wouldn’t have to. So I set up another background.

  Four men meet periodically in the library of the Union Club. Three of them engage in a brief conversation which reminds the fourth, Gris wold, of a story. Griswold tells it and it always turns out to contain a mystery which Griswold solves. He doesn’t tell the solution until the other three demand one indignantly, denying that there can be one. Then he reveals it. I call these the Griswold stories. I wrote my first Griswold story on March 9, 1980, and Gallery

  published thirty-three Griswolds before it changed publishers in Au gust 1983 and dispensed with my services. I continued to write them occasionally, however, and to place them with EQMM.

  I have also written some mystery short-shorts for youngsters, many of which have been published in Boys’ Life. The best of them, in my opinion, was rejected by Boys’ Life (perhaps because it referred to terrorism) but was snapped up by EQMM and appeared in its July 1977 issue under the title “The Thirteenth Day of Christmas.”

  In the 1970s and 1980s, I wrote something like 120 mystery short stories, far more than the number of science fiction short stories I wrote in that period. I don’t think that will change. I enjoy the mysteries more.

  Let me explain this. Those 120 mysteries are “old-fashioned.” Modern mysteries are more and more exercises in police procedurals, private-eye dramatics, and psychopathology, all of them tending to give us heaping handfuls of sex and violence.

  The older mysteries, in which there are a closed series of suspects and a brilliant detective (often amateur) weaving his clever chain of inference and deduction, seem to be, for the most part, gone. They are referred to nowadays, with a vague air of contempt, as “cozy mysteries” and their heyday was Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. The great cozy writers were such people as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, and Michael Innes.

  Well, that’s what I write. I make no secret of the fact that in my mysteries I use Agatha Christie as my model. In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written, far better than the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Hercule Poirot is the best detective fiction has seen. Why should I not use as my model what I consider the best?

  What’s more, every last one of my mysteries is an “armchair detective” story. The story is revealed in conversation, the clues are presented fairly, and the reader has a reasonable chance to beat the fictional detective to the solution. Sometimes readers do exactly that, and I get triumphant letters to that effect. On rare occasions I even get letters pointing out improved solutions.

  Old-fashioned? Certainly! But so what? Other people in writing mystery stories have their purposes, which may be to instill a sense of adventure, or a grisly sense of horror, or whatever. It is my purpose in my mysteries (and, in actual fact, in everything I write, fiction and nonfiction) to make people think. My stories are puzzle stories and I see nothing wrong with that. In fact, I find them a challenge, like writing limericks, since the rules for preparing honest puzzle stories are so strict.

  This means, incidentally, that the stories do not have to involve pathological acts or violent crime—or, indeed, any crime at all. One of the mysteries that I had most fun in writing recently was “Lost in a Space Warp,” which appeared in the March 1990 EQMM. It dealt with a man who mislaid his umbrella in his girlfriend’s small apartment and couldn’t find it. From the information he gave, Henry deduced where it could be found, without stirring from his position at the sideboard.

  What’s more, I don’t intend to alter the format of these stories. They will stay always the same. The guest of the Black Widowers will always have a mystery to tell, the Black Widowers will always be

  stumped, and Henry will always come up with the solution. Similarly, Griswold will always tell his stories and the other three will never see the solution till it is explained. Why not? The background is an artificial one designed only to present the puzzle. What I intend is to have the reader greet each new story with the comfortable feeling of encountering old friends, meeting the same characters under the same circumstances, and having a fresh mind stretcher over which to try to outguess me.

  Trap Door Spiders

  During the 1970s, I joined a number of organizations, more through circumstance than through eagerness to do so. Since I mentioned the Trap Door Spiders in the previous section, that would seem a good starting point.

  When I first went to Philadelphia, back in 1942, I met John D. Clark, through Sprague de Camp. In their younger days, they had been college classmates. Clark (universally called “Doc” because he had a Ph.D.) had a thin face, a very thin mustache, a keen sense of straight-faced humor, and (unfortunately) was a chain smoker, which kept me away from him.

  He was an inorganic chemist who, in the war years, worked on rocket explosives. In the late 1930s, he had written two excellent science fiction stories and then never wrote again. One of them, “Minus Planet” (April 1937 ASF), was the first story, I think, to deal with antimatter.

  About the time I met him, he was getting ready to marry a large, rather flamboyant would-be opera singer. I didn’t particularly like her, but she was Doc’s choice, not mine. It turned out, however, that all of Doc’s friends didn’t like her and it became impossible to engage in

  social intercourse with him unless his wife was not among those present.

  Fletcher Pratt was one of Doc’s friends, and had collaborated with Sprague on a number of excellent fantasies in Unknown. He was a little man with a thin beard, a bald, retreating forehead, and a formidable intellect. He was an expert on military history and wrote Ordeal by Fire, which I consider the best one-volume history of the American Civil War ever written. He invented a war game in which little models of actual warships engaged in naval battles according to a complicated set of rules designed to mimic reality as closely as possible. He also kept marmosets in his apartment, which reeked of animal smell in consequence. He died in 1956 at the age of fifty-nine and, through a quirk of memory, I have a clear picture of the last time I saw him as we separated on the streets of New York, waving at each other.

  In 1944, it occurred to Fletcher to establish a club that was to meet for dinner each month and was to be strictly stag. Doc Clark could be made a member and, once a month, he could socialize with his friends without his wife being present. A different member, or pair of members, hosted each meeting (and paid for the meal), and it became customary for each host to invite a guest who, after dinner
, could be grilled on his life and work. The club called itself the Trap Door Spiders, the notion being that they had moved into a burrow outfitted with a trap door that would keep out enemies—that is, Doc’s wife.

  Doc himself apparently couldn’t stand his wife eventually, for he divorced her after seven years, but the Trap Door Spiders continued anyway and he remained a member. Also members were my old friends L. Sprague de Camp and Lester del Rey.

  I was occasionally invited as a guest when my visits to New York happened to coincide with the meeting day of the club (always a Friday night), but I refused to accept actual membership because I knew I would rarely be in New York on an appropriate day. Once I moved to New York in 1970, however, I was immediately voted in and I have been a member ever since.

  It is pleasant to be a Trap Door Spider. The conversation is delightful, and every member is a professional man of some sort. We average some twelve people per meeting. To give you a small notion of the diversity: Roper Shamhart is an Episcopalian minister and is an expert on theology and liturgical music; Richard Harrison is a professional cartographer; Jean Le Corbeiller is a teacher of mathematics; Lionel

  Casson is an archaeologist who specializes in the study of Roman life; and so on.

  (I was once reading one of Casson’s books on Rome while waiting for Robyn—who was visiting me—to return from a date. She was late, which would ordinarily have thrown me into a fever of apprehension, but on this occasion I was so wrapped up in the book, I didn’t notice. In fact, when she did come back, quite late, I was annoyed because she had interrupted me before I had finished the book. I told Casson this, and he was infinitely pleased.)