Fantastic Voyager

Today marks what would have been author Isaac Asimov’s 86th birthday. (He was born in Petrovichi, Russia, in 1920 and died in New York City in 1992.) Most of you undoubtedly think of Asimov as a science-fiction writer; his Foundation series and Robot series have both become classics of the genre. However, like his friend Gene Roddenberry, Asimov was interested in all sorts of storytelling, including crime fiction.

His novel The Caves of Steel (originally serialized in Galaxy Magazine in 1953, but released in book form in 1954) was an early synthesis of detective tale and science fiction. Its sequels, The Naked Sun (1957) and The Robots of Dawn (1983), were whodunits, and all three novels featured a New York City homicide dick named Elijah Bailey. The prolific author also penned mystery short stories, including the 14 contained in his 1968 collection, Asimov’s Mysteries. And, beginning in 1971, he contributed a succession of yarns to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, all of them featuring a half-dozen supposedly brilliant male members of a literary dining club called “The Black Widowers,” who regularly congregate (with guests) to share delicious meals as well as solve puzzles--most of which ultimately have to be untangled with assistance from a Jeevesish waiter named Henry. Five collections of Black Widowers tales were published during Asimov’s lifetime, while a sixth, The Return of the Black Widowers, appeared posthumously in 2003 (with an introduction by Harlan Ellison and one new Widowers story, written by the book’s editor, Charles Ardai, who is now the publisher of Hard Case Crime).

On top of all that, Asimov composed a single straightforward mystery novel, Murder at the ABA (1976), which stars a writer and amateur sleuth modeled on his friend Ellison, and is set around an annual convention of the American Booksellers Association.