Banquets of the Black Widowers is a collection of mystery short stories by science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 author Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...

 featuring his fictional club of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers

Black Widowers

The Black Widowers is a fictional men-only dining club created by Isaac Asimov for a series of sixty-six mystery stories which he started writing in 1971...

. It was first published in hardcover

Hardcover

A hardcover, hardback or hardbound is a book bound with rigid protective covers...

 by Doubleday in 1984, and in paperback

Paperback

Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

 by the Fawcett Crest imprint of Ballantine Books

Ballantine Books

Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...

 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

Afterword

An afterword is a literary device that is often found at the end of a piece of literature. It generally covers the story of how the book came into being, or of how the idea for the book was developed....

 following each story by the author. Each story involves the club members' knowledge of trivia

Trivia

The trivia are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates...

.

In the story "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

Murder at the ABA

Murder at the ABA is a mystery novel by Isaac Asimov, following the adventures of a writer and amateur detective named Darius Just . While attending a convention of the American Booksellers Association, Just discovers the dead body of a friend and protégé...

. Asimov states that he "thought up" this Black Widowers story just for this character.

The story "Sixty Million Trillion Combinations" features a mathematician who suspected that his work on Goldbach's conjecture

Goldbach's conjecture

Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. It states:A Goldbach number is a number that can be expressed as the sum of two odd primes...

had been stolen.

Contents

• "Introduction"
• "Sixty Million Trillion Combinations"
• "The Woman in the Bar"
• "The Driver"
• "The Good Samaritan"
• "The Year of the Action"
• "Can You Prove It?"
• "The Phoenician Bauble"
• "A Monday in April"
• "Neither Brute Nor Human"
• "The Redhead"
• "The Wrong House"
• "The Intrusion"

External links

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