Casebook of the Black Widowers is a collection of mystery short stories by American 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 1980, 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 March 1981.

This book is the third of the six books featuring the Black Widowers. It collects twelve stories by Asimov, most reprinted from mystery magazines and a few previously unpublished, together with a general introduction and an afterword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...

.

Contents

• "Introduction"
• "The Cross of Lorraine"
• "The Family Man"
• "The Sports Page"
• "Second Best"
• "The Missing Item"
• "The Next Day"
• "Irrelevance!"
• "None So Blind"
• "The Backward Look"
• "What Time Is It?"
• "Middle Name"
• "To the Barest"

External links

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