Banquets of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers
Cover of first edition, 1984
Author(s)	Isaac Asimov
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Black Widowers
Genre(s)	Mystery short stories
Publisher	Doubleday, Fawcett Crest
Publication date	1984
Media type	Print (Hardcover), (Paperback)
Pages	212 pp
ISBN	0-385-19541-9
OCLC Number	10403672
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Classification	PS3551.S5 B3 1984
Preceded by	Casebook of the Black Widowers
Followed by	Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers is a collection of mystery short stories by science fiction author Isaac Asimov featuring his fictional club of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1984, and in paperback by the Fawcett Crest imprint of Ballantine Books 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 following each story by the author. Each story involves the club members' knowledge of trivia.

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. 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 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