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$20.00 for RPG Item: Thunderscape: The World of Aden Campaign Setting
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by Lowell Kempf

I first stumbled across Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers stories when I was in middle school or high school so it’s safe to say that I’ve been reading them off and on for a long time.

They are a series of straight up just straight up mystery stories. While Asimov is synonymous with science fiction, he wrote a lot more than that. (In fact, he wrote far more non-fiction than anything else.)

The Black Widowers are social club based on one that Asimov actually belonged to. (He denied the real life one ever solved mysteries though) And the stories are formulaic enough that even the characters seem to be aware of it. The Black Widowers meet once a month, there is almost always a guest who has some sort of problem and their waiter Henry solves it at the end of the story.

That being said, Asimov got more than fifteen years worth of writing out of the Black Widowers, up to the end of his life. And I like the justification that Henry was able to solve so many mysteries because all the arguing about the problem at hand helped him analyze it. That helps justify the formula.

I recently realized that, while I have read quite a bit of the series, I have never read the second collection, More Tales of the Black Widowers. Either I missed it because it has almost the same title as the first book, (only adding the word more to it) or I had completely forgotten about it.

So I decided to correct that.

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Ironically, this collection includes the story that introduced me to the Black Widowers, The Ultimate Crime, which was reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space. Further ironically, that story wasn’t about any crime or puzzle but the club helping someone come up with a topic for a Sherlock Holmes paper. I honestly don’t consider it one of the stronger stories.

However, the collection also contains what I now consider to be the weakest Black Widowers story, Nothing Like Murder. A Russian guest believes he heard two college students planning a murder. Henry is about to figure out that they were really just talking about Tolkien. Murder and Mordor just sound alike.

I don’t know if the conceit might have been cuter back in the 1970s, when fantasy and science fiction were a lot more niche, or if it would have seemed obnoxious. I did think Henry figuring it out was a lot more of a magical deduction than usual with his reasoning coming down to ‘college students talk about Tolkien’

(I am now sure that I hadn’t read this collection before because I’d have remembered Nothing Like Murder lol)

It’s ironic to harp on those two stories because one of the strengths of the series is its consistency. The formulaic nature feels comforting. Seven friends solving problems that usually don’t involve them in a luxurious restaurant is probably the height of cozy mystery.

The actual mysteries themselves, while theoretically fair play, are sometimes built on very obscure bits of trivia. Asimov actually softens this by having Henry’s solutions not being definitive but simply the most likely.

However, the Black Widowers aren’t really puzzle for the readers to solve. They are a very pleasant and entertaining form of escapism :)

by Eric R.

Bands with the word crystal in the title are underrated. It's been in the 90s here lately. Summer is here, which always brings me back to my perennial summer fave In The Summer. Plus the video is trippy as heck. Crystal fighters are underrated themselves. Are they folk, are they electronica? (and there are more electronica versions of this song too) I hear the song I Hate London and immediately want to relisten to the CF song I Love London. And I was surprised when a while back I saw a shoe commercial using a Crystal Fighters song.
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