More Tales Black Wido

Asimov wrote Black Widower short stories for _Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine_ for years, rounding out each batch to a dozen with a few previously unpublished episodes for each new Widower collection. The Widowers are a stag club who meet once a month at the Milano restaurant: Avalon (patent attorney), Drake (research chemist), Gonzalo (painter), Halsted (teacher), Rubin (author), and Trumbull (intelligence analyst). They rotate the office of host; each month's host brings a guest for an evening of dinner, conversation, and grilling, and each eventually produces a problem of some kind for the Widowers to try to solve. (Problem-solving isn't the point of the club; Avalon, for one, grumbles about how the grilling always seems to degenerate into sleuthing, lately.) The seventh Widower - Henry, the waiter - always produces the solution after the other six have batted the problem around awhile.I can see why EQMM usually ate them up; the puzzles tend to be the kind of artificial gimmick that EQ's own early adventures were noted for - fair, if you know the right bits of trivia, and can view the problem as a constructed puzzle rather than a story about people. The crossword aroma is generally diluted with a healthy dose of Black Widower squabbling, though, as well as the wildcard element of the guests, so they're an entertaining read."When No Man Pursueth" Guest: Mortimer Stellar (a stand-in for Asimov himself), who's annoyed with a publisher who bought an article only to sit on it without explanation. [Asimov used this story to blow off steam about a real-life incident.]"Quicker Than the Eye" - Host: Trumbull. Guest: Robert Alford Bunsen, Trumbull's boss - because Trumbull couldn't explain previous successes without violating Widower confidentiality. Bunsen's minions baited a trap with a small item, in hopes of tracing their opponents' network when it was passed in a restaurant, but they still don't know how it was done. (Henry points out the obvious problem - the agent's people *must* know, after various searches and X-rays, that his cover was blown - but Bunsen's response is adequate. My issue with Trumbull's occasional panics over the dangers of unbroken enemy codes is that either the problems are very dated or Asimov didn't concern himself with making Trumbull a realistic cryptography expert, but I can always read _The Devil's Code_ for that kind of thing.)"A Chip of the Black Stone" (a.k.a. "The Iron Gem"), according to a family legend of the Widowers' guest, Latimer Reed, is supposedly a stolen fragment of the Kaaba, but the legend's dubious, at best. On the other hand, someone years ago was *desperate* to buy it..."The Three Numbers" (a.k.a. "All in the Way You Read It") - Host: Drake. Guest: Samuel Puntsch, a fellow researcher, although in physics rather than chemistry. A family friend and co-worker, recently committed to a mental hospital, may have an important breakthrough locked in his safe. Why won't the combination work?"Nothing Like Murder