Banquets of the Black Widowers is a collection of mystery short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov featuring his fictional club of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in September 1984, and in paperback by the Fawcett Crest imprint of Ballantine Books in June 1986. The first British edition was issued by Grafton in August 1986.This book is the fourth of six that describe mysteries solved by the Black Widowers, based on a literary dining club he belonged to known as the Trap Door Spiders. It collects twelve stories by Asimov, together with a general introduction and an afterword by the author following each story. Nine of the stories were previously published; "The Driver," "The Wrong House" and "The Intrusion" are new to this collection.Each story involves the club members' knowledge of trivia. Nearly every story here is about decoding a riddle, each of which provides a clue based on dying or last words, misunderstood words, forgotten words, or withheld words. A few are based on facts that are, perhaps, not generally known to the public – Asimov was a frequent writer of popular science and his inclination to explain anything and everything for the general public carried over into other fields, such as history and sociology – but all the mysteries play fair with the reader, who is given either enough information to figure out the solution or a satisfying conclusion that is based on previously given facts and personality qualities.
“Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead.”
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." — E. B. White, in "Some Remarks on Humor," preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)
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Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 27
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