Asimov’s Mysteries

I found Asimov’s Mysteries in a used-book stall, and of course I had to get it.  A mashup of mystery and scifi?  Perfect!  The book appears to be out of print,  with secondhand copies floating around.

I’m so glad I read these, but I wish I had read them separately, in different magazines, as they were originally published. Reading them all together highlighted the similarities, and I felt like I was reading the same story, over and over. Basically, there’s a murder, and then there are a couple of possible suspects, one of who has recently returned from a planet where the gravity/light/atmosphere is different from Earth’s, and he makes a crucial mistake because he forgot about Earth’s conditions.

It was great the first time I read it. The first story is about the criminal mastermind who carefully covered his tracks, killed the co-conspirator who might have turned him in and destroyed all the evidence that could connect him with a crime, but was revealed when he expected lighter lunar gravity and dropped something on Earth.  I’d have really enjoyed finding a story like this along with other different genres and styles in a retro scifi magazine.

Even one of the introductions to these reprinted stories reflects on the similarities. Asimov mentions that literary scholars have noticed similarities. He says this in typical Asimov style, like he was just having fun telling cool stories, and didn’t expect literary study of his work. So it’s not just me feeling like it’s the same story, again.

Also… the women characters in this collection.  There are five ladies total, in all the 13 mysteries. Two of the women are wives who conveniently go to their mother’s and leave the male protagonists to have fun. Two of them are murderers who kill with a spoonful of cyanide disguised as sugar. (These are completely different stories, they just all take place in worlds in which ladies serve drinks.) There’s a fifth female character, too, the obligatory sexy space lady. I wasn’t entirely sure if she was a prostitute or just a beautiful girl who kept a risque wardrobe and a zero-G playroom for visiting (wife-free) friends to drop by. She has a name, at least, which is more than some of the others got. Oh wait, there’s also a girl who’s found dead! So, counting the murdered girl, that’s six women in the collection. About 0.46 women per story!

The era of pulp scifi magazines, where these stories were originally published, means that the stories were published relatively cheaply and quickly. With the fan letters in these magazines commenting on the stories and Asimov’s own introductions and comments, there’s a feeling of scifi still being created, in conversation with readers.  There’s even a mystery here that’s left unsolved and asks for readers to write in their solution. And the whole idea of a fix-up scifi novel is an author putting together several previously-published short stories around the same theme or set in the same world, and recreating them as one book.  It was interesting to see Asimov playing with the scifi clues and how much to reveal  without spelling out the ending for his readers.

I was particularly interested in the world and settings Asimov created here, even if the pun mysteries stories weren’t for me. One of the real joys of reading old scifi is seeing how writers extrapolate future tech developments from older technology. I absolutely love when future characters smoke a cigarette in the waiting lounge for the hyperspace shuttle! There’s so much creativity in these spaceships and laboratories that the retro scifi-itis is even more annoying here. The future worlds are completely male, there isn’t a woman scientist on any of these teams or a woman astronaut on any crews.  Despite the clever plots, a lady character working in one of these labs or outposts didn’t seem to occur to him.