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| Isaac Asimov |
Isaac Asimov is best remembered nowadays as a Master of Science fiction, but he also wrote some excellent mysteries which deserve to be equally well regarded.
He was born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov in Petrovichi, Russia, sometime between October 1919 and January 2, 1920. A minor mystery surrounds his date of birth, which he always gave as 2 January 1920, but detailed records are scanty, and when he was approaching school age his mother gave his birthday as 7 September 1919 in order to get him into school a year earlier.
The family emigrated to the United States in 1923, and around that time their surname changed to Asimov. Isaac became a naturalised U.S. citizen in 1928. He was always proud of being American, though never denying his roots.
His father Yudah made a courageous sacrifice in moving to America, one which Isaac understood and appreciated. In Russia Yudah was respected and relatively prosperous, whereas in New York he found himself at the bottom of the heap, taking menial jobs because, unable to read English script, he was effectively illiterate. But by 1926 he had saved enough for a down-payment on the first in a succession of candy stores, which prospered enough to secure the Asimovs’ future even through the depression of the 1930s.
Isaac was always bright and keen to learn. He taught himself to read by the age of five and progressed well at school. He was expected to help in the shop too throughout his schooldays, and though this didn’t make for an easy childhood, it got him used to working long hours, a habit he maintained all his life. And most important for a future writer: the shop sold magazines as well as sweets, so Isaac was able to read the pulp science fiction and mystery magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. He later attributed his love of the written word to this constant supply of reading material.
He enjoyed mysteries when young, and particularly admired the British Golden Age Queens’ Christie, Sayers, and Marsh, but his own first efforts were science fiction. He began to write when he was 11, but never finished any of his early stories. “I never planned ahead,” he explained in his memoir, I. Asimov. “I made up my stories as I went along, and it was a great deal like reading a book I hadn’t written. What would happen to the characters? I still write my stories in that manner – making it up as I go along – with one all-important improvement. What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem.”
He graduated from high school at 15 and went on to gain a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at Columbia College in 1939. By then he had begun submitting science fiction short stories to pulp magazine editors. He received several rejections but also editorial encouragement to keep trying, and in 1939 his first published story, Marooned Off Vesta, appeared in Amazing Stories. After that he had stories accepted at an increasing rate, and he was a professional writer, though not a full-time one.
He completed his M.A. in 1941, and the following year he married Canadian-born Gertrude Blugerman and got a job as a civilian chemical researcher at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. After the war ended in 1945 he was drafted into the army and served in the USA and in Hawaii (not yet a full state.) After nearly nine months he received a “research discharge” and returned to academic life: a PhD in biochemistry at Columbia in 1948, followed by a year’s research there. Through all these years he kept writing, and by 1949 he had published sixty stories, but though they brought him a rising reputation, he could not live on the proceeds.
In 1958 he was fired
from the B.U.S.M. as the result of tangled and bitter internal academic
politics. He retained his professorial title, and after brief anxiety over not
having a regular salary, he began to revel in the freedom of being a full-time
author. From then on, he averaged 13 books a year. (“I’m my own
book-of-the-month club.”) The majority were non-fiction, and he was proud of
his wide range of subjects: popular science from Astronomy to Zoology; history,
literature; religion, humour…Indeed f you like quiz-type trivia, you’ll enjoy
the fact that his books appear in libraries in all ten of the major categories
of the Dewey Decimal classification system.
His personal life had downs as well as
ups. His marriage to Gertrude had, as he put it, “gone sour”, but they stayed
together till their children were grown. He finally left her in.1970 and moved
back to New York. He became close to a long-time friend, Janet Jeppson, and
married her in 1973 after his divorce came through. They were happy together till
his death.
Amazingly, he found time for plenty of activities other than writing. He was a member of Mensa, and of societies dedicated to Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas, to Sherlock Holmes, and to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. His interest in detective fiction never waned.
The majority of the mysteries he wrote are short stories; there are only a handful of full-length novels. He produced two distinct kinds of mystery: science-fiction detective stories, and “straight” mysteries, which is how he described the stories with no connection to science fiction, set in his present day. All his tales share characteristics of the British Golden Age mysteries he admired. They contain no gratuitous violence or gory descriptions. His detectives solve their cases by brain rather than brute force, through a series of clues which play fair with the reader. Murders happen off-stage…when there are any murders; they occur in the novels and the longer short stories, but most of the really short mysteries concentrate on less serious issues.
His two “straight”
novels are standalones, and each reflects an aspect of his own 
experience. The
Death Dealers (1958,) re-published ten years later as A Whiff of Death, takes
place in a University chemistry laboratory rife with academic feuding. Murder
at the ABA (1976) involves death at an American Booksellers Association
meeting, with a writer as sleuth, and touches of comedy including a cameo role
for Asimov himself. Both are easy-paced, a little old-fashioned perhaps, but
then Asimov was consciously following an older tradition. “I make no secret of
the fact that in my mysteries I use Agatha Christie as my model,” he wrote in
his memoir. “In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written.”
His “straight” short stories, well over 100 of them, were produced in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly for magazines such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Gallery, and collected into anthologies later. They are clever, often witty, and I’d call them puzzles rather than mysteries. The two main series stick to regular formats which became familiar to their readers.
The Union Club
mysteries are set in a club library among a (different) regular group of
friends. They are shorter and lighter (around two thousand words) and the
puzzles are even more cerebral, for instance deducing the combination of a safe
from the missing numeral in a series of mathematical numbers. They are narrated
and solved by the enigmatic investigator-cum-spy Griswold. Asimov enjoyed
writing these brain-teasing puzzles. “It is my purpose in my mysteries (and, in
actual fact, in everything I write, fiction and nonfiction) to make people
think.”
His science-fiction mystery novels certainly make you think, and not just about puzzle-solving. They are “science fiction detective stories”, a form regarded in the 1940s as impossible to achieve, since it would be too easy for an author to break the conventions of detective fiction by simply inventing convenient “facts” whenever he liked, and therefore not playing fair with readers. Asimov was determined, however, and The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequel The Naked Sun, (1957) were considered ground-breaking. A third sequel, The Robots of Dawn, (1983) continued the series later.
They are set in the future, The Caves of Steel begins in New York City in 3421 AD, but they stick to the rules of the classic detective story, and Asimov’s future societies are carefully and logically drawn. The leading detective is New Yorker Elijah Baley, and his partner is R Daneel Olivaw, a human-like robot equipped with intelligence, physical strength, good looks, and charming if rather formal manners. His author described Daneel as “possibly the most popular character in all my writings,” but as so often with Asimov’s comments on his own work, you can’t be certain how large a pinch of salt to apply.
In both The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn Asimov pictures humans in their colonies on other planets. It’s accepted that faster-than-light space travel is easy, (don’t ask, it just is!) and the varying colony societies are well imagined and detailed enough to be easily absorbed. Baley finds it hard to work outside his comfort zone, his “caves of steel”, but Daneel’s skills complement his own, and they make a good if unorthodox team. “caves of steel”, but Daneel’s skills complement his own, and they make a good if unorthodox team.
Asimov’s shorter science-fiction mysteries, written in the 1950s and 1960s, are much more varied than his “straight” series. Each one is different, and the futures they portray are different too. They are longer, allowing more details in characters and settings. Crimes range through murder, theft, and smuggling, and settings include bases on the Moon and Mars as well as future earths. Motives for crime are timeless though; greed, ambition and revenge are still to be found throughout the galaxy. Some of the science is a little dated now, but these glimpses of alternative futures are as fresh as when they were written. The best of them make up the anthology Asimov’s Mysteries.
Isaac Asimov died in New York City on 6 April 1992. Heart and kidney failure were the immediate causes of death, exacerbated by his having contracted HIV from an infected blood transfusion during heart bypass surgery years before. He continued to work almost to the end, though knowing his time was short. In 1991 he wrote: “No matter what happens to me now, it’s been a good life, and I am satisfied with it.”
I had the good luck to meet Isaac Asimov in 1974 when he visited Britain. I was preparing a short series on science fiction for BBC Radio 4, and he recorded an interview for me. We didn’t, alas, talk about mysteries; the subjects I can remember included computers and colonies in space. He was a joy to interview, articulate, witty, and thought-provoking even when discussing topics he must have covered a hundred times. He was rather full of himself, (a trait he was aware of,) and also flirtatious in an amusing and non-offensive way. This surprised me (not unpleasantly!) till I learned later that he liked to present himself as an amiable lecher. All in all, meeting him gave me that special pleasure you get by discovering that an author whose books you really like is a person you can really like too.
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