title: Puzzles of the Black Widowers
author:  Isaac Asimov 
description: The fifth Black Widowers collection has stories from 1984 to 1989, 11 appearing originally in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine . Asimov again uses a real-life New York dining club as model for the Widowers. In every story a dinner guest is asked, "How do you justify your existence?" The guests--graduate student, government spook, bookseller, plumber et al.--dispose of the question, and then pose a puzzle for the Widowers to chew over--over and over. Invariably, after the chewing, the deferential, cerebral waiter Henry, also a Widower, comes up with the solution. Said solution turns on some piece of arcana--Bermuda traffic rules, the element with the most syllables--that most readers won't know or care about. Each story is less than two dozen pages, a relief because the writing is like unbuttered, unsalted popcorn: harmless but not satisfying unless you're already addicted. Asimov assures us the Black Widowers "will continue as long as I do." Long life anyway, Dr. A. <br />Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: **ISAAC ASIMOV**
  
   _ **TALES**_
  
   _ **of the**_
  
   _ **BLACK WIDOWERS**_
  
   **A FAWCETT CREST BOOK**
  
   **Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut**
  
   _ **TALES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS**_
  
   **THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDITION.**
  
   **A Fawcett Crest Book reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday and Company,
  Inc.**
  
   **Copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 by Isaac Asimov**
  
   **All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
  thereof in any form.**
  
   **ISBN 0-449-22944-0**
  
   **All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
  actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.**
  
   **Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321**
  
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  _**To Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine**_
  
   _ **to David Ford**_
  
   _ **and to the Trap-Door Spiders for reasons detailed in the introduction**_
  
   _ ****_
  
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  _**Special Note**_
  
   **The erudite copy reader points out that since the stories that