Xotl posted:

I never read much Isaac Asimov: just have a very vague high-school era memory of finding early sci-fi rather dry. But he also wrote a series of mysteries called The Black Widowers. They were based on a real social club he blonged to -- the Trap Door Spiders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_Door_Spiders

This was a men's only dining club that met once a month, originally founded to get away from a particularly annoying wife of one of the members, that none of the other guys liked (and whom were collectively disliked by the wife). It was basically a chance for a bunch of highly-educated, highly-intelligent guys to sit around and shoot the poo poo over fine wine. Aasimov fictionalized the setting and some of its members and created a fun series of mysteries. Each meeting has a different special guest, and inevitably something comes up for the club members to argue, wrangle over, and try to get to the bottom of. The mystery and the topics of discussion, as befitting someone as absurdly learned as Asimov, vary wildy.

I have the first volume. What surprised me right away was how full of life they were. Asimov has a reputation as a bit of a ... functional writer: he always gets the job done, but "verve" is never a word I've seen associated with his work. The Widowers stories are a great deal of fun: the characters come to life, there's plenty of energy, good pacing, and good characterization. Most of the stories were written for magazines, but even so they had a strong element of serialization and continuity, with members referring to previous incidents (both the mysteries as well as smaller bits of characterization). When collected, Asimov tells us in his forward that he tightened this aspect, reducing some of the reintroduction bits of character and background at the start of each story so that it wasn't as tedious for someone reading them all straight through. He adds afterwords to each tale, explaining their genesis, the origins of a story's title, and any corrections made to the text after such and such reader wrote in and corrected Asimov on some point or pointed out a loophole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Widowers