The Book I Read: A Whiff of Death by Isaac Asimov

I regularly peruse the shelves of the Science Fiction Paperbacks at Half-Price Books. And I always look for books by Isaac Asimov. Last week, a title I vaguely knew of but had never seen before jumped out at me: A Whiff of Death. It actually shouldn't have been in this spot, since it is a mystery novel, but let's look on the bright side and say that at least the employee who shelved it there knew that Isaac Asimov was at times a writer of science fiction. (I was talking to a friend the other day...an educated person and a former English teacher...who told me that she had never heard of Isaac Asimov...so clearly the good doctor's name is no longer common coinage.) As always, I have plenty of other books on my plate already, but I suspected that this was a book I wouldn't be seeing again for some time (if ever), and I plucked it from the shelf, paid for it, took it home, and almost immediately began to read it.

It was a quick and compelling read. It's only Asimov's 28th book...and only his 10th novel for adults...which makes it "Early Stuff" for the prolific good doctor. But he writes with assurance, and the subject matter...death in a chemistry lab...is, of course, right up his alley, since he spent 1939 to 1948 earning his Master's and Doctorate degrees in chemistry...and the first portion of his working life as a biochemistry professor at Boston University School of Medicine. In fact, it looks like he was still teaching when he wrote this novel, and only turned to full time writing after it had been published. 

Speaking of this book's publication...it first appeared in 1958 as an Avon paperback entitled The Death Dealers. The original cover--

                                              --looks great, but it's wildly inaccurate. In fact, none of the images depicted correspond to the contents of the novel: there are no beautiful women, no guns, and no bodies found on the floor. For that matter, there is only one Death Dealer, so even the title is misleading. It wasn't until 1968 that it was published under the Asimov-preferred title A Whiff of Death...and as a hardcover book. Which probably says more about how Asimov's reputation had grown than anything else. At any rate, it then went through another dozen or so editions. As I was gathering this information together, I saw the cover of one of the later paperback editions--a 1972 Lancer Books paperback--

                                                                                                                          --and realized that I had once owned this copy of the book...and had no doubt read it. Alas, I had no memory of that event, nor did I get any hint of it while I read the novel. But after all, 49 years is a long time, and at least five thousand books have gone down my gullet since 1972. And hey, at least I remembered the cover.

As for the edition of the book which I read...well, clearly the Fawcett Crest folks were in dire need of a good proofreader. There were at least a dozen errors in the text...and maybe twice that many...including this puzzler:

Maybe you're quicker than I am, but it took me a few passes before I realized that the second and third lines had been switched. You'd think that somebody would have caught that somewhere along the way, wouldn't you? (It also makes me wonder if this and the other errors appeared in the earlier editions of the novel. Surely not.) It's a shame that this kind of sloppiness makes it to the bookstores, though, since every error is a pothole in the road...at least for me. I'm abruptly pulled out of the story and compelled to examine the error, and then it takes a moment before I re-insert myself into the novel. Or several moments sometimes, as in the case illustrated above.

But the book itself? I thought that Asimov wrote with great confidence, handled the characterizations ably, and created a plot that was exciting and compelling. He did the usual mystery story thing of throwing several characters under the shadows of doubt, and he played fair in that one of them was the actual culprit. 

So good book, then. Good enough, in fact, that I felt myself wanting to read more Asimov mysteries, and am about to do just that with Asimov's Mysteries.