Murder At The ABA: A Puzzle in Four Days & Sixty Scenes
by Isaac Asimov
Doubleday, 1976
Hardcover, 230 pages
ISBN: 0385113056
Original price: Unknown
What I paid: $0.50 US

As any frequent user of the card catalog could tell you (back when there were such things), Isaac Asimov got around. In fact, according to the Asimov FAQ, he has at least one book in every category of the Dewey Decimal system except philosophy. This is certainly a remarkable technical achievement.

This kind of prolific output also makes it very easy to jump to certain conclusions: With over four-hundred books to his name, isn’t it possible that more than a few of them just aren’t that good? Nobody can hit a home run every time at bat — even writers who spend years on a single novel, re-writing and revising, honing their sentences, shading their words, and driving their editors mad with anticipation. Asimov drives his readers a little crazy, but in a different way. Pick up a book with his name on the cover, and you wonder: is this the clinker?

That was the thought in my mind when I picked up Murder At The ABA. Not, I grant you, an entirely fair way to approach a book one intends to review, but there we are. In some way, perhaps this helped to counteract the rose-colored view I developed with regard to Asimov after reading his third autobiography. Isaac was quite a charmer, even if he did say so himself, and I had been charmed. I don’t apologize for that, but I thought you should know.

Knowing the title, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find out that Murder At The ABA is a mystery novel involving a murder at the American Booksellers’ Association convention. It’s also kind of a “cozy” mystery, sort of. The death occurs off-screen, there’s very little violence, almost no action of any kind. It’s actually right up my alley; I’m not widely read when it comes to modern mysteries, but I like the Sherlock Holmes stories, Agatha Christie’s work (well, most of it), and all the old stuff they play on Mystery on PBS. So yay for coziness. But, then again….

Even before I knew the circumstances leading up to the creation of this book  (Asimov only had three months to write it), I felt the whole thing had a rather tossed-together kind of aura about it. A good mystery, even a cozy one, should take its readers on an interesting journey. Let’s face it: a mystery book is almost defenseless in the hands of a reader. There’s nothing to physically prevent him or her from skipping to the end, thus revealing the killer or the thief or what have you, thereby avoiding all the intervening rigmarole. However, if the writing is good and the story is interesting — if there’s any indication that the long route will be more satisfying than the cheater’s path, in other words — then there’s a chance that readers are willing to stick it out until the end.

Murder At The ABA, just barely makes it, by these standards. I happen to enjoy Asimov’s unornamented writing style, but so much of this book seems like padding — even the love story — that I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to not merely skim, but to skip headlong to the ending. Not all of the book is padding, but it still took a good bit of mental effort to imbibe the frequent sections that seemed to be running in place, making up some arbitrary word-count.

The plot is centered around a writer named Darius Just (based pretty obviously on Harlen Ellison), who’s only at the convention to give a speech but somehow winds up embroiled in a murder investigation. Along the way he bumps into his publishers, other publishers, PR people, an old fuck-buddy, hotel detectives, and Isaac Asimov, why not? And when I say along the way, I mean alooooong the way. There’s a whole lot of back and forth movement, repeating visits to places and people we’ve seen before, plus a few scenes that seem pointlessly parenthetical. Darius goes here, Darius goes there, Darius eats some chicken. We also meet blinkered hotel apparatchiks who go all Quincy’s-boss on ol’ Darius, insisting that the victim died in an accident, partly so the hotel doesn’t lose business due to the stigma of a murder on their premises, but mostly so as to cover up their dirty laundry (so to speak).  They are the closest thing you get to an antagonist, in this book.

The mystery starts out clear as mud, and pretty much stays that way until a glaring clue springs up in the last quarter of the book. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out exactly who the killer was from this clue, but it might as well have had a neon sign hanging on it, as the apparent crux of the matter, at least as far as sharper readers are concerned. In the end, though, the shenanigans involved with the object require some kind of diagram to explain intelligibly — too bad there isn’t one included.

The overall tone of the novel is deeply mired in the 1970′s. Darius Just is a flawed hero by today’s standards; for though he thirsts for justice, he’s the kind of guy who calls himself a feminist, while also critiquing every female body within pawing-distance, and winds up bitterly resenting a woman for mentioning his lack of height. (Get over it, man!) I know that to some readers, the kind of callous, unselfconscious sexism on display here would make the book unreadable. Couple that with the fact that Darius Just’s head is not always a very pleasant place to inhabit, and you’ve got a book that’s challenging for all the wrong reasons. I am, perhaps, too forgiving about this point: though I found it extremely grating, I still managed to get through to the end, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, if nothing else.

At the risk of seeming incoherent, I didn’t hate this book. Not at all. I never actually stopped caring about the resolution of the murder (I wanted to skip to the end, rather than abandoning it altogether). And there’s some humor tucked away in pockets here and there.  I was amused by the back-and-forth between Just and Asimov that plays out in the footnotes, for example. (Asimov’s role is that of a Watson-type bit player and humble chronicler, and he’s certainly not kind to himself.)

It’s just not a great book. And I know it’s fairly typical to point out that, with over 400 of the damn things under his belt, not all of Asimov’s books can be towering classics. But it’s true, dammit, and I can’t think of a better example of this phenomenon than Murder At The ABA.