And so on, and so on.

It seems certain, then, that I will be asked, either with amusement or with exasperation, why I am writing mystery stories.

Here goes, then.

I started my writing career in science fiction, and I still write science fiction when I can, for it remains my first and chief literary love. However, I am interested in many things and among them has been the mystery. I have been reading mysteries almost as long as I have been reading science fiction. I remember risking my life when, as a ten-year-old, I pilfered forbidden copies of The Shadow from under my father's pillow when he was taking his afternoon nap. (I asked him why he read it if I was forbidden, and he said he needed it in order to learn English, whereas I had the advantage of school. What a rotten reason I thought that was.)

In writing science fiction, then, I frequently introduced the mystery motif. Two of my novels, The Caves of Steel (Doubleday, 1953) and The Naked Sun (Doubleday, 1957), are full-fledged murder mysteries for all that they are science fiction as well. I have written enough shorter science fiction mysteries of one sort or another to make it possible to publish a collection of them as Asimov's Mysteries (Doubleday, 1968).

I also wrote a "straight" mystery novel, The Death Dealers (Avon, 1958), [Well, it was rejected by Doubleday, if you must know] which was eventually reissued in 1968 by Walker amp; Company under my own title of A Whiff of Death. This, however, dealt entirely with science and scientists and its atmosphere was still that of the science fiction novel, as was true of two mystery short stories I sold to mystery magazines.

Increasingly, I felt the itch to write mysteries that had nothing to do with science. One thing that held me back, though, was the fact that the mystery had evolved in the last quarter-century and my tastes had not. Mysteries these days are heavily drenched in liquor, injected with drugs, marinated in sex, and roasted in sadism, whereas my detective ideal is Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells.