Reading order
Black Widowers reading order
- Tales of the Black Widowers1974
- More Tales of the Black Widowers1976
- Casebook of the Black Widowers1980
- Banquets of the Black Widowers1984
- Puzzles of the Black Widowers1990
- The Return of the Black Widowers2003
- 6 volumes
- Volumes
- 1974–2003
- Published
- about 25 h
- Reading time
- Completed
- Status
Quick answer
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Publication order
6 volumes1974–2003Completed
- Isaac Asimov’s armchair mysteries, sixty-six short stories collected in six books, about the Black Widowers, six clever, quarrelsome men who meet once a month for dinner at a New York restaurant.
- Each evening a guest is questioned and turns out to have a small puzzle, a missing object, a strange clue, a puzzling lie; the members argue brilliantly and wrongly, and Henry, the quiet waiter, quietly solves it.
- Fair-play puzzles with wordplay and trivia, each with an afterword by Asimov.
- No book has enough ratings yet.
- Any order works.
A plan for the whole series
6 volumes, 1,448 pages, about 25 hours. At 45 min a day that is about 5 weeks.
Stages
2 stages, with 1 short book from outside the series between them. You finish around December 13, 2026, 9 days later than in one go.
- Stage 120 habout 4 weeksby November 25, 2026
- BreakMaus · Art Spiegelman · 295 pp. · score 9.0
- Stage 26 h8 daysby December 13, 2026
- The end of the series
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How this plan is calculated
The plan comes from the pages and ratings of each volume: we split the series into stages of about three weeks’ reading, size each break to the stage before it, and read the chance of finishing from how many readers rate the last volume compared with the first. How we work out the plan →
Every volume in order
No volume in this series has enough ratings to enter a ranking yet, so the list carries no scores — the order and the volumes are still complete.
Order checked by hand · Order and years: Wikidata (CC0). Spotted an error? Tell us. · Data updated October 29, 2026
Frequently asked questions
Which Black Widowers book is the longest?
“The Return of the Black Widowers” is the longest at 335 pages; the shortest is “More Tales of the Black Widowers” with 202 pages.
What should I read after Black Widowers?
Other series by Isaac Asimov: Galactic Empire, Lucky Starr series, Robot series.
More series by Isaac Asimov
All books by Isaac Asimov in order →
