Earth is An Armchair: The Wendell Urth Quartet by Isaac Asimov

During the early 1950s, Isaac Asimov observed "one would think that science fiction would blend easily with the mystery," but, oddly enough, "it was the mystery form that seemed most difficult to amalgamate with science fiction" – hybrid mysteries were little more than novelties at the time. There were some early, well-intended attempts to blend the detective story with science-fiction, which were clunky at best (Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet, 1942) and poorly conceived at worst (David V. Reed's Murder in Space, 1944). Anthony Boucher arguably produced the only good hybrid mystery of the period, the time travel short story "Elsewhen" (1946).

Asimov saw a practically untapped reservoir of potential, "science itself is so nearly a mystery and the research scientist so nearly a Sherlock Holmes," prompting him to write his own science-fiction mystery, The Caves of Steel (1953/54). I reread it last year and remained of the opinion that it's one of the most important detective novels of the previous century. A truly futuristic, fair play detective novel demolishing the future argument that advancements in science and technology made the traditionally-plotted detective story obsolete. The Caves of Steel played the Grandest Game in the World inside a dystopian hellhole with humanoid-looking robots, mind probes and high-tech, breakaway civilizations. Asimov wrote a sequel, The Naked Sun (1956/57), "just to show that the first book wasn't an accident" in addition to "several short stories intended to prove that science fiction mysteries could be written in all lengths."

A personal favorite of these short stories is the standalone "Obituary" (1959), another criminal time travel story horribly gone wrong, but Asimov also created a short-lived series-character, Dr. Wendell Urth, who, "if the judgment of experts counted for anything, was Earth's most outstanding extraterrologist" – "on any subject outside Earth men came to him." However, Dr. Urth is an earthbound space sleuth who visited any of the planets nor strayed further than a few miles from his rooms. So basically a space detective who reasons from the largest and most comfortable armchair in our Solar System, Earth.

I read the four stories in the collection Asimov's Mysteries (1968) and thought the character was a great and original take on the armchair detective, but found the plots to be lacking. An anonymous comment brought up this short-lived series and noted "Edward Wellen also wrote a Wendell Urth mystery in Foundation's Friends which has perturbed me ever since." That just sounded like a good excuse to revisit this series. After all, I wanted to probe deeper into the hybrid mystery following the publication of Yamaguchi Masaya and Masahiro Imamura's two zombie mysteries, but there's simply not much out there to probe. So why not take another look at this series to see how they stand up.

"The Singing Bell," originally published in the January, 1955, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is an inverted mystery involving the "first murder on the Moon." Louis Peyton is asked by Albert Cornwell, "small-time retailer of stolen things," to help him get a cache of moon rocks, so-called "Singing Bells," from a crater on the Lunar surface ("...enough there to enable you and me to retire in affluence"). Singing Bells make heavenly sounds when struck correctly, which makes them expensive collector's items ("a supply of Bells would be worth murder"). After securing the cache, Peyton shoots Cornwell with a blaster and hastily beats a return to Earth to destroy evidence where rigged up a clever, counter intuitive non-alibi – reasoning that nothing is "so conducive to an appearance of innocence as the triumphant lack of an alibi." Peyton has a long-standing habit to seclude himself every August inside his remote house in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, protected with a force field fence ("no one saw him, no one could reach him"). Inspector Davenport, of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, knows Peyton was on the Moon and shot Cornwell, but difficult to prove without an apparently rock solid alibi ("if he had an alibi, I could crack it somehow, because it would be a false one"). And he first needs to prove Peyton was on the Moon, before he can subject him to a psychoprobe. So turns Dr. Wendell Urth to help him nail the man on the Moon for murder.

A fairly good and amusing short story with an intriguing enough premise and a clever take on the unbreakable alibi, but it all begged for something better, slightly more ambitious than a simple "ha, gotcha" solution.

"The Talking Stone" originally appeared in the October, 1955, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is rightfully the best-known of the Wendell Urth stories. The titular stone is a silicon based life form, a silicony, which are ovoid-shaped creature with smooth, oily skin with two sets of appendages – six "legs" below and rabbit-like "ears" on its back. Siliconeus asteroidea exist on asteroids who "get their energy by the direct absorption of gamma rays" and Dr. Wendell Urth argued "there isn't enough gamma radiation on any asteroid to support siliconies more than an inch or two long." When a spaceship, Robert Q, docks at Station Five in the asteroid belt for emergency repairs, the attendant notices the captain has a bigger than usual silicony aboard. And figures the creature must have come from an uranium rich asteroid ("...one great big fat chunk of uranium ore like nobody on Earth saw..."). So sees an opportunity for promotion, but everything goes horrible wrong when the Robert Q collides with an asteroid. The human crew of uranium died in the crash and the silicony is dying.

Only the dying silicony knows where the human crew hid, or wrote down, the coordinates to the uranium asteroid, which are nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the silicony have "rudimentary telepathic powers" that allows it to read minds and talk to humans. Although not much help as the last words of the silicony, "on the asteroid," proved to be very little help. Why write the coordinates on the asteroid ("that's like locking a key inside the cabinet it's meant to open"). So they turn to Earth's most celebrated extraterrologist, Dr. Wendell Urth, to decipher the silicony's dying message.

This is an excellent blend of science-fiction and mystery as having a detective decipher a dying message from an alien creature is a great idea. Due to the short length and some clueing, the problem is actually a solvable one. All you need is to add a bit of creative thinking and the solution should not be too difficult to spot, which is incidentally its only weak spot. Not because it's solvable, but because cracking an alien dying message should be a lot harder to do. And perhaps "The Talking Stone" should have been a novel-length science-fiction mystery. Nevertheless, it's a rock solid hybrid mystery.

The last two stories are both longer and poorer, much poorer, detective stories beginning with "The Dying Night," published in the July, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which centers on a class reunion of four scientists – three of whom recently returned to Earth. Edward Talliaferro worked on the Lunar Observatory, Stanley Kaunas on the Mercury Observatory and Battersley Ryger and the distant Ceres Observatory. Romano Villiers, "the most brilliant of the four," became sick and was unable to leave Earth. Something that ate away at him and eventually unbalanced his mind, but, during the reunion, Villiers announces he's "discovered a practical method of mass transference through space." But then he dies in his hotel room. And papers goes missing. Most curious of all is the particular, illogical hiding place of a certain object. Dr. Wendell Urth is asked to shine his light on this little mystery among scientists.

Asimov wrote in his afterword that "this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events" and (jokingly) wishes "astronomers would get things right to begin with," because he refused to "to change the story to suit their whims." That's all fine and funny, if "The Dying Night" had just been dated science-fiction short story, but it also tries to be a fair play detective story requiring knowledge of astronomy in order to solve the problem. So, purely as a detective story, it has aged very poorly and became less fair overtime. Still better than the last story in the series.

"The Key" first appeared in the October, 1966, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and takes the series back to the Moon. Karl Jennings and James Strauss are conducting the first ever, privately funded selenographic expedition to land on the Lunar surface and they make a momentous discovery. A ragged, nearly amorphous piece of metal and the spectrograph identifies it as artificial, "titanium-steel, essentially, with a hint of cobalt and molybdenum," but no records exist of a spaceship ever landing or crashing on that part of the Moon – suggesting it "to be of ancient and non-human manufacture" ("an artifact of some ship wrecked eons ago"). Something they're able to confirm when they find something Jennings calls the Device. A strange piece of technology that allows for mind reading and it reveals to Jennings that Strauss is an Ultra. A group of radicals who want to reduce the six billion people of Earth down to roughly five million.

So the aftermath of this revelation is Jennings' body being found on a skim boat with a stab wound and Strauss was alive but in delirium. What happened to the Device? A dying Jennings hid it somewhere on the Moon and left behind a coded message addressed to his old teacher, Dr. Wendell Urth, who naturally manages to decode it. A very disappointing story as it completely ignored the fascinating mystery of what and who crash landed on the Moon ages ago. Why bring in a mind reading device when Dr. Urth could have been presented with the ultimate case for an extraterrologist! Something that could very well have forced him to break his habit of never leaving his neighborhood, which would have been fitting for his final outing and a puzzle of such a enormous magnitude. This is just dumb, stupid and unworthy of Asimov.

Well, it seems a second reading only confirmed my first, dimly remembered impression that the first two were definitely better than the last two and the best part being the character of Dr. Wendell Urth. There's something very pleasing about an earthbound extraterrologist and armchair detective who uses the planet as his armchair to ponder the mysteries of the universe, but Dr. Wendell Urth deserved to have better, much more cases to his credit. Perhaps even his own science-fiction mystery novel as there's more in the character and series than Asimov got out of it. So I'll definitely going to track down Edward Wellen's pastiche "Murder in the Urth Degree" (1989) to see what he managed to do with the character.