"A Whiff of Dead" - Isaac Asimov
Surely one could not become so close to Death and not be marked in any sense.
He put on his glasses again and looked around the laboratory again. Why be marked by encountering Death? After all, I met her every day, every moment, in every direction. There he was, sitting in the middle of fifty bottles of brown glass with reagents, which filled the shelves. Each vial of Death was well labeled, each occupied with varying amounts of its special type of pure, refined crystals.
In his first mystery novel, Asimov transforms all his scientific investigative capacity into the realm of police expertise, and it is in "A Whiff of Dead" where his protagonist, Professor Louis Brade is involved in a plot of unexpected mystery . What is the death of your graduate student Ralph Neufel? Is it suicide? Is it possible that it was murder?
The skill with which Asimov writes this work does not fail to surprise the reader of science fiction, because although it is not the root genre of its author, we are in the presence of a masterpiece of the mystery, that does not leave us calm on the end of each chapter.
Who would have reason to murder his disciple? His own wife, who a few years ago had broken his craft vase? His secretary because an old romance? Any of your colleagues because of professional jealousy? Would he have motives?
Isaac Asimov, among other things professor of biochemistry of the University of Boston, was the most indicated to narrate this history. In the midst of his famous works of science fiction, such as I Robot, The End of Eternity, The Own Gods and The Man of the Bicentennial, wrote this, his first mystery novel.
"A Whiff of Dead" gives us the possibility to meet again with the literature of mystery of the hand of the maximum referent of science-fiction.
