the wheels were slowly turning in the recesses of my mind, I happened to be visiting the actor David Ford (who was in both the Broadway and Hollywood versions of 1776). His apartment is filled with all kinds of interesting oddities, and he told me that he was convinced once that someone had taken something from his apartment but he could never be sure because he couldn't tell whether anything was missing.
I laughed and all the wheels in my head, heaving a collective sigh of relief, stopped turning. I had my twist.
I then needed a background against which to display the twist and here we have something else.
Back in the early 1940's, legend has it, someone got married to a lady who found her husband's friends unacceptable, and vice versa. In order to avoid breaking off a valued relationship, those friends organized a club without officers or bylaws for the sole purpose of having a dinner once a month. It would be a stag organization so that the husband in question could be invited to join and his wife legitimately requested not to attend. (Nowadays, with Women's Lib so powerful, this might not have worked.)
The organization was named the Trap-Door Spiders (or TDS, for short) probably because the members felt themselves to be hiding.
Thirty years have passed since the TDS was organized but it still exists. It is still stag, though the member whose marriage inspired the organization is long since divorced. (As a concession to male non-chauvinism, a cocktail party was given on February 3 1973, at which the TDS wives could meet one another-and this may become an annual custom.)
Once a month, the TDS meets, always on a Friday night, almost always in Manhattan, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes in a member's apartment. Each meeting is co-hosted by two volunteers who bear all the expenses for the occasion and who may each bring a guest. The average attendance is twelve. There are drinks and conversation from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.; food and conversation from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.; and just conversation thereafter.
After the meal each guest is grilled on his interests, his profession, his hobbies, his views, and the results are almost always interesting, often fascinating.
The chief among the general eccentricities of the TDS are these: (1) Every member is addressed as "Doctor" by the others, the title going along with the membership, and (2) each member is supposed to try to arrange for a mention of the TDS in his obituary.
I had been a guest myself on two different occasions, and when I moved to New York in 1970, I was elected to membership.
Well, then, thought I, why not tell my mystery story against the background of the meeting of an organization something like the TDS? My club would be called the Black Widowers and I would cut it in half to make it manageable-six people and one host.
Naturally, there are differences. The members of the TDS have never, in real life, attempted to solve mysteries and none of them is as idiosyncratic as the members of the Black Widowers. In fact, the members of the TDS are, one and all, lovable people and there is a mutual affection that is touching to see. Therefore, please be assured that the characters and events in the stories in this book are my own invention and are not to be equated with anyone or anything in the TDS, except insofar as they may seem intelligent or lovable.
In particular, Henry, the waiter, is my own invention and has no analogue, however remote, in the TDS.
So, having my plot and my background, I wrote a story
I named "The Chuckle." It was accepted by EQMM, which renamed it "The Acquisitive Chuckle." [EQMM invariably changes my titles. This doesn't bother me, because I always look forward to book publication, in which I can change the titles back to what they should be. Sometimes I don't, as, on rare occasions, an editorial change of title meets my approval. For instance, I really think "The Acquisitive Chuckle" is better than "The Chuckle," so I am keeping that.]
After the first sale, there was no stopping me, of course. I began to write one Black Widower tale after another and in little more than a year I had written eight and sold each of them to EQMM.
The trouble was that, even though I was holding myself back, and not writing as many as I wanted to write, I was still producing them faster than EQMM could publish