Even before his introduction told me so, I could tell that Dennis Palumbo’s FROM CRIME TO CRIME: MIND-BOGGLING TALES OF MYSTERY AND MURDER was a tribute to Isaac Asimov’s BLACK WIDOWERS short stories.

After all, this collection of tales concerns The Smart Guys Marching Society, a group of men who regularly meet over chips and beer, and talk politics and entertainment before one of them always seems to seek help with a real-life mystery that has them all baffled … except for the narrator’s “Uncle Isaac” in the corner. He’s the older guy with “white muttonchop sideburns” who pores over old sci-fi and mystery paperbacks, yet has been listening just enough to provide a ironclad solution.

They may not be as clever or perplexing, but these delightfully old-school whodunits follow Asimov’s formula to a T. Introductory conversations at first appear unrelated, but always figure into the deduction.

In “The Last Laugh,” their “poor man’s MCLAUGHLIN GROUP” tackle the case of a comedian who suddenly dies in a restaurant and leaves a coded message in his final words of “Take my wife.” A snot-nosed youth gets into a heap of trouble in “Mayhem in Mayberry,” which the Society members help him get out of, however reluctantly. “Time Served” seems like an open-and-shut case of a working woman murdering her boss, until the Smart Guys conduct a one-sided interrogation during a rare field trip outing.

Among the nine stories, two fizzle simply because their solutions are dead giveaways from the moment the pivotal clues arise: “Freud Slept Here” and “The Ghost Whistle.” The others are tougher, but not so crack-proof to earn the MIND-BOGGLING label of the subtitle.

Palumbo — screenwriter of the fondly remembered Peter O’Toole farce MY FAVORITE YEAR — closes out his collection with three standalone stories unrelated to the Smart Guys Marching Society. The shortest of these, “Players,” offers one of those last-second turns that work quite well in flash fiction, while the best of these, “A Theory of Murder,” features Albert Einstein in his early days as a patent clerk, on the trail of a Jack the Ripper-eque serial killer.

Clearly, these mini-mysteries were written out of a sheer love for the genre, and the joy within them can’t help but transfer from the page a little bit, making for pleasant poolside reading this summer for the plastic armchair detective. —Rod Lott

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