My first Black Widower story, "The Acquisitive Chuckle," was written in 1971 and was published in the January 1972 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I had intended it as a one-shot, but Frederic Dannay (one of two authors who were Ellery Queen) had the idea that it would make a good series. So I kept on going and, as of now, I have written no fewer than sixty of these stories, and have put them into collections - twelve stories in each. This one, therefore, Puzzles of the Black Widowers, is the fifth collection. Between the first story and the sixtieth, however, seventeen years have passed, and that means there have been changes. For instance, I think I am at least three or four years older than I was seventeen years ago, though that may just be my innate pessimism showing through. A much more serious change is that Fred Dannay died in 1982, to the loss of everyone in the field of mystery writing. Other changes have involved the club on which this series is based. I have explained in earlier collections that there is a real-life organization called the Trap-Door Spiders which has been in existence for over forty years, and which is very like the Black Widowers. Indeed, I have modeled the latter, quite unashamedly, on the former. I used six of the Spiders as models for my Black Widowers, choosing them more or less at random and making sure they didn't