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Page 251
inferior they didn't live up to your vision of what they might have been. It seemed to me that at some point you discovered that you liked to incorporate in your stories an element of mystery and suspense. I wondered whether you would feel it to be a fair statement that when your stories began to really incorporate not just detective elements, but always a kind of mystery to be discovered, this was really when your fiction began to please you, and began to be successful in your own eyes.
A.: Well, now that's very interesting, because I think perhaps you're right. Certainly the first stories that really satisfied me and made me feel good about my writing were my robot stories, and the robot stories, of course, virtually every one of them, had a situation in which robots which couldn't go wrong did go wrong. And we had to find out what had gone wrong, how to correct it within the absolute limits of the three laws. This was just the sort of thing I loved to do. And I enjoyed it.
Gunn: And so when you began to write mysteries science fiction stories as mysteries it was really nothing new because you had really being doing this all along with the robot stories, except they weren't presented as detective stories there was no formal detective, but Susan Calvin was doing the job of a detective.
A.: Yes, that's right. And then by the time I got to The Caves of Steel, there was a robot story in which the detective element was formal. And I did the same with The Naked Sun and then it was just natural progression to go to straight mysteries. Which I now enjoy more than I do science fiction it is as though I've discovered what I really like and I can do that even without the science fiction. And, incidentally, this is very old-fashioned. People don't do it anymore even the mysteries, the straight mysteries I write are extremely old-fashioned and I suspect that if I weren't me I couldn't sell them. And this is another thing that constantly puzzles me about my own writing and I hate to talk about it too much for fear that someone else will see that. But to put it as briefly as I can how do I get away with it? Because, when I wrote Murder at the ABA, for instance, even on the book jacket, it said "an old-fashioned mystery" and I thought, gee, there's the kiss of death. Who's going to read an old-fashioned mystery? Well, enough people read it so that it was reasonably successful. And now my autobiography is, if ever I saw one, an old-fashioned autobiography, because there are no sexual revelations in it there are no deep psychological probings. I don't have any sensational revelations whatsoever. It's just the ordinary story of an ordinary life and yet it's doing fairly well.

 
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