The Death Dealers
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The Death Dealers (later republished as A Whiff of Death) is a mystery novel by Isaac Asimov. It is about a university professor whose research student dies while conducting an experiment. He used the wrong chemical. The professor attempts to determine if the death was accidental or planned.
Main Characters
- Louis Brade, an assistant professor of organic chemistry.
- Doris Brade, his wife.
- Ralph Neufeld, a paranoid research student of Brade. From Europe. Survivor of "something unpleasant" in which father and sister were killed. (possibly the Holocaust?)
- Cap Anson, an organic chemist and Brade's former teacher.
- Roberta Goodhue, a research student of Brade. Involved with Ralph.
- Merill Foster, an assistant professor of organic chemistry. Colleague of Brade.
- Otto Ranke, a physical chemist. Colleague of Brade.
- Arthur Littelby, head of Brade's department.
- Jack Doheny, a policeman.
Plot
Template:Spoiler On a Thursday afternoon, Brade goes to Ralph's laboratory to bid him good-bye. He finds him dead, having inhaled hydrogen cyanide. In his experiment, he had used sodium cyanide instead of sodium acetate. In the aftermath, he meets Doheny, who is in charge of Ralph's case. When he gets home, he explains to his wife his suspicions that Ralph's death was murder. She tells him not to tell this to anyone, as he is destroying any chance of getting associate professorship and tenure. The next day, he meets with Cap Anson, who seems to blame him for Ralph's death. The next day, he goes to the zoo with Anson, who encourages Brade to go into comparative biochemistry. Brade refuses, saying he wants to continue Ralph's work in kinetics. That night, he goes to a department get-together at Littelby's, and he becomes so fed up with the other professors' wanting to put the blame on him for the death that he puts his job on the line and accuses them back. He is also disrespectful to Littelby, in his nearly outright request for tenure. On Sunday, he goes through Ralph's research notebooks and finds that his data was faked: a cardinal sin in chemistry. When Doheny comes to the university, he tells him about the faking, using it as a possible motive for suicide. Doheny, however, twists it around and says that Brade might have been trying to protect his reputation by preventing word of the fakery from getting out. The next day, after his lectures in the university, he meets with Cap Anson. After that, he almost triggers a chemical reaction which would have killed him. He then meets with Roberta Goodhue, in the presence of Doheny. By questioning her, he reveals that she and Neufeld had had an argument about the faked data. The only person who could have heard is Cap Anson, and after Doheny tricks Anson into revealing that he knows about the attempt on Brade's life, he confesses.