I'm surprised nobody has banned me for starting a post and not having the balls to finish it. Well, I'll remedy that mistake now.
Edward D. Hoch (not to be confused with former NYC mayor Ed
Koch) is one of the finest mystery writers alive today. The reason you haven't heard of him is that he specializes in short stories. I can remember when
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine was sold at local drugstores, but I think the only place you can get it outside of subscription or the library is Border's. Maybe.
Too bad, because Hoch has a publshing streak that would make most writers envious. Since 1974, every single issue of
EQMM has published an Edward D. Hoch story. To call him the Cal Ripken, Jr. of publication would be an understatement. All Cal had to do to keep his streak going was show up. Hoch had to actually write a story and make it good enough that readers will want to read it. Anybody who has had a smidgeon of writer's block will realize how difficult that is. But I'd be talking about Hoch even if he didn't publish stories like clockwork.
You see, they don't write stories anymore the way Hoch does. Time used to be mystery books were whodunits and puzzles. It was like a game trying to figure out not only who the killer was, but how the crime was performed. Many mysteries today are more character studies and sometimes there isn't even a whodunit or mystery involved.
Hoch's stories ARE puzzles. It's tricky figuring them out, but he is always fair. Everything that the detective needs to solve the crime is available to the reader. Even when I don't initially like the ending to a Hoch story, upon re-reading it I find the only person I have to blame is myself.
A particular specialty of Hoch's is the "locked room" mystery made famous by John Dickson Carr. You know---a body is found murdered inside a sealed room locked from the inside. Never mind whodunit, the bigger question becomes HOWdunit. Hoch has many variations on this type of plot, so a better description would be "impossible crime." Here are some of the things which have happened in Hoch stories...
A car stops in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam. The driver is found inside strangled. None of the other commuters saw anybody leave the car and the victim is the only one inside.
A distraught man walks into his office and locks his door. After it is broken down, they find the window broken open but nobody is inside. No, no body hits the pavement thirty stories below. An hour later, the man's body DOES mysteriously fall from the same window.
A horse drawn carriage goes down a snow-covered road to a covered bridge, but never comes out the other side. Later, the driver is found murdered miles away.
A stunt man parachutes from a plane and drifts toward a haunted elm tree. When the film crew rushes up to cut him down, they find he has been strangled.
All of Hoch's "series" has had impossible crimes of one sort or another. Only the Dr. Hawthorne series is made up exclusively of impossible crimes. Other impossible crimes come up occasionally in the Leopold series. The Nick Velvet series is always interesting even if there isn't an impossible crime. Velvet is a professional thief who will only steal items of seemingly worthless value. (In other words, he will steal a comic book for you, but it had better be a copy of
Savage She-Hulk #1 rather than a mint version of
Action Comics #1 or
Fantastic Four (Vol. 1) #1. There's always more than one mystery in a Nick Velvet story---(1) the mystery of the crime itself (which Nick is obliged to solve), (2) how Nick Velvet arranges to steal the worthless object (it's never easy), and (3) why anybody would pay between $20,000---$50,000 for something seemingly "worthless".
You can find a few of his anthologies at Amazon.com and more are available
here Anyway, that's it for now. Just wanted to share...
