Leopold’s Way
Detective Stories
Edward D. Hoch
Edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. & Martin H. Greenberg
Introduction by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
Contents
Introduction
Circus
Death in the Harbor
A Place for Bleeding
Reunion
The House by the Ferris
The Oblong Room
The Vanishing of Velma
The Rainy-Day Bandit
The Athanasia League
End of the Day
Christmas Is for Cops
The Jersey Devil
The Leopold Locked Room
A Melee of Diamonds
Captain Leopold Plays a Hunch
Captain Leopold and the Ghost-Killer
Captain Leopold Goes Home
No Crime for Captain Leopold
The Most Dangerous Man Alive
A Captain Leopold Checklist Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
Introduction
Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
IF EVER THERE WAS a member of an endangered species it’s Edward D. Hoch, the only person alive who makes his living as an author of mystery short stories. By the time this collection is published, he will have sold approximately 700 tales, and at his current rate of productivity he should hit the 1,000 mark in the early 1990s. As if turning out two to three dozen stories a year were not enough, he fills his odd moments with writing a monthly column for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, editing the annual Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories anthologies, and serving tirelessly on various committees of the Mystery Writers of America organization. In addition he has published five novels and is presently collaborating on a series of mystery-puzzle paperbacks. Not exactly the lightest of work schedules; and yet he never seems harried or overcommitted and comes across in person and correspondence as an amazingly placid and easy-going fellow. His secret? If you are doing precisely what you want to do with your life, and making it pay besides, the distinction between work and play becomes meaningless and every hour is a pleasure.
Edward Dentinger Hoch was a Washington’s Birthday boy, born in Rochester, New York, on February 22, 1930. His father, Earl G. Hoch, was a banker, but despite the precarious nature of that line of work during the Depression, the family weathered the ’30s without serious problems.
From a very early age Ed was fascinated by mystery fiction. “When I was a young child,” he said, “I used to draw cartoon strips and have masked villains running around. They were terrible, just stick figures, because I wasn’t much of an artist, but I’d try to draw in cloaks and masks to identify the villains so that I could have a final unmasking to surprise the reader. Of course, I was the only reader. No one else saw those strips.”
In June of 1939, when the 60-minute Adventures of Ellery Queen series debuted on the CBS radio network, nine-year-old Ed Hoch was one of its staunchest fans. Later that year, when Pocket Books, Inc., launched its first 25¢ paperback reprint books, the boy discovered that his hero Ellery Queen had been the protagonist of many novels as well as a radio sleuth. The first adult book he ever read was the Pocket Books edition of Queen’s 1934 classic The Chinese Orange Mystery. “It was among the first group of paperbacks published, and I recall going down to the corner drugstore and seeing them all lined up with their laminated covers. I debated for some time between James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and an Agatha Christie title [probably The Murder of Roger Ackroyd], and finally settled on Ellery Queen because I had heard the Ellery Queen radio program which was so popular in those days. I bought The Chinese Orange Mystery and was completely fascinated by it, sought out all the other Ellery Queen novels I could find in paperback, as Pocket Books published them over the next few years, and from there went on to read other things. I read Sherlock Holmes at about that time too.”
It was during the ’40s that, one by one, Ed Hoch discovered the masters of fair-play detection: Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, and countless others besides of course the cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee who wrote as Ellery Queen. In 1947, after completing high school, he entered the University of Rochester, but left two years later to take a researcher’s job at the local public library. He enlisted in the army in 1950, during the Korean conflict, and once out of basic training he was assigned to Fort Jay, on Governor’s Island just off Manhattan, as a military policeman. He took advantage of being stationed near the headquarters of Mystery Writers of America, which was then only five or six years old, to attend the organization’s monthly meetings (in uniform) and to mingle with the giants of deductive puzzlement whose books he’d been hooked on since age nine. Discharged from the service in 1952, he went to work in the adjustments department of Pocket Books, the house that had started him reading detective fiction, and continued to write short mysteries as he had since high school. In 1954, back in Rochester, he took a copywriter’s job with the Hutchins advertising agency, and late the following year he knew the special pleasure of seeing his first published story on the newsstands. That was the start of Ed Hoch’s real career, one that is still going strong thirty years and almost seven hundred stories later.
For more than a dozen years after that first sale he kept his job at the ad agency and saved his fiction writing for evenings, weekends, and vacations. But he was so fertile with story ideas and such a swift writer that editors and readers could easily have mistaken him for a full-timer even in those early years. In 1957 he married Patricia McMahon, with whom he still shares a small neat house in suburban Rochester. (Two of its three bedrooms were long ago converted into his office space, and the basement into a library filled with thousands of mystery novels, short story collections, and magazine issues, few of them without at least one Hoch story.) The field’s top publications, Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery magazines, began printing his tales in 1962. Six years later, having won the coveted Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for the best short story of 1967, he decided that he could support the family on his writing income and left the advertising agency. He continues to write full time (many would say more than full time) today. During 1982–83 he served as president of the organization to whose annual dinners he had first come in military khaki more than thirty years earlier. In his mid-fifties he shows not the least sign of slowing down, and readers around the world hope he’ll stay active well beyond his thousandth story.
Why so few novels and so incredibly many short stories? It boils down to Hoch’s special affinity for the short form. “Writing a novel has always been, to me, a task to be finished as quickly as possible. Writing a short story is a pleasure one can linger over, with delight in the concept and surprise at the finished product.” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “I guess ideas just come easily to me. That’s why I’ve always been more attracted to the short story form than the novel. I am more interested in the basic plotting than in the development of various sub-plots. And I think the basic plot, or gimmick—the type of twist you have in detective stories—is the thing that I can do best, which explains why so many of my stories tend to be formal detective stories rather than the crime-suspense tales that so many writers are switching to today.”
Those words are misleading in one sense: more than two hundred of his published stories are nonseries tales of crime and suspense, and the best of them—like “I’d Know You Anywhere” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1963), “The Long Way Down” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, February 1965) and “Second Chance” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1977)—would fill a book the size of the present collection. But most of Hoch’s energies have gone into the creation of short-story series characters and the chronicling of the
ir exploits. To date he’s launched 23 separate series, dealing with all sorts of protagonists from an occult detective who claims to be more than two thousand years old to a Western drifter who may be a reincarnation of Billy the Kid to a science-fictional Computer Investigation Bureau. Whatever the concept of a series, whatever its roots, Hoch’s tendency is to turn it into a series of miniature detective novels, complete with bizarre crimes, subtle clues, brilliant deductions and of course the ethos of playing fair with the reader that distinguishes the work of Carr, Christie, and Queen. The best introduction to the world of Ed Hoch is a quick tour through each of his series in the order in which they were created.
SIMON ARK, the two-millennia-old Satan-hunter, was the central character in Hoch’s first published story, “Village of the Dead” (Famous Detective Stories, December 1955), and appeared in many tales which editor Robert A. W. Lowndes bought for the Columbia chain of pulp magazines during the late ’50s. The ideas in these apprentice stories are occasionally quite original (e.g. the murder of one of a sect of Penitentes while the cult members are hanging on crucifixes in a dark cellar), but the execution tends to be crude and naïve at times, and the Roman Catholic viewpoint somewhat obtrusive. Eight of the early Arks were collected in two already rare paperback volumes, The Judges of Hades and City of Brass, both published by Leisure Books in 1971, but the most readily accessible book about this character is the recently published The Quests of Simon Ark (Mysterious Press, 1984). In the late 1970s Hoch resurrected Simon for new cases in the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen magazines, but these tales play down the occult aspects to a bare minimum and present Ark simply as an eccentric old mastersleuth.
PROFESSOR DARK, apparently an alter ego of Simon Ark, popped up in two obscure pulp magazine stories of the mid-’50s under Hoch’s pseudonym of Stephen Dentinger, but they have never been reprinted and are of interest only to completists.
AL DIAMOND, a private eye character, began life in “Jealous Lover” (Crime and Justice, March 1957), which featured a walk-on part by a certain Captain Leopold. After two appearances Hoch changed his shamus’ name to AL DARLAN so as to prevent confusion with Blake Edwards’ radio and TV private-eye character Richard Diamond. Although little known and rarely reprinted, Hoch’s best Darlan tales, like “Where There’s Smoke” (Manhunt, March 1964), are beautiful examples of fair-play detection within the PI framework.
BEN SNOW, the Westerner who may be Billy the Kid redux, was created by Hoch for editor Hans Stefan Santesson, who ran Ben’s adventures in The Saint Mystery Magazine beginning in 1961. Perhaps the best of the Snows is “The Ripper of Storyville” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1963), a first-rate Western detective story if ever there was one. Recently Hoch has revived the character for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
CAPTAIN LEOPOLD, the protagonist of the present collection, will be considered at greater length after the rest of the parade has passed by.
FATHER DAVID NOONE, parish priest and occasional detective, was Hoch’s version of a clerical sleuth in the great tradition of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, but was dropped after two rather feeble cases, beginning in 1964.
RAND, of Britain’s Department of Concealed Communications, was created in 1964 for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and has since appeared in more than fifty short episodes of espionage with strong elements of cryptography and fair-play deduction. Originally called Randolph, the character was renamed at the suggestion of EQMM editor Fred Dannay, who wanted a name that subliminally evoked James Bond even though there wasn’t a thing Bond-like about the stories. The series began with “The Spy Who Did Nothing” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1965), and most of the Rands retain “The Spy Who” in their titles, reminding us that the greatest espionage novel of the era in which Rand came to life was John LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Rand is now officially in retirement, but Hoch still brings him back for an EQMM assignment once or twice a year. Seven of his early cases are collected in the paperback volume The Spy and the Thief (Davis Publications, 1971).
NICK VELVET is perhaps Hoch’s best-known character, a thief who steals only objects of no value and who is usually forced to play detective in the course of his thieving. He debuted in “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1966) and quickly became an international hit. More than fifty short Velvets have been published over the past twenty years. Seven of Nick’s early capers are included in The Spy and the Thief, and a total of fourteen (of which two come from the earlier volume) are collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (Mysterious Press, 1978). Several books of Velvet stories have been published in Japan and, re-christened Nick Verlaine, our contemporary Raffles has been the star of a French TV mini-series. The character is presently under option by 20th Century-Fox and may receive prime-time exposure on NBC if all goes well.
HARRY PONDER, a short-lived spy-cum-sleuth whose name subliminally suggests the Len Deighton-Michael Caine movie spy Harry Palmer, first appeared in “The Magic Bullet” (Argosy, January 1969), an excellent mixture of espionage and impossible-crime detection, but was dropped after one more case.
BARNEY HAMET, a New York mystery writer, turned amateur sleuth in Hoch’s first novel, The Shattered Raven (Lancer, 1969), and helped untangle a murder at the Mystery Writers of America organization’s annual dinner. In a recent short story, “Murder at the Bouchercon” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1983), Hamet probes another killing among his colleagues and adds himself to the roster of Hoch series characters.
CARL CRADER and EARL JAZINE, who solve crimes for the Federal Computer Investigation Bureau in the early 21st century, were created by Hoch in “Computer Cops,” a story he wrote for Hans Stefan Santesson’s science fiction-mystery anthology Crime Prevention in the 30th Century (Walker, 1969). Later Hoch made them the protagonists in his trilogy of futuristic detective novels: The Transvection Machine (Walker, 1971), The Fellowship of the Hand (Walker, 1972), and The Frankenstein Factory (Warner Paperback Library, 1975). They haven’t been seen since.
DAVID PIPER, director of the Department of Apprehension and popularly known as The Manhunter, shows that even when Hoch creates a character in the tradition of The Executioner, The Butcher, and other macho action heroes, he converts the man into a mainstream detective. Piper starred in a six-installment serial, “The Will-o’-the-Wisp Mystery,” published in EQMM between April and September of 1971 under the byline of Mr. X. The entire serial was reprinted under Hoch’s own name in Ellery Queen’s Anthology, Spring-Summer 1982.
ULYSSES S. BIRD was Hoch’s attempt to fashion a criminal character who would not turn into a detective-in-spite-of-himself. The first of this con artist’s four published exploits was “The Million-Dollar Jewel Caper” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1973), but all of them were negligible except the third, “The Credit Card Caper” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1974), which is a gem.
SEBASTIAN BLUE and LAURA CHARME, investigators for Interpol, vaguely resemble the stars of the popular British TV series The Avengers, but as usual when Hoch spins off a series from a preexisting source, he moves it into the domain of fair-play detection. The characters have appeared more than fifteen times in EQMM, beginning with “The Case of the Third Apostle” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1973).
PAUL TOWER, who becomes involved in criminal problems while visiting local schools as part of the police department’s public relations program, was suggested to Hoch as a character by Fred Dannay. “The Lollipop Cop” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1974) and Tower’s two subsequent cases were excellent, and it’s a shame the character was dropped so quickly.
DR. SAM HAWTHORNE, Hoch’s most successful character of the 1970s, narrates his own reminiscences of impossible crime puzzles which he unofficially investigated in the late 1920s and early ’30s while serving as a young physician in the New England village of Northmont. To date he has spun yarns and offered “a smal
l libation” to his listeners more than two dozen times, beginning with “The Problem of the Covered Bridge” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1974), which remains one of the best in the series. Hoch’s Northmont has long ago overtaken Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville as small-town America’s Mecca for bizarre crimes.
BARNABUS REX, a humorous sleuth of the future who debuted in “The Homesick Chicken” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977), has since appeared in only one more story. But two cases make a series character even in the world of tomorrow.
TOMMY PRESTON, the young son of a zookeeper, was created by Hoch for the juvenile book market. In The Monkey’s Clue & The Stolen Sapphire (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) he solves a pair of mysteries involving animals.
NANCY TRENTINO, an attractive policewoman with a deductive flair, could almost be Connie Trent from the Captain Leopold series under a different name. Which is precisely what she was, until the editors of Hers (later Woman’s World), who bought her first solo case, asked Hoch to give her more of an ethnic flavor. Since her debut in “The Dog That Barked All Day” (Hers, October 1, 1979) she has solved a handful of puzzles.
CHARLES SPACER, electronics executive and undercover U.S. agent, figures in espionage detective tales, the first of which was “Assignment: Enigma” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 10, 1980), published as by Anthony Circus. (Later Spacers are under Hoch’s own byline.) The ambience of all these tales and the pseudonym on the first may vaguely suggest John Le Carré, but the leitmotif as usual in Hoch is the game of wits.
SIR GIDEON PARROT, whose name reminds us of two of John Dickson Carr’s mastersleuths and one of Agatha Christie’s, stars in a series of gently nostalgic parodies of the Golden Age deductive puzzles on which Hoch was weaned. His first appearance was in “Lady of the Impossible” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 20, 1981).
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